Enjoying my Middle-Aged Mother
Jonah's mother is fourteen years younger than his father and the age gap is beginning to matter.
This story contains anal sex and analingus so you have been warned.
I hope you enjoy the tale and look forward to readers' comments, as always.
Sylviafan
My parents drive down and visit me once a month or so and generally stay for anything up to a week. It feels like a bit much, sometimes, but I'm all they've got and I live the best part of two hundred miles away so I don't feel as though I can refuse. And it's not like I take a week off work when they come; I carry on as normal and dad potters in my garden during the day and mum goes shopping and cooks evening meals and on a Saturday or a Sunday the three of us go walking in the Shropshire Hills, if the weather's fine. If it's not we all stay in and mum bitches about dad and he ignores her.
They're both retired now. Well, mum never really had a job to retire from; she helped out at dad's engineering firm in Harrogate for a few years as a secretary until she got bored with it. After that she did her own thing which involved a lot of shopping and expensive hobbies which dad funded without a murmur. She took up painting at one point and she was really good at it.
Dad's nearly seventy, now, and he's slowed right down. His hobby is re-enacting Napoleonic battles with model soldiers. Toy soldiers, according to mum. He has a group of like-minded friends and they get together and do all the Peninsular wars and try to change the outcome with their brilliant and strategic thinking. It's not my cup of tea but it's my dad's escape from his wife, who's only fifty-five and seems to be getting more and more impatient with her husband as the years go by.
I'm Jonah, by the way. A twenty-nine-year-old Chartered Surveyor from North Yorkshire but now working in Ludlow, in Shropshire. I bought a house there because at university I met a girl from Shrewsbury, and we got engaged and then after a couple of years we broke it off and she moved to London and I stayed in Ludlow in the little semi-detached house, on the outskirts of the town, with fields at the back. After that I tended to steer clear of relationships; I still date but it's all non-commitment stuff, and not much of that, recently. At the time this story starts, I hadn't slept with a girl for nearly six months, which might explain what happened, to some degree.
It really all started on a Friday afternoon in June. I was expecting mum and dad to arrive that evening so I got home from work by five o'clock to do a bit of housework and make up their bed and so forth and I was upstairs in the spare bedroom at the back of the house when I heard the front door open and mum call out my name. I went downstairs to find the door open and mum unloading groceries from her Toyota hatchback, rather than dad's BMW saloon. Furthermore, there was no sign of my father.
'Where's Dad?' I asked, puzzled.
Mum came over and kissed me on the cheek. 'He's at home,' she said, tightly, and I judged it best not to pursue the point at that time. Instead I helped her to unload her car and carry stuff into the kitchen and upstairs to her bedroom. She was looking smart, as usual, in a black, barathea trouser-suit which I knew to be bespoke and which was tailored to show off her figure which, for a lady in her mid-fifties, was very good indeed: long-legged and slender with hips and bum that were maybe a few pounds heavier than a decade ago but none the worse for it. She's also got a shapely bust and shoulder-length blonde hair, mostly out of a bottle. Facially she's attractive, in a rather severe way. She's got a square chin and a rather full-lipped and kissable mouth, which nowadays always seems to be pressed into a line or turned down at the corners. She's got high cheekbones and clear, blue eyes but you can see her age in the fine lines at their corners and elsewhere on her face. To conceal this she uses plenty of makeup including eyeliner and eyeshadow and bright lipsticks. She also paints her manicured nails or has them painted. Usually in shades of bright red but sometimes in green or blue.
A little while later, as I stood at the oven cooking and mum sat at the kitchen table sipping white wine, she explained the situation, or rather her interpretation of it.
'Your father's got a cold coming on, apparently,' she began, 'although he looked fine to me,' she added. 'It's that wretched toy soldiers club of his,' she went on. 'They've got some sort of convention at the weekend, apparently, and he would have had to miss it if he came down with me. I bet that's what it's all about! Cold indeed!'
'He is sixty-nine, Mum,' I said quietly.
My mother's face relaxed slightly. 'I know,' she sighed.
My mother, Charlotte Bishop, can be a difficult, selfish, opinionated and sarcastic individual, but if you call her out and she's in the wrong she usually admits it. A lot of people don't like her and think dad spoils her, but she's an interesting person underneath the hard exterior and she and I always have a laugh together. I've always thought the surface personality is a front to protect her insecurity.
'And you could have postponed the trip,' I told her.
'I wanted to see my baby boy,' she smiled at me and sipped her drink, her blue eyes on me.
We chatted over dinner and afterwards we took the remains of the wine into my conservatory and sipped the chilled Sauvignon Blanc as the sun set over the distant hills of Wales and the garden fell into shadow. I suggested opening another bottle but mum said she was tired after the drive, which was not like her, she was normally the last man standing. But she'd been a bit quiet all evening and I got the feeling all was not well in her life. If that was the case, she would let me know soon enough.
The next day was Saturday and it was a belter of an early summer day so we went walking around the Stiperstones, near the Welsh border. Mum looked good in slimline walking trousers and a short-sleeved checked shirt and I was similarly dressed and carrying a knapsack with water and sandwiches.
It should have been an idyllic walk but it was spoiled by my mother's endless litany of dissatisfaction, mainly with dad. Nothing he did was right, it seemed. I tried to defend him but she just kept saying that I needed to be there to see it, which I couldn't really argue with. I tried to steer the conversation onto other topics but somehow it always came back to how shit her life had become. She didn't use the word 'shit', mum rarely swore and never in front of me. In the end I just walked alongside her in defeated silence and eventually she got the point and stopped talking herself.
Back home she went up for a shower and came down half an hour later in a bathrobe and came up to me and hugged me.
'I'm sorry I spoiled the walk today by being such a cow,' she told me, contritely. 'Let me take you out to dinner to apologise. We could go to that nice Italian in the centre of town.'
Which is how we ended up at Luigi's later that evening. Mum was dressed in a dark-blue cocktail dress and black stockings and high heels. She'd spent ages on her hair and makeup and she looked pretty damned good for fifty-five. More than one head turned as we were shown to our table by the waiter.
Neither of us was driving so we had an aperitif and a bottle of Chianti with the meal and a brandy afterwards.
'Forgive me for saying this, Mum,' I began after the waiter had poured the coffee, 'but you've been out of sorts for a while, haven't you? I mean it's not just today, it's the last few times you and dad have visited. Is there something going on that I should know about?'
Mum sipped her brandy and put the glass down on the table and looked around at the other diners. 'Yes, I am going through a bit of a... a difficult time at the moment.'
'Is there anything I can do?' I asked.
She smiled. 'Maybe. But I don't want to discuss it in a restaurant.'