Chapter 9

These are my mother's words, the story of her life as she told me after our reconciliation, so I would be able to fill the gaps in my mind of her and my family's life story, everything that I did not know and should.

When I met Pierce's father, my late husband, I was a young and impressionable woman, just a newcomer to the big city from the distant western lands. He, he was a dream-like come true, the man with which all women, from their earliest childhood, dream to get.

We met and fell in love, it was like a fairy tale, she was older than me, but it didn't matter to me, as I was madly in love with him and him with me. Our first time together was full of thunder and lightning, we were like ancient Olympic gods clashing, we were Zeus and Hera, Hefesto and Aphrodite, Apollo and Artemisia, Jupiter and Juno.

Then reality showed its ugly claws in my parents' refusal to accept any part of my new life. They didn't accept my pregnancy, didn't accept my love for the man it was going to be my husband next, they refused to accept my yet unborn son, only because he had been conceived out of wedlock, and worse than anything else the three of us were thrown out of their home. We were cursed in their strict compliance with the laws of a god they said was all love and forgiveness.

Contrary to their predictions, our marriage was very happy those early years, but unfortunately we could not have any more children. That was perhaps the biggest shadow of our marriage.

I did not talk to my parents again until Pierce was eight years old; I wanted him to know his grandparents and for their grandparents to know him, since he could not meet his other grandparents whom had died years ago in a plane crash. Pierce's father had no other family and I wanted my child to have some kind of family reference. Dale agreed with me but let me be the one who handled the matter, only forced by circumstances would he speak with my parents again...

I was apprehensive. How would they receive me after so long a estrangement. What would happen in my first trip to my parent's ranch after so many years was a mystery. How would my parents receive me? And Pierce? Would they be willing to love their grandson? I was no longer the girl who had gone ten years ago to study in the big city. Today I was a woman of sophistication and world wise; with different concerns and values to that they had taught me. Above all things I wondered: how were they? Had they aged well? How was their health?

When we arrived at the ranch they were both waiting on the porch gallery. Our image must have been a surprise for them. From the car got out a tall and slender woman, elegantly dressed in the latest fashions and fully produced, I looked more like one of those famous models in magazines and on TV that the recently pregnant girl that they had driven from her home several years back. I do not know what was really what they expected of her daughter, I'm sure it was not the vision of elegance sophistication that appeared before their eyes.

And Pierce, my son, tall for his eight years, handsome, with dark hair, and dressed with elegance, he had with an affectionate smile, well educated, he went to his grandparents and greeted them as if he had known them all of a lifetime. His words carried emotion when he approached my mother, kissed her on the cheek and asked, "How are you dear Grandma", while turning around to shake my father's hand with his and asked, "And you, how are you grandpa"

The polite attitude and gentle presence of his grandson seemed to melt slightly their icy attitude toward us of the earliest moments of our visit. None the less the first few days were very uncomfortable, especially for me, their arrogant attitude, their belief that they were beyond good and evil and that I was still a sinner, made my stay with them very uncomfortable. So after a week with them in the ranch I, let Pierce, with whom they had bonded very well, in their care to pass the summer and I returned to me home and to Dale, who truth be told, never badmouthed my parents or told me "I told you this would happen". In that moment I loved him more if that was possible.

From then on, became a custom that Pierce would go to visit his grandparents during the holidays, almost always alone, I put him on the road, bus or plane and his grandparents would go to meet him at the bus station or airport, according to the way he traveled. I was very glad the way they bonded.

Pierce's holiday visits to his grand-parents continued until that unfortunate day when Pierce left the house forever after that afternoon in which I flirted shamelessly with him half-naked, and he reacted trying to caress my breast, at which I answered venting my sexual frustrations and cursing him and losing him forever...

After the first eight or ten years of our marriage, Dale was missing his full time work, he wanted more time to study and read technical journals, so he had less time for family life. Oh, I know he still loved and worshiped me, and he loved profoundly our son; but it wasn't enough for me. I loved him just as the first day I laid my eyes on him at that dreadful autopsy room, but the years had dented his interest in sex, so our love sessions were less and less frequent, becoming more spaced in time; in the meanwhile, I was on the prime of my life and I wanted to make love, or just have sex every day, whatever.

By the social position that our family and the academic position my husband had, I had to be the perfect wife, I couldn't flirt even as a joke, I should act with prudence, and of course any extramarital affair was off limits if I wanted for my marriage to survive. And I did want it to survive. But I was sexually frustrated, very frustrated, and I could not argue that Dale had not warned me before our marriage, he did warn me that could come to happen. Maybe, hence the subconscious and unintentional flirting with my son that led to the events that in some way destroyed my family, or at least part of my family; me.