You Are Your Problem

Special Thanks to my own private consultant. When an author has no experience with a particular emotion, it is best to seek out those who know of it first hand. Thanks again. Additionally, I thank my editor, Erik Thread, for his patience and skills, not only with the words, but for his tutelage.

*

"I guess I couldn't expect any better. After all, I am a bastard," I mumbled to myself as I lifted my glass to the photo of my parents on the mantle in front of my chair.

Because of my Dad's birth date and the draft lottery number he had, he figured he would be drafted into the Army as soon as he graduated from high school, so he joined Navy. He didn't want to march in formation. There isn't room to do that on a ship. In the early years of the war, almost every soldier or seaman spent part of their military career, long or short, in Viet Nam. He even signed up to go back there for a second year. Spending most of the war offshore on a ship, he must have felt safe because he did it a third time.

After that third tour, during his annual leave around Christmas, Dad met and married a woman he would live with for the next thirty-plus years. Well, it wasn't really the first time he'd met her. He knew her and her family, sort of like you know everyone in a little town with a population of less than 3,000. Because he was married, he really wanted to leave the military, so he agreed to go back to Viet Nam for his fourth tour because it would earn him a discharge a few months early. He got home three months before I was born.

You do the math. Mom and Dad married around the end of the year and I was born a little over a year later, the first ten months of that year, he was several thousand miles away. They never said anything and I never asked, in fact I didn't learn about it until I was grown. Hey, you don't ask your mother, "Please tell me who my real father is." They never said anything to either of my two younger brothers either, both of whom look just like Dad, over six feet, long legs, two hundred plus pounds and even at the age of 63, he still had a full head of hair. I'm the oldest son, but I'm also half-bald, skinny, and short.

Funny, not humorous, but strange, Dad was always a strong-willed, tough guy. Mom was a red-headed termagant, a temperamental shrew who was so jealous she'd question him if he were five minutes late getting home from work. He would stand beside a ringing telephone and let it ring rather than have to go through her interrogating him about who was the woman that had called, and why had she called him. I guess I grew up thinking I should be jealous, too.

That jealousy is probably why Laurel and I had to get married. I think I was marking my territory so every other guy in school knew she belonged to me. I might have been a bold guy, something of a wheeler dealer, but I wasn't stupid. When I needed to go tell Laurel's father that she and I had to get married because she was pregnant, I took my parents with me. I figured the chief of police would be a little less likely to draw his gun and shoot me in front of his wife, daughter, and my mom and dad.

Laurel and I lived with my family for the last half of that year while we finished high school and then we just stayed there because we had the baby. About that time, Dad was pretty sick and only worked part time. My two younger brothers were still in school. Mom was helping with our baby boy, and Laurel was pregnant again. Yeah, we knew about birth control, but didn't do anything about it. Dad's half-income and my job just barely kept enough food on the table for our two families.

It was during Dad's illness that I drove him to the nearest VA hospital for some tests. I was sitting with his medical records in my lap while he was giving samples for some lab work. I was flipping through several pages and saw his service record, including leave dates and discharge date. All the blood drained from my head when I realized he wasn't home when my mother would have gotten pregnant with me. I didn't say anything to Dad, nor did I mention it to my mother. If they wanted to keep that secret, I'd let them. I'd never felt slighted or that I was treated as anything other than their son. In fact, I felt sort of special that my dad had accepted me knowing he wasn't really my father.

When Dad got well, Laurel and I found our own place to live. I worked for a homebuilder and Laurel stayed home with the children, which pretty soon included our third child, a second son. I discovered I liked telling people what to do -- better than I liked working -- so I started my own construction company. Most of the work my company did was home improvements. About the time the baby was two years old, Laurel gave birth to our fourth child, our second daughter. It only took one suggestion from Laurel to convince me that I should have a little medical procedure performed so we wouldn't have any more children.

It's amazing to me that some women just lose all sense of themselves when they become a mother. They gain weight, feel they don't have time to wear and maintain nice clothing, and forget to wear make-up. Laurel was never like that. She had a hot body and took care of herself. She wasn't a clean freak like her mother, but our home was always neat and she was a great cook. She made sure the family went to church regularly, and my Laurel could stretch a dollar until it seemed to buy twice as much as anyone else.

About the time my oldest son was in his first year of high school, my mother was suddenly ill. She went downhill so fast she was too far gone by the time we needed to say goodbye. After the funeral, Dad took a few months before he could do anything other than a day's work and then go home. He started chatting with a few women online. A little over a year after mother died, one of his online friends asked him to come visit her for a weekend. He never really came back home. He just made a trip to quit his job, pack his clothes, and then he went back to live with her.

After he moved on, it sort of became a habit for me to stop by one of the local bars one or two days a week on the way home from work. In a small town there wasn't a lot of choice, it was either the bar I liked or the one with music so loud it would damage your hearing. I was probably copying what I'd seen my mom and dad do, although I didn't go home and get my wife as my dad always did. I'd stop by during the afternoon, or go by there for a beer or two before I went home.

* * * *

I'm not a saint and if I'm absolutely truthful, I would probably say I'm not really a good man. Although I'd be pretty angry if my wife looked at another man, or flirted with him, I didn't think that rule applied to me. I flirted, I looked, hell -- I even touched. Dammit, I did a little more than touch.

One of the gals I'd gone to school with was the daytime bartender at my bar. She was three years older, which might mean something when you're in high school but it doesn't matter when you're in your early thirties. She started working there about a month after she divorced her second husband.

A couple of weeks after she started, she asked me to help her flush some of the liquid supply lines in the little closet behind the bar. I bent over to open a valve, but when I straightened up Carol was half naked. We had a mind-blowing stand-up fuck that lasted only a few minutes before we were both trembling from body-shaking climaxes. We continued our acquaintance in a hot and heavy affair that took us to her house two or three afternoons a week. As soon as her afternoon relief arrived, she would call me and I'd meet her at her back door, almost tearing my clothes off. Even though there was no emotional connection between Carol and me, we liked to fuck. She was aggressive, usually taking charge, leaving me panting. I never did kiss her the way I kissed Laurel, though. It was just sex.

Laurel and I had tried oral sex a few times, but she didn't enjoy giving me a blow job, and she didn't even like for me to give her an orgasm with my mouth, tongue, or fingers. She said intercourse gave her a much stronger orgasm.

However, Carol taught me to eat pussy until my neck was so tired I couldn't hold it up. I learned not to be so rough and to watch for the approach of her orgasm. I got pretty good doing that in the afternoons before we fucked. During our affair, I was afraid to try oral sex again with Laurel because I didn't want her to realize I'd learned from another woman.

I have to be honest, I'm not sure I really loved my wife with the deep soul-satisfying love I'd always heard about. We enjoyed sex, but after close to twenty years of marriage, it wasn't exciting any more. Carol was new and maybe that newness provided the excitement I wanted, but the clandestine nature of our affair helped too. The effort to park my truck in her back yard and lock her bedroom door so her sons and daughter wouldn't interrupt us when they came home from school was part of the exhilaration.

According to some of the guys, Carol had been the hottest fuck in high school and then she'd learned a lot during her marriages. She did this thing when she gave me a blow job that always made me last a lot longer. She'd clamp her fingers around the base of my cock and not let me cum, and then we'd fuck until I just couldn't hold it anymore.

Carol and I tried to be careful, but in a small town word soon got out. Laurel later admitted she probably learned I was having an affair within the first week. She would know I was at Carol's house before I got home that evening. Man, I didn't understand how much I hurt her, but when I finally confessed, she forgave me and I felt like I'd be able to repair the damage I'd done if I could just stay away from Carol.

Well, it didn't work. Carol decided to go visit her sister for Easter weekend, and she invited me to go with her. I didn't do that, but I did go visit my dad and his girlfriend because they lived about twenty minutes away from Carol's sister. Truthfully, I didn't see much of Dad, I spent most of that long weekend with Carol, fucking like there was no tomorrow. We used a condom about half of the time, but I knew I couldn't make her pregnant. She assured me she didn't have any other sexual partners.

After that weekend, Carol and I started to cool it, or maybe we were finally getting enough of each other. One of the other married guys in the bar started flirting with her. She was trying to keep both of us happy and it wasn't working very well. I didn't really object to her seeing someone else. Hell, I was married and still having sex with my wife.

Just when I decided I'd have to call it off with Carol, she surprised us both and left town. She'd been worried about the teenage boys her two sons had chosen for their pals. One of them was paying an awful lot of attention to Carol's fifteen-year-old daughter. Her sister's marriage was ending and the two women figured they could make a go of things, without husbands, if they combined their efforts.

Her sister had a big house, but I wondered if it was large enough for six teens and two women with pretty large sexual appetites. I never had sex with Carol's sister, but not because it wasn't offered. I thought I was being careful. Cheating on my wife was bad enough. Cheating with several women was more than I could rationalize.

Not long after Carol left, I was sitting at the bar one day, when one of my pals made a remark about his pretty wife. The rest of the guys and I often teased him that he should be watching her a little closer or someone would take her away from him. He explained that he wasn't jealous because he knew his wife loved him almost as much as he loved her and he never failed to tell her, every single day, that she was the most important person in his life.

As I was driving home later, I started thinking about what the guy said. I realized my wife really loved me and I had no reason to be jealous of her. She wasn't going to take up with another man. She had forgiven me for having the affair and she'd learned about the Easter weekend, too. She was mine, she knew it, and was happy about it, too.

Almost like a revelation, I realized that as I'd watched the way my jealous mother treated my dad I thought that was the way I was supposed to treat my wife. It wasn't a sudden transformation, but I stopped being jealous. I began to see the times I questioned Laurel about where she went, or who she talked to and I saw how dumb it was to mistrust her loyalty. I'd catch myself before I said something and felt a lot better that Laurel seemed more relaxed when she talked to a friend or came home from the grocery store.

I can't tell you how much happier our home life was after that. It was amazing. It seemed I finally fell deeply in love with Laurel. I'm not sure I truly loved her before that. I think our marriage had been a habit for me.

It was during that time that my dad brought his girlfriend to meet the rest of his family. He had lived with her for two years and had come home for couple of week-end visits, but it was the first time he'd brought her to meet everyone. From what I saw, it looked like they had a close relationship. In fact, Dad seemed more relaxed than I had ever known him to be.

I'm not sure which one of us mentioned my mother's jealousy, but sometime during that conversation, I told Dad my brothers and I had often wondered why he'd stayed with her. She was a difficult person to live with. Dad said he'd noticed Laurel and I were a lot happier, too. He said he loved my mother and when you really love someone, you love them despite their faults. After all, they're doing the same for you.

Dad and I spent part of one day taking my two sons to a nearby lake for an afternoon of fishing, something I'd never been interested in doing before. I was always too busy, but now I was spending more time with my children.

My daytime and after-work visits to the bar stopped. I started going to church with my family and my business was growing large enough that I could keep my work crew busy every day. I took me almost a year to build us a larger house, partly because I used my work crew when we weren't working on a paying job.

Laurel and the kids and I had a lot of fun, too. At least one evening a week we went to the new house. All six of us would work two or three hours doing the small chores around the construction site that the carpenters, plumbers, and electricians never seem to do. I figured that if the kids helped build the house, they would be more interested in taking care of it.

Laurel and I weren't even forty years old yet and before I knew it, our first child had graduated from high school. The second would be a senior when school resumed after the summer break and the other two were growing up fast. I couldn't get my head around the fact that in a few years Laurel and I would be empty nesters. Those were the happiest years of my life.

That's when my world exploded.

The pastor of our church was a widower. His wife passed away about the same time my mother died. Although he was about ten years older than Laurel and me, his three children were about the same ages as our three youngest. Occasionally, one of the women in the church would go over to his house to help him. It wasn't a daily thing and probably not even weekly. Their help was fixing an extra nice meal or baking a birthday cake and then helping with the party. The next Sunday he would thank her at the beginning of the service.

Laurel, in particular, would help him with activities for his children. Me, or one of my work crew, even helped with things that needed to be done around the house. I built some shelves inside his laundry room. In fact, my oldest son, who started working for me as soon as he got out of school, helped me with those shelves. The neighbor lady was so impressed she wanted the same kind of shelves put in her laundry room, but we had to reinforce the wall before we could hang her shelves.

"Drive down the driveway, Jason," I told my son. "They have a wide drive in back where we can park to unload."

I was inside the house talking to Mrs. Turner when Jason walked inside with the first handful of tools. "Mom just drove up to Brother Hebert's house."

"Yeah," I told him. "She's taking all the kids to the swimming pool in Anson."

Our small public swimming pool was closed for a couple of weeks to make repairs and upgrade the circulating pump. Laurel had promised all the kids a swim day and decided that by driving thirty minutes to the nearby town she could still keep that promise. The day was so hot I was almost wishing I could go with them instead of building shelves.

I walked outside to cut the first piece of wood and looked between the Turner home and the one next door. I saw my wife's car going down the street with my older daughter driving her younger brother and sister plus all three Hebert children. My first thought was to cross my fingers that all six teens were wearing their seatbelts. My second thought was to wonder why Laurel wasn't in the car.

After I had measured and cut the three other boards, I decided I'd go next door to see if Laurel and Brother Hebert needed some help. I didn't recall if my wife had mentioned any particular chore the pastor needed help with. I left Jason nailing the four boards to the long wall. As I walked between the Hebert and Turner homes, I took the bandana from my hip pocket to wipe the sweat off my face and neck.

I hadn't looked at a thermometer, but it felt like it was already over ninety degrees and it wasn't even noon yet. Mrs. Turner had all her windows open, as did Brother Hebert. I got about halfway between the two houses when I heard a voice I recognized. It was my wife, and I knew exactly what was happening.

Laurel has this funny little squeak in her voice when we have sex. Every time I slam into her, she squeaks, "Eek." When I hit that sweet spot that is going to cause her orgasm, it changes to "Eek, eek, yes."

That is exactly what I heard. Laurel was squeaking and encouraging Brother Hebert, "Eek, eek, yes, o-o-oh. Eek, eek, yes, o-o-oh." I knew she was on the verge of an orgasm.

My head was roaring, my chest hurt, and all I saw was red rage.

There is something strange about us humans. No matter how much we know something is going to disgust us or frighten us, we will still look at it. I took two more steps and glanced into the open window of Brother Hebert's bedroom. All I saw was his white ass and my wife's legs in the air as her hips bounced on his bed when she finally let out the sounds of her climax, "Oh, oh, oh, oh." It didn't last long, but I couldn't move.

I'm not sure if I made a sound or simply fell to my knees. My legs wouldn't support me. I fell face forward onto the grass between the two houses and held my hands over my ears. I could not drown out the sound of my unfaithful wife and the pastor of our church. It didn't occur to me at the time that his chant, "God bless, God bless, God bless," was just a little blasphemous.

I'm not sure how I got myself up off the ground or walked to the truck. I just recall sitting behind the steering wheel looking at the grass stains on the knees of my jeans. Jason came outside and asked me if I was all right. I think I said something about getting too hot, so I was just resting for a few minutes. I finally got my head together and helped Jason finish the shelves. Mrs. Turner said she'd paint them herself, knowing it would save a little on the cost of the job.

After we cleaned up our trash and loaded the tools, I told Jason to take me home and he could go by the shop to unload the tools and then take the rest of the day off. He wanted to borrow my truck so he and a couple friends could take their girls on a campout at the lake. They planned to do a little fishing plus whatever it was twenty-year-olds did for fun. I suspected they would spend most of their time drinking beer and lying on top of their sleeping bags under the stars on that warm summer night.