Chapter 1: You Are My Mom?

"I'll come back next month, keep your head up," I said and I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes that I couldn't quite interpret. Was mom afraid of me?

"Ronny, you can't," she pleaded with me. "I know you are worried about me, but I'll be fine and I promise to call you if something's wrong. We barely have the money to pay your high school tuition fees. We can't afford a flight there and back across the pond more than two or three times a year. Wouldn't you think it's better to leave that money for the case I really need you and for you to come back over the holidays?"

I hated it when she had a point, but somehow mom's logic still didn't ring true with me. But there was nothing to substantiate my strange misgivings, so I let it go and got on my way, not to return for about five months.

The travel was a slog. I had to fly from California to New York, where I would board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt in Germany and then there was another almost 3-hour train ride to Hannover, where I had been accepted into the Niki de Saint Phalle art school for the highly gifted. It would not be easy, living in a strange land. I was pretty open minded and I tend to consider myself somewhat knowledgeable, so I was not one of those dope-heads you see on CNN, asking whether the correct spelling of the last country we've invaded without invitation is Iran or Iraq. But still, you learn little about Germany from our media back home.

I'd spent two weeks on a crash course at the Goethe Institute in San Francisco, but there's only so much they can pump into your head in fourteen days. Nonetheless, it was helpful. Germany is so much different from America. I had come with many preconceptions and most of them went out the window soon. One of the first to get smashed was their alleged lack of humor. I was surprised how much fun they made of themselves almost constantly. And I learned that the leather-pants wearing, beer drinking fellows with funny hats where Bavarians, who are only a part of Germany's population.

The school was an international melting-pot of talent. Americans, Europeans, Asians, there were people from all parts of the world. The Africans were a bit under-represented with only one South African, but that was probably down to the substantial costs.

I was loving my time in Germany. I lived in a modern dormitory that cost very little rent, but had internet access like I'd never seen before. We were connected to Hannover University's backbone and the download speeds boggled the mind. Many classes were taught online, provided as streams in different languages due to the diverse nature of our class, but I still made an extra effort to learn German.

It was surprising, how many Germans spoke decent English, but I didn't want to rely on that forever. I soon noticed that speaking German with my American accent was a great door opener. Somehow the sound must be pleasing to their ears, as most people reacted very friendly, even if my attempts at their language were less than perfect. I guess they were really appreciative of my effort to learn German, which is definitely not an easy language.

What I also learned was that Germany is much more liberal than most parts of the US of A. I had nearly choked when I saw a film on TV that featured full frontal nudity, and it was shown on free-to-air TV at 6pm. Also, when temperatures were high enough to go to the Maschsee, a lake at the outskirts of Hannover, you'd see a lot of women sunbathing topless.

Art classes were great. They were taught in English, so I had it easier than many of my classmates and the atmosphere was fitting to the liberal ways of Germans. I think we got to paint a nude girl as early as six weeks into the semester. Can you imagine what would happen if someone put a nude sixteen-year-old girl in front of a class of fifteen-year-old teens back in the States?

What was not so great was the worry about my mother. We had a weekly Skype call on Saturdays and allegedly all was always fine, but I could see the subtle signs that this was not the case. I knew something was wrong, when mom missed the last two calls before my first Ferien, that's what Germans call school holidays. What I wanted was run screaming, wrestling my way onto the first flight home, but I had learned quite a bit from my German classmates. They had their emotions like anyone else, but they didn't wear them on their sleeves. So I put a brave face to it and forced myself to endure the agony until early December came around and I was flying home for two months.

When I came home, nothing was as it had been when I left. My father was gone. We had never been the closest of buddies, but I'd always thought he was quite okay. And he was paying for my education as well.

When I came back home, having taken the bus as mom hadn't picked me up at the airport as she had promised, I stopped dead in my tracks. Mom was sitting on the couch. Well, 'sitting' was a rather generous interpretation of the term. She had slid halfway down and was either sleeping or dead. The whole living room was full of beer bottles, at least a hundred of them, and it stank of sweat and smelly feet like you wouldn't believe. Mom's usually pretty long black hair was greasy, tussled, and ugly strains stuck out in all directions. It looked like she hadn't seen the inside of a shower for days.

What shocked me the most though, was that she was practically naked. She wore nothing but a robe and socks, which, at a guess, had once been white. The robe had opened and I had a clear view at her boobs and her pussy. It's not like I hadn't seen her before. We were relatively relaxed about nudity in our household. We didn't prance around naked, but we also didn't always wrap a towel around ourselves when coming from the bathroom, and when taking a dive in the pool, we usually didn't wear swimsuits.

Having had me at the young age of sixteen, and me being fifteen now, mom was only thirty-one. Her boobs were firm, well-shaped and medium size with dark nipples that looked somewhat small on her. Her pussy looked like a mess. Normally mom would keep her pubic hair trimmed, but right now she looked like a grizzly down there - dark long curls covered the whole pubic area, even spilling over to her thighs. Making a well-shaped body like mom's look unattractive was an 'achievement' in itself, but she had somehow managed to do so by what looked like massive neglect of herself.

I got angry and walked into the backyard and dialled my father's number. He answered in a cheerful voice, ostensibly happy to hear from me.

"Were are you?" I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

"On the Philippines, didn't your mother tell you?"

"At the moment my mother couldn't even tell me her name," I growled. "She is lying on the couch, naked, stinking like something a scavenger would get aroused by, and the house has more bottles in it than a fucking brewery."

"Listen, Ronny, you have to help her," he said, his voice soft. "I know you think I'm a jerk, but I ain't. I once loved her above all else, but your mother started to change when she was twenty-eight. She kept saying how ugly she was and how desperate I must be to fuck a decaying carcass like her."

I gasped. I'd never heard him drop the F-bomb before. "But dad, she's beautiful. Damn, she's hot even!"

His sad sigh alerted me to what I had just said and I muttered an apology.

"No need to apologize," he said and I heard some very stirring emotion in his voice. "She is good looking and I've always tried to reassure her. But hearing for two years that you're corpse-fucker is too much. She literally drove me into the arms of another woman. I know it isn't a nice thing to do, Ronny, but I simply couldn't take that self-depreciation anymore. I'm so sorry."

The last sentence shocked me to the bones. It was delivered in a whiny voice. I had never heard or seen dad cry.

"Help her Ronny," he asked of me amid sobs. "She's a good woman and she still has you. It's a lot of responsibility to dump on a fifteen-year-old, but I know you can do it. I don't have the power. Call me a coward or a wimp, but I can't."

"What will happen now, dad?" I asked, shocked about the news.

"For the moment, nothing," he said calming down. "If your mom wants to file for divorce, I'll accept it and it will be amicable. Don't worry about your education, I'll pay for it. After all you should not be the victim of our failed marriage."

"What should I do now?" I asked.

"This will be hard," he said. "If she's drinking heavily, get her to a clinic, and Ronny, you might need to be brutal about it. I'm not talking violence, but asking nicely might not cut it. I tried and failed. You are now the man in the house."

When the talk with wimp-dad was over, I was shaking with range, not the least because of his weakness. Why the hell had mom been doing that? I remembered dad's words, reminding me that I was now the man in the household. And control I took.

I went back into the house and drew a bath. I dipped my foot in it to make sure that it wasn't too hot. Once the tub was filled, I dumped some bath salts in it and went back down to the living room. I shook mom almost violently, and I was just shy of calling 911, when her eyes finally opened slowly and only half way.

"Nghsrbl, ssssssueeethard, wrrlbg home," she mumbled.

"You speak better German than I do," I muttered sarcastically and tried to get her on her feet after removing her dirty robe. She was completely out of it and I started to wonder just how many of those hundred bottles she'd emptied in one sitting. In the end I just hoisted her up in my arms and carried her naked body to the bathroom. God dammit, she stank like something that wouldn't be allowed to enter hell.

When I dumped her into the water she had passed out again, but she lay stable enough to make sure she wouldn't slip down with her head ending up under water, and I gathered she could use the time to soak. So I went to prepare the aftermath. I had to towel her dry somehow. I went to her bedroom and spread a beach towel over her bed, putting several more towels in reach. Coming back to the bathroom I saw her lying in the bathtub, snoring at a volume worthy of a logging camp. The water had adopted a grey-greenish color. God, she must have been filthy. I started to wash her, and it felt utterly surreal to wash her boobs and her pussy, especially as my hormone-ravaged body showed some distinct reaction.

I forced myself to ignore the utter sexiness of the body before me, especially now as it assumed a somewhat more civilized appearance again. Washing her hair had been the hardest part as I couldn't dip her under water.

Once I had done my thing, I hoisted her out of the tub and carried her dripping wet body to her bedroom laying her down on the beach towel that covered her bed, and towelled her front. More than once I was tempted to cop a feel of her beautiful breasts or even her pussy, but I forced myself to stay detached from what I was doing, much like I was doing when painting an utterly gorgeous nude girl in class. I rolled her over, making sure her face was pointing to the side, and towelled her back.

Mom was so wasted, she didn't even stir when I pulled the beach towel out from below her body. As she was lying on her blanket, I got mine from my room and put it over her naked frame.

By the time she came down to the living room the next day, the house looked a little less like a cave. I had removed all the rancid and putrid foodstuffs from the fridge for starters. Seriously, that stuff was so alive, it shouted 'turn the fucking lights off' when I opened the fridge door. All the bottles were gone and the washing machine had worked all through the night, as had I.

Mom was wearing a bathrobe - my bathrobe. I had left it in her room because she had literally no clothes left. All was in the laundry and despite the all-nighter, I hadn't even worked through half of it. My mother was in a complete and utter mess. She walked down the stairs at a snails pace, her whole body shivering in the throes of her hangover and she was crying in shame. I gathered that talking to her in that condition would only prompt a hysterical reaction, so instead I gently put my hand in the crook of her elbow and sat her down at the kitchen counter.

I put a mug of coffee before her and a glass of water with an Aspirin tablet dancing around at its bottom as it dissolved slowly. She could barely hold the cup because her hands were shaking badly. She had to use both hands.

"I had hoped you'd never see me like that," she muttered, her voice empty and lifeless.

"You should never have ended up like that," I said anger bubbling up in me. "What the fuck is wrong with you mom? You drove dad away with your constant nagging and your fifteen year old son, you forgot my birthday by the way, has to work all through the night to clean up this cesspool, and he has to wash a week worth of muck off his drunk-out-of-her-mind mother."

"Y-you washed me?" she asked.

I snorted and then I yelled at her in anger. "Yeah I did. I was surprised there weren't any vultures in here. It stank like a corpse had decomposed in our living room, for fucks sake. What the hell is happening? Why did I find the woman who raised me, naked and filthy on the couch surrounded by a hundred empty beer bottles.

Mom cried hard and tried to run, but her weak legs gave way and she nearly fell. I caught her just in time. Her whole body was shaking as I held her.

"There's a basket of finished laundry in your room. Dress and come back here," I said, but she made no move to honour my request. "MOVE IT!" I yelled at her in what little German I had learned in the first months over there, and I could see the naked shock and fear in her eyes. She didn't understand, but the rough sound of German, especially when shouted, got to her and she staggered off and about ten minutes later she came back, dressed decently

The Taxi was already waiting and I had the driver deliver us to a rehab clinic. I didn't give her much choice and I dragged mom in there where she was quickly taken away by a doctor. Sitting in the waiting room, the whole gravity of the situation and the brutal way I had come down on her got the better of me and I started crying.

"You shouldn't be sad," someone said. Not able to see too much through my tear-filled eyes, I noticed belatedly that a nurse had gathered me in her arms, hugging me tight as my emotions kept spilling out.

"I've been such a prick," I admitted, but she dabbed at my eyes with a tissue and looked at me.

"Ronald, may I call you that?" She asked and I nodded, telling her I'd actually prefer Ronny.

"Ronny, people with alcohol problems don't come here voluntarily. You have no idea how many people never get treated because their families are afraid of doing what you've done. You are a remarkable young man. It takes a lot to go that hard on your own mother, especially when you're only fifteen. One day she'll be grateful for what you did. I nearly jumped out of my skin when she placed a tender kiss on my cheek and went back to her work.