Chapter 1: My New Mother

Danny

Normally the fastest way to the airport would have been to use the Messeschnellweg and then a short stint on the Autobahn, but that logic doesn't apply when the summer holidays are on, so I was slogging through the congested city towards Hannover-Langenhagen. That gave me time to think about the upcoming reunion with my mother. Reunion is perhaps a bit of a big word, considering she'd only been in Switzerland for twelve weeks, but even though I was eighteen already, that was the longest I'd ever been separated from her.

I love my mum, no doubt about that, but don't think I've been sitting at home moping. Having the house to myself for three months? Puleeze, which young guy would not love that. Granted, most other guys would have had female companionship, or parties, probably constantly. I'm pretty sure I was the only virgin in our class, and I have my damn brains and my stepfather to thank for that.

The brainy guys don't get many girls, because teen girls are just as shallow as we menfolk. They want the muscle-bound prat, or the one with a big wallet. If there's a rich muscle-bound oaf he's practically constantly chased by the female contingent.

The scrawny, braniac is only noticed by bullies – but in this case, constantly. I stopped counting around age 12 how often I've been beaten up by guys twice my size, just because they could. Even now at eighteen I was still in therapy to deal with the aftermath of constantly being accosted by violent bullies.

It only stopped when I started working out at fifteen and was strong enough by the time I was seventeen. It is utterly ironic. All my life I've been beaten up by several well-known bullies and the teachers never did anything about it. When I hit back for the first time, I was immediately handed a three day suspension. He, who had thrown the first punch didn't even get a reprimand.

So as the result of that, there weren't any parties while mum was in Switzerland. You'd need friends for that and I have few of those. I had used the chance to go naked for all that time without my mother thinking I'm weird. It's my guilty pleasure – sue me.

Mum and I were born in East Germany. My father died in 1987 in a car accident. From today's perspective it's surprising that our family's Trabant had gone fast enough to have a crash in the first place, but the thing had no safety features beyond seat belts and the guilty party in this accident had been a drunk tram driver, who'd thought he had right of way because his vehicle weighed eighty tons.

I was only nine at the time, so the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany a year later are things that I didn't quite understand yet in their enormity. What I did understand was why we were suddenly moving to the west. Mum had worked in a kolkhoz, so that job went out of the window when the wall went down. She found work as a florist in Hannover and soon she met Gerd, the owner of the chain of flower shops she was working for. They got married in 1994 and I was actually quite happy, because at the time I thought my mum was too young to be without a husband and second, because Gerd was wealthy, I mean really wealthy.

But it soon turned out mum was little more than a Trophy wife. Not in the sense that my stepfather didn't love her, but, Jesus, he made the pope look like someone from Sodom and Gomorrah. I was too young to think about that at the time, but I bet she had never gotten any other sex than a quick missionary shag with the lights turned off, if even that. He loved mum, but he wasn't very expressive about it.

He had accepted me like his own son, and had given our principal a very unmistakable piece of his mind about the shenanigans in regards to my suspension. He wasn't a bad man. Not at all, but he had all the passion of a dead fish.

With no-one to admire her, mum stopped caring about her body. She wasn't badly groomed or anything, but while other women were working out to avoid getting bigger or keeping gravity from messing up their boobs, my mother barely made sure she was eating healthy. As a result, she had developed a noticeable pouch and gravity had dragged her small boobs down pretty badly. But who was there to notice but me?

Not that I made up for my stepfather's unwillingness to sate her desires. Incest is as illegal in Germany as it is elsewhere in the world. But seeing my mum naked wasn't a rare occurrence. Sometimes she would call from the bath, asking me to bring her a bathrobe or a towel or she would walk back from the bathroom to the bedroom topless – of course only when my stepfather wasn't home. He was so uptight he would have freaked at the thought of a son seeing his mother without clothes, which is ridiculous. If you want to make sure that your son doesn't start fantasizing about his naked mother, make sure that he grows up with seeing her naked occasionally so he'll learn that it is perfectly normal.

For me she had always been mum. That she was a woman was a biological fact, but I had never seen her as a sexual being. I can't remember having ever gotten as much as an erection seeing her. As harshly as it sounds, but I guess my mom's lack of motivation to do much about her ageing process may have had to do with it as well. By the time I was fourteen and started to look at female bodies with different eyes, she was thirty-two and she'd not aged well.

Half a year ago, not too long before my eighteenth birthday in 1997, after only three years of marriage, mum and my stepfather came to the conclusion that they had simply drifted apart and got divorced. It was a rather amicable split. We got to keep the estate and the big house and he even sold his business to mum for the symbolic price of one Deutschmark, which redefines the term generosity as it makes double digit numbers of millions every year. In compensation he got two thirds from the family's bank-account, but the remnants were still somewhere around twenty million. With this generous starting capital, he emigrated to America, where he was right at home with his prudish lifestyle. But as I said, it was an amicable split and they still call each other on their respective birthdays and he gives mum advice when she runs into a snag with the business, or if has a difficult decision to make. As I said, he isn't a bad man, he was just not the right one for my mother.

I finally arrived at the last roundabout and turned my concentration back to the road. The driveways into Hannover airport can be tricky and it's easy to end up at departures when you wanted to go to arrivals and vice-versa. Today it was arrivals and I parked the car right across from the exit of Terminal B. There was still some time before mom's flight from Zurich would arrive, so I could go up to the observation platform to watch the starting and landing planes, just the right thing for an aviation nut like me.

Mum had surprised me three months prior when she sat me down and explained that she wanted to change her life radically. She told me that at thirty-six she still had a few good years ahead and wanted to use them. It had been a talk that spanned most of the evening and involved the consumption of wine in generous amounts. I don't know if it was the alcohol or if she had planned to do so, but mum had been very straightforward that day and also admitted her sexual frustration of many years.

The details about mom's love-life or lack thereof had actually been a bit too graphic for my liking, but I was happy that she'd decided to book six weeks in a beauty farm in Switzerland. At least that had been the initial plan. Then the freakiest thing happened. On the way to the airport, stealing a look at her bra-less floppy boobs, I had thought that a mere beauty farm wouldn't be able to undo years of neglect. Cosmetic surgery was a better candidate to yield results – boom – just a minute later she announced she might change her plans. Now that was properly freaky.

Seeing that she'd paid more than she would have for staying in the ritziest hotel in town, just by looking at the weekly transfers from our account, I gathered that she had indeed gone to a clinic instead, or she was getting her own personal pool boy included who would take care of her sexual frustration.