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Requiem for a Slave—Chapter 4 of 4
Mother.
I’m not sure what to say to you. Think to you. Whatever.
I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch much recently. I came as soon as I heard. I did.
I’ve never called you ‘Asha’. Not even in my head. You were always ‘mother’. Sometimes some of dad’s other girls were as well, but not always. They were...
The English language isn’t set up to support my childhood, you realize that, don’t you?
I never doubted you were my mother. It wasn’t until high school that it even occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure which of you had given birth to me. I suppose its on my birth certificate.
You all cared. I have no complaints there.
No one else had my childhood. I was the weird kid, from the weird family. With too many ‘mothers’.
I remember when I realized that was different. Its easy: The first day of kindergarden, when the teacher asked us all to introduce ourselves, one by one, going down the row...
I remember she paused when she saw me, but asked anyway. I introduced myself, and named my parents. All of them.
There went any hope I ever had of fitting in at school.
You came, you comforted me. That’s one advantage I had: I never had to wait for a busy parent to pick me up. One of you was always free.
Of course I wasn’t the only misfit in school. No one ever is. As misfits do, we bonded. Marissa would come over to our house, and we’d play. I was never really all that sure why—not until much later—but she seemed to prefer it to hers.
And, of course, eventually the weirdness wore off, and the other kids learned to treat me as I was.
Not that they ever forgot, of course.
I knew what went on in our house, of course. It would have been hard not to. I managed to never make the mistake of calling dad ‘Master’ myself, but I knew you all did it, and that it was a term of respect. Eventually I even figured out what it meant.
Which was an odd feeling.
I don’t know how you managed it mom: In the midst of all that, you—all of you—managed to teach me that a woman is a man’s equal if she wants to be.
You just managed to teach me that not all women want to be as well.
I think dad had the hardest time with me: I was part of the family, but I wasn’t under his control. The only one who wasn’t. He wasn’t always sure how to treat me, and we had a few odd conversations over the years.
I was the only one who could argue with him. I never mentioned it, but I did notice that all of you went silent when that happened.
Well, I did mention it once, to dad. He said he didn’t want me to feel ganged up on, so if I started arguing the rest of you were to stay out of it.
It never surprised me that none of you ever took my side.
I will say this: I never felt unloved, or unwanted, or unvalued at home. And you, mother, were a large part of that. I knew you served dad first, but you always made time for me.
By the end of elementary school, I could have been any other kid. People had learned to overlook the weirdness of my family, and see that I was normal. Mostly.
Then came high school...
New faces, new people. New story telling. New bodies.
New expectations.
I did have one advantage: sex ed wasn’t the shock it was to everyone else. I knew generally how it must work, and that people enjoyed it.
And—frankly—I’d found the toy stash.
You all accepted sex as part of life, so I set out to do the same. My first couple of experiences... Well, they weren’t the best. They guys didn’t know what they were doing, and neither did I, and...
And, well, we weren’t quite ready yet.
Dad was not the right person to talk to. I went to you. I expected you to listen, but I didn’t expect you to understand. You didn’t have it like that with dad...
But you did understand. And you could tell me why, and why what you had with dad wasn’t like that. Or one version of it anyway: Because you valued each other.
It is a testament to you and dad that I never doubted that statement.
You offered to help teach me how it all worked. How to do it right.
I think you would have helped me practice if I’d asked, and I’m only now learning to think that would be weird. Regardless, you didn’t offer, you just gave me tips and explanations.
Yes, I trusted you. I knew that just as you would never disobey dad you would never hurt me. Not intentionally, not without a reason.
In a weird way, we were equals: You had experience, and knowledge. All the normal things that come with being a mother. I had free will, which balanced that. You went to dad for instruction on what you should do, I went to dad for permission on what I was allowed to do. Only one of us had to listen.
Anyway, by the middle of high school I had a Reputation, and it was only then that I discovered what that meant. Sex just didn’t mean as much to me as it did to everyone else; it still doesn’t.
I did try to live it down. It helped that I was Marissa’s friend, and she was the ice queen: she didn’t even date.
There were a few of my boyfriends who were only trying to get to her. I learned the signs, and dumped them quick.
But, if anyone in my class could handle having a reputation, I could, precisely because sex didn’t mean as much to me. It was just another part of life, and I’d been teased about my weird life before. I learned to live it down, and I managed to teach the guys (and some girls too, home life hadn’t taught me to be stuck up on gender...) that just because I wasn’t opposed to sex that didn’t mean I was going to dive into bed for them.
I had good grades, a loving (if weird) family, and my life ahead of me. I’d been in love, and I’d been in lust. Both were good, and I looked forward to more.
I went off to college, looking forward. I’ll admit a part of me wanted to shed the stigma of the ‘weird family,’ but I wasn’t ashamed of you. Just... I knew you weren’t normal, and I was ready to try ‘normal’ for a change. It wouldn’t change who I was, just who I was seen as, after all.
I remember the phone call from Marissa. Saying she’d joined the family.
How could you? She was my best friend.
She used to call me sister, when we were growing up. Now she stands here, just a few feet away, aching over the loss of her ‘sister’: you. And she means that in an entirely different way.
Its not fair, mother. Its not right. Its weird. For the first time, I really thought of my own family as ‘weird’. I could see what everyone was saying about us. Why they kept their distance.
And the weirdest thing was that I was angry at you. Not Marissa, not dad, not anyone else. You.
I—better than anyone—know that you had no say in this. That you were just doing as you were told. Just acting as an instrument of father, as always.
But... you were the one who played with us growing up. Who comforted me when I scraped a knee, who taught me to make cookies, who helped with my homework. You were the one who I went to when someone broke my heart. You were the one who taught me to look past the sorrow, and into the future.
And you’d done the same for Marissa, all our lives. Her mother wasn’t interested, so you stepped in.
And now, she was... Well, she was ecstatic about joining you. And more.
It didn’t make sense in my head. I just lost a friend, to the one person I’d felt safe with the longest. How could I trust either of you?
I guess that really says it, doesn’t it.
Marissa tried to keep in contact, like we had, but it wasn’t the same. We weren’t equals anymore, and she... she had a new obsession, that was driving everything else in her life to be secondary, at best.
I couldn’t talk to her like that.
I’m not sure who I hurt by staying away. No one was going to call me back if I didn’t want to, and I just couldn’t face you. I stayed at college, and then I arranged summers away...
For a while I pretended I didn’t have a family. Certainly not a weird one.
I’m still not sure I forgive you. I’m not sure I know how. It wasn’t to hurt me, I know that. Marissa told me herself how long and hard she’d worked to get dad to accept her. It wasn’t even your fault: Marissa was the one who asked to be dad’s slave. You were just there at the time.
But she’d hidden it from me, while you helped her. And you hid it from me as well.
Staying away, and ignoring the fact that I have a family, I managed to build a life. A normal life. I kept enough in contact so that you could pay my tuition, be the remote ‘parents’. I know you were proud of me, proud of what I’ve become.
Sometimes I think I’ll never understand you. I’m nothing like you. I have a job, a life of my own. A husband, who is my partner in life, not my master or my slave.
I only invited dad to the wedding. Only part of that was to not make him think I’m weird. It was a long time afterwards before I finally explained how I grew up.
I’m still not quite sure he believes it.
Other times...
I look at my husband, and I wonder what I’d do without him. How I’d face life on my own, and I realize that I never want to. I’ve never felt the desire to lose myself in him the way you did with father, but...
I trust my husband. Maybe as much as you trust dad. I can rely on him, he can rely on me. And that’s all your life was about really, wasn’t it? Showing your man he could rely on you, and that you trusted him, absolutely. Without question, without end.
If that’s it, then maybe I can understand.
You are my mother. You always were, and you always will be. To me, that is the most important thing about you.
And you were one of the best.
I wish I’d had another chance to tell you that.
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