It starts with just one thought. A whole new reality. One moment, a whole chain of events.
Mandy was desperate to get pregnant again. All she could think about was babies; their little tiny woolen booties, the nappies, the bibs, the little cots and the teddy bears, the wallpaper and the nursery rhymes.
Yearning for the innocence of a new born child, a fresh start, after so many years she deserved to finally feel like she had a new life now. It has been eighteen years since Harold walked out, leaving her with a new born baby, her only child, her son, Dustin.
He just graduated high school and had never known his father.
Mandy started a new life, she dated other men, she still wanted a family and she still wanted to give Dustin a normal life.
Eventually she met the perfect guy.
Rick was everything Mandy wanted in a man, dependable, honest and upright, even if stern.
Rick sometimes lost his temper but never hurt Mandy although she wondered if she did something to make him angry enough if he had it in him. He was one of those men who worked so hard to make everything perfect that if anything didn't work out he could lose his temper to let off steam.
Mandy had an amazing life with her wealthy husband. Rick owned a big double storey house in an upmarket neighbourhood and he had a fabulous career. He was great at socialising with other couples, always keeping things light-hearted. In private, the man had personal demons and something to prove. Perhaps because Rick had come from a poorer background he sought money and prestige and power to give himself a sense of worth and perhaps Mandy, because she came from wealth, felt so ashamed by her failed marriage that she was all the more desperate to fulfill the image of a perfect life.
No matter how hard Mandy had tried over the years, and she had tried, Mandy had never fallen pregnant with Rick.
The fact that Rick and Mandy never had sex made it even more difficult for her to fall pregnant and made Rick's insistence that they have a child all the more perplexing when contrasted with his willingness and appetites. Mandy had a son, she didn't really need another one but Rick, well he wanted a child of his own.
All Mandy wanted to do was give her husband that baby. It was her last chance to have the kind of normal family she had always wanted with a dad, a mom, a son and sibling.
Life went on in this manner for some time as Rick became increasingly religious in his efforts to inspire the impregnation while Mandy noticed that actual acts of intercourse which are most likely to produce offspring where decreasing in frequency. Rick's big promotion, busy schedule and heavy workload at the office all meant he needed R&R time while at home and of course the stress probably wasn't doing his swimmers any good. The holiday he had always promised Mandy would be a good time to actually, you know, make the baby, like a second honeymoon...
Mandy was devastated because she could see her chance to have another baby slipping away. She had been to the doctors despite Rick's instance to "not get doctors involved". In her desperation she has sought out professional advice and was assured that she was still able to fall pregnant and the problem must lie with her husband.
Rick and Mandy did have sex, sometimes. But she had still not fallen pregnant and the doctors and specialists she consulted with reconciled her to the truth.
What terrible luck! Mandy had waited for so many years to finally start her perfect family and now that dream was slipping away. Was there anything she could do?
Putting her mind to the task she came up with nothing but blanks, like Rick, if he even came.
If they even had sex.
Having almost forgotten about all these issues plaguing Mandy's conscious and subconscious mind, they were brought, with immediacy, back to her attention by a curious conversation with her son.
Dustin had casually asked his mother if there was a way to make sex "last longer". Unlike Rick, she wasn't raised with rural conservative values but rather urban liberal values. She had always dressed sexily to try and get Rick's sttention but he was never around while she was at home, all alone with Dustin. Mandy and Dustin were pretty close after everything they had been through together and so Mandy was unafraid to discsex uss and was naturally curious. Did her son have a problem with premature ejaculation? Surely responsible mothers discuss issues like that with their sons.
"Why do you ask?", Mandy inquired of her timid looking son, whose nervous expression, having broached the subject, betraying his unease at needing to discuss the problem.
"Well..." Dustin began earnestly. He trusted his mother. "You know I have never had a girlfriend right, well, I have been with girls. It's just that things never develop very far."
"Yeah, what do you mean honey?"
"Well, it's not like I don't get to have sex, like it gets to that stage but the relationships never go anywhere."
"Darling, I am your mother, I love you with all my heart and was put on this Earth to protect you, you can tell me anything. What is the matter...?"
"All the girls I have been with say I don't last long enough."
"Well how long do you last?"
There was an awkward silence and both mother and son noticed the palpable tension in the room.
