Are You There Mom, It’s Me?

On the advice of an acquaintance I reached out to my mother through a medium. With my brother and sister on the telephone we called South Africa to hear the Medium describe things about our mother that go beyond any sort of google or Facebook search. It was eerie.

I’ll use the word mom, although everything was spoken through the medium as a vessel for my mother to communicate with us. She said glowing things to my brother and challenging things to my sister and to me, not too much.

Talking to my sister, my sister Mom began by apologizing then telling her to leave her husband and work harder at her photography. To my brother, she raved about how happy she was and how successful he will be. And to me, I’m supposed to take care of my sister as she leaves her husband, go back to writing, which will be successful if I finish, oh, and I am not using my brain.

My sister was devastated and conflicted by all of the information and shared more than she should have with her husband who claimed to have had a sixth sense they would not work out which was one of the reasons he has been resisting getting a vasectomy. After consulting with her shrink, my sister concluded that science cannot explain our experience but that does not mean it was not real, or at least real to us. It is more than okay to explore things like this so long as it does not dictate our life and choices. I added, that perhaps Mom had said all of these things because this is what we needed to hear. The harsh words will force my sister to craft a healthier relationship with her husband or she’ll get the courage to leave. My brother needed the confidence about his business to gain confidence to pursue deals and I needed the direct comments to return to my writing which has taken a back seat to the kids.

That night my mom came to be in my dream. She had known about the medium but warned me not to do it too frequently, and just like my mother suggested we use a different person next time from Latin America. A kooky friend of my mother’s was not surprised about the conversation. Like me she has felt mom’s presence and she simp;y needed a vehicle to communicate directly with us. At first I thought that the medium was 80-90% accurate but the more I think about it, the percentage falls closer to 65%. But having 65% of my mom for an hour sure felt great.

Embarrassing Vibrator Story Abroad

I was mortified when my step mother recommended I bring a vibrator college.  My mother was equally shocked.  Eventually I acquiesced and we strolled through the aisles of Caldor, the predecessor to the KMarts and Targets of today, leaving with a ConAir personal massager with more attachments than necessary.  Because the vibrator was my first real foray into masturbation I was unable to achieve the same relaxation manually, nor could my paramours.

 

During my dry spells of college I experimented with the handy toy satisfying myself more than any horny college kid could. And when I was not able to lay in bed and satiate myself for hours on end, I missed the little machine.  One such time was when after graduation I was traveling.  Certainly omitted from the list of recommended items for backpacking abroad was one’s reliable vibrator.  With the different electrical currents and plugs, Asia and it’s room sharing hostels was not ideal for self satisfaction.   

 

By the time my trip was nearly finished and I was traveling alone, I was horny.  I found myself on the eve of my return home roaming a street sale in Hong Kong.  Amongst all of the knick knacks and crap one considers using was a thumb size mini massager for sale.  I was renting a small cot in a private room at a hostel where the owners spoke only a few words of English. Tonight I could get lucky, or rather relaxed before the flight.  

 

Being that I was alone and had nowhere to go, I decided to engage the shop owner.  I asked him what the little device did, and why one would own it. With his limited English, he demonstrated how to massage my arm and my back.  I don’t know what he had thought of me, if perhaps he thought some American backpacker really believed he was selling small ineffective personal massagers or if I was looking for a good old fashioned vibrator.  

 

That evening, as I laid in my cot my only concern was if the noise traveled through the walls.  

50 Shades of Eroticism

The most recent book club selection was Fifty Shades of Grey, the amazingly popular soft core porn book that everybody is talking about.  When we first chose it I thought it would be a little steamy, and at the original price of thirty dollars I did not immediately purchase it instead waiting for a friend to finish her copy first.  

The book is hot, no doubt about that. I am sure my husband regrets having to go on a business trip the week I read it and my sister’s husband ever grateful it is a trilogy calls the book literary viagra.  So much of the book is a disappointment as it was not entirely convincing.  Sex six times a day! Even in my prime I did not do that, let alone sex involving all types of submissive behavior, although that does sound highly erotic.  

I was discussing the book with a mom from my son’s preschool and she seemed to have an entirely different take.  She looked at me with skepticism as I said some of the scenes felt repetitive and the writing was poor.  Ten more minutes of discussing our contrasting take, we realized we were discussing two completely different books.  She was reading Between Shades of Gray, about a Lithuanian teenager on the brink of World War One.  

 But now talking about this soft core porn novel is main stream. According to one friend, the book is the most downloaded anything in Kindle’s history.  It even came up with my step mother and sister in law’s mother.  I’m sure my mother in law is not far behind.  Maybe we have been so repressed about talking and reading about sex that a little fantasy of physical repression and unadulterated attraction is all we need.