Robert Lubrican - A Model Mother

I don’t know if boys in general are dense as they grow up, but I was. I’m aware that’s a pretty sweeping comment, but let me explain and perhaps you’ll understand where I’m coming from and judge me less harshly.

What I’m actually referring to is a boy’s reflection on his parents. In my case, it was just one parent, my mother. She was a single mother, and that’s all I ever knew her as. I had no idea who my father was, only that she’d never married him and deflected any questions or conversation concerning him. They say that familiarity breeds contempt. I think that’s a little harsh, personally, but familiarity does cause one to view the other person in a bubble. When you’re a kid, your mom is just … your mom. Other kids' moms might seem interesting, or exotic, or even hot, but you see your own mother so much that she just fades into the background.

My mom was a real estate agent. I guess she’d been a waitress when I was little, but she had her realtor’s license by the time I was five or six. We were poor, but I didn’t know the difference. She always found a way to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. It took until I was twelve or thirteen before I did the math and figured out that she’d had me when she was fifteen. It sounds crazy now, but back then, the fifteen-year-olds I knew seemed like grownups to me, so I didn’t think a lot about it. Nor did I think about how hard it must have been for her to be pregnant and not even old enough to have a driver’s license, yet.

Anyway, she did okay as a realtor. The income wasn’t steady, which is why, sometimes, things got tight, financially speaking. Markets like that fluctuate, so you have to plan for the long haul. I knew she’d had second jobs, now and then, as I grew up, but I hadn’t paid any attention to that, either. When she wasn’t there, that gave me time to read comic books, and play on my Atari, that she’d gotten at the Good Will store. Like I said, I was a little dense. Or maybe just self-absorbed.

What I did pay attention to was my mother’s opinion on how a man (or boy) should treat a member of the opposite gender. She was death on that. It was her firm opinion that If a man didn’t respect women, and their wishes, then he was lower than whale shit. She made it quite clear, even before I entered puberty, that I was to be a gentleman. I was to listen to what a woman said, and always, always, always respect her.

I was allowed to date when I turned sixteen. I did some of that, but I was pretty shy. I had to know a girl pretty well before I’d ask her out. It might sound counter-intuitive, but by the time I knew a girl that well, we were friends, and had usually figured out dating each other wouldn’t be as fulfilling as just staying friends. I felt the same urges other guys did, but the girls I felt them about were mostly either out of my league or already somebody’s girlfriend. So I fell into the category of group dating, for the most part. A bunch of us who liked each other went out and did things together. I’d recommend it to others, except that my sexual development took a somewhat odd path.

But that comes later. I managed to get by with usually quick, somewhat violent masturbatory sessions. The objects of my passion at such times were photographs of women who didn’t mind if I saw them naked. That was obvious because they had posed for such pictures and let somebody put them in a magazine. I could have whatever fantasy I wanted about them without feeling like I was objectifying them. Men objectifying women was one of my mom’s hot-button issues.

Mom managed to save up enough money for me to at least start college. I wanted to be a fire fighter, and it just so happened that the vo-tech school in our town offered an associates fire science degree, so I was able to save some money by living at home. The rest of the guys in my class were away from home for the first time, horny out of their minds, and finally able to get drunk without a parent finding out, so they were a pretty wild bunch. I’m sure that if I’d lived in the dorm with them, the peer pressure would have caused me to do some of the same stupid things they did, but I was able to get away at night. It helped my study habits, too, which I had failed to build up in high school. It was close enough that I could ride my bike (helpful in the physical fitness arena, which was a big deal in the program) or walk if I had to.

On the other hand, living at home meant I couldn’t bring a girl over and despoil her, like my friends bragged they did. Alas, I stayed a virgin. Of course I never told them that.

And that brings me to what started the train of my normal, ordinary, dense life to … well … derail. Or threaten to derail.

In my fourth (last) semester I had to take a humanities class as an elective, to satisfy a fine arts requirement. I chose Art 101 because I figured it would be easy credit. I mean art is subjective, right? So you can’t screw it up, right? If my apples and bananas in a still life end up looking like coals and sticks, then I can just spin it and say it’s what I intended, right?

It turned out I liked art. An example of my denseness is that I spent years with my nose stuck in a comic book and didn’t translate that into, "I like art." I’d never spent any time drawing, but I should have, because I had a talent for it. My teacher even thought so. After class one time she took me aside and asked if I might be interested in working with one of the college art partners. I didn’t know what a college art partner was. It turns out that a local art gallery offered training above and beyond what the vo-tech could offer. They called it "investing in art’s future." I would later learn that the theory is a little like American Idol, or The Voice, where tens of thousands of people are screened who might never come to the attention of a music producer, but who have raw talent. Not many will make the grade, but the few who do make a lot of money for the people putting on the show. What these art partners did was try to find talent that could make them money.

Anyway, it was part of what was called Art Lab. The owner of the local gallery came in as a guest instructor and ran it in a studio at the college. It was only on Friday nights, which was good, because that wouldn’t interfere with my fire science classes. It was three hours long, so students could spend serious uninterrupted time on major projects. Obviously, since it was on Friday night, only the serious people attended. If you were a pussy hound, or an alcoholic-in-the-making, you avoided things like art lab. I had taken out a few girls since starting college, but only those I already knew from high school. I didn’t really have a lot of self confidence, or at least enough to approach the vivacious, independent girls I saw on campus. Actually, that was one reason I took art as an elective. I figured maybe girls who were into art might be into quiet, polite guys … like me. My point is that I didn’t think losing Friday nights to art lab would cut into my social life. It was also a good excuse to turn down a party where, typically, alcohol would flow like a stream, leading to me trying to sneak into the house without my mother knowing I’d been drinking.

"So what do they do there?" I asked.

"They do different things each semester," she said. "I believe they’re doing a figure study this semester."

"I guess I could try," I said. "Isn’t drawing figures hard?"

"It is for some people, but as you already know, it’s formulaic. We’ve already gone over the basics of that in class. Mrs. Gaskill will be providing advanced instruction. I think you could do it."

"Okay, then," I said. "Where do I go and what should I bring?"