Logotherapy P. 2
(Please read Logotherapy P.1 to get caught up.)
These stories are all true.
Only names have been changed, and some settings where the location may be too indicative of identity.
All characters are over eighteen.
This is the second installment of the retelling of the history of my sexual experiences.
Part 1 recap: I started the narrative when I returned home from college at twenty-two with a useless degree. I was still working through real Oedipal issues.
Begin Part 2
So, after that initial encounter in the hallway, I devised several plans to get a better view next time.
This was long before spy cams. I had to be creative.
Eventually, I discovered that if I turned the outside flood lights on, the light bleeding through cracks in the window shades might provide additional light inside their room. I tested it one night and it was perfect. The next time he came home I would be ready.
I don't know how long I had to wait, but the charmer showed up late one hot July evening or early August. (I left for graduate school in September, so it was between July and August of 1991.)
I played it cool throughout the evening and then through dinner. He pressured her into drinks and I even ignored his open sexual comments about my mom's body.
I waited for the right time and eventually went to bed. But before ascending the stairs, I switched on the flood light before heading up.
Time stood still. No falling asleep this time. Rock hard and furiously jerking off, anticipating what I both longed and feared would occur.
After midnight passed and the TV was still blaring downstairs I thought it was not going to happen.
As both disappointment and relief swept over me, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. "Here he comes," I thought. The squeaky wooden stairs gave way to his unsteady weight.
As he passed my room. He shut my door. Then I heard him close my mom's bedroom door behind him.
I sprang out of bed and repeated my previous strategy of passing through the connecting bathroom to watch from the adjoining rooms.
I made it to the adjoining bathroom, but luckily, their door was wide open.
Any wrong move or misstep, and they could switch on a light and see me standing in the bathroom doorway with a massive, pulsating boner.
This time, I at least had the good sense to wear a long black t-shirt to both be more stealthy and to cover my cock if I got caught.
I thought my best play was to step into the shower. So, I painstakingly raised my legs over the bathtub's edge and eased myself to the back of the tub, maneuvering as best I could behind the shower curtain that still pulled about halfway across the rod.
I could hear him talking but couldn't make out what was being said.
She gave a few audible sighs and I heard her say, "Just do what you need to".
And with that, I felt like a caveman.
I wanted to run in there and crack him over the head with a club and take her for myself.
I loved her, I thought - no, I knew.
[In later chapters, I can explore all the afternoons I spent rummaging through the drawers in her dresser and the discovery of her panties that set me on a path of panty theft for many years. Thank god, it was the '80s, and 90's before RING and cams were everywhere. I would have been cooked. This narrative is just being written as I think about it. I don't have a real "master plan", I am just submitting chapters as the story unfolds in my memory. However, I think later, in the narrative, the early explorations and nascent roots of what will become, it seems, a life-long obsession.]
Suffice it to say, that my sexual fixation and endless hours of masturbating on her panties, bras, and nightgowns, coupled now with my newfound respect, admiration, and sense of protection for my mom, created in me a feeling that completely transcended some simple state of curious voyeuristic horny son spying on his parents; or, so I believed. No, I was a knight errant born at the wrong time. (Didn't King Arthur marry his sister?)
As crazy as it sounds, during my hours-long masturbation sessions with her panties and gowns, I had started to allow myself to imagine us living as husband and wife one day when I would respect and care for her as she deserves to be.
I dreamed of us going on the proverbial long walks on beaches in unknown regions where we could walk hand in hand, unabashed. I could put my arm around her and openly show affection for each other. Then, after a romantic star-lit dinner at night, she would seductively invite me into her bedroom wearing the same silky, cream-white robe that she now enticed my father with.
I could replace him as the far better man, and I presumed I was the far better lover. If only...
But, in reality, I knew there was no "if only".
I knew that all of our lives would be ruined if I tried to say or do anything.
In retrospect, I was in love, albeit unrequited.
I was in love with a wounded, beautiful woman who could not see herself free from a trapping relationship.
Since I wanted what was best for her, I knew that I loved her far more than anyone else, certainly him.
I was ultimately simply hurt that she chose him over me and disappointed that she chose what was not best for her over what was.
Of course, that's how I allowed myself to dream and fantasize during the throes of my hormonal rage and myopically limited worldview at 22 years old in 1991.
There was no internet to sate all these taboo curiosities that no one had answers to before the Web.
I had only heard the word "incest" a handful of times in my life to that point. Mostly, I knew about it from church when we had to read from the Old Testament. Abraham married his sister. Lot impregnated his daughters. And Onan pulled out and came on his sister-in-law's tits. But, in real life, incest fantasies and desires were never once discussed anywhere.
So, I felt utterly alone and trapped and I thought I was carrying the heaviest secret that one could bear. I thought I was the only son in the world to have a sexual obsession and affection for his mother.
I thought God hated me. But, I couldn't stop.
Although I was smitten, in love, and obsessed with my mother, social and societal norms and Southern Christian ethics provided an Iron Wall between fantasy and action.
I could feel what Freud could only imagine.
I know how the young, growing, challenging son in some ancient or primeval setting once felt.
As the son grew older, more competent, and more virile, he, in some cave in early Cro-Magnon Europe, threw his father out of the way as he forcibly re-entered his mother's womb and replaced the old father as her new lover, protector, and guide.
Indeed, societal norms and those Christian moral values that prevented me from acting on my impulses to violently overthrow my father and make animalistic love to my mother did not allow for parental sexual voyeurism either.
However, I assumed that, in the secrecy of my mind and with proper stealth and foresight, I could go undetected by anyone. And if undetected, I would be unknown and therefore not guilty, right?
From my darkened corner of the tub, I braved an attempt to peer around the edge of the shower curtain to see what was happening.
Terror gripped me. I could barely move and had shallow rapid breaths. I had never heard my heartbeat literally through my chest before. I remember thinking that I might have a heart attack.
I was only about twenty feet away from them, and I had a straight shot to the top half of their bed. The bathrooms had no windows, so it was pitch black around me.
I heard shuffling and then a waistband snap.
My heart pounded.
I knew something was happening.
I had to see what.
I carefully leaned my head to the side and tried to poke one eye out from around the shower curtain.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the light, and their room appeared.
My plan had worked. The outside light was bleeding in just enough to give a late twilight glow inside their room.