My Mom's Secret: A Journey of Self-Discovery

copyright: Lesley Tara, 2014


How could I have not known this about my Mom?! I mean, how ... just how could I possibly have NOT KNOWN?? and, y’know – about my MOM!!

I was literally dumbstruck as I looked down at the opened wrapping paper and black cardboard box that were resting on my knees ... or, rather, as I looked down at what was IN the box. And then, with a pounding heart and a dry mouth, I read for the third or fourth time the neat writing on the small coloured gift-tag that had been inside the box:

Darling Sandra – I’ll be back soon, wear this for me and make my day! I’ll sure COME to see you!! Happy birthday, your loving Diane xxx

With trembling fingers, I picked up the object that nestled neatly inside the box. In full view, it was even more unmistakeable: a strap-on harness with a thick ribbed black plastic dildo attached! There could be no mistaking its use, or misunderstanding the note: it was something that lesbians used to fuck each other, and the note was to my Mom from her long-time ‘best friend’. I snorted, suddenly understanding the warmth of that friendship in an entirely new way.

That took me back again to the question whirling around inside my head: how could I have not realised the true nature of their relationship? How could I have not realised that my Mom was ... no, IS ... a lesbian? It was not like I was a little kid any more, from whom the grown-ups could quite easily keep such a secret, avoiding questions and diverting the child onto other topics. Jesus, I was almost seventeen years old, and not exactly naive! ... not exactly inexperienced, either, although (and I admitted to myself the irony of this) that was something I hadn’t exactly been telling my Mom about!

As to how I had made this astonishing discovery, which in a single moment had turned my whole world upside down and made me re-evaluate almost every memory that I had ever had – well, it was a chapter of coincidences and assumptions, but by comparison it was easy enough to understand.

My Mom and I had a lot in common – maybe too much, I thought now! There had always been just the two of us: Mom got pregnant in a completely unplanned way when she was only 18 years old, and she was not really even in a relationship with my father – he was just a boy her own age, and it happened at party when she drank a bit too much to say no. When three months later she realised she was expecting, she didn’t want to tie him down – or tie herself to him either. But neither did she want to give up her baby, and so with her parents’ support she postponed going to college, had me, took evening courses and eventually qualified as a lawyer, and then slowly built up a career. When I was six years old, we moved out of my grandparents’ house to our own apartment, nearer to the centre of town, and that’s how it has been ever since – Mom and me.

Two things that Mom and I had in common had contributed to my devastating discovery of the strap-on dildo. The first was that our birthdays were only ten days apart: hers had been just over a week ago, and mine – my seventeenth, which I was pretty excited about – was the very next day. The second thing was that we shared the same initial, although a lot of people who knew us didn’t realise that. They know Mom as Sandra, the name she’s been called from childhood, not realising that it is actually short for Alexandra – and my name is Angela; Mom chose it because she said I was a gift from the angels.

So it was that when, a few minutes after I got home from school today, this package was delivered, addressed to ‘Ms A. Benson’, I had just assumed that it was for me. It was a standard plain UPS mailing box, and when I opened it, just as expected there inside it was another box, this one carefully wrapped in shiny gift-paper with a ‘Happy Birthday’ motif. Now the pattern of the last few years has been that I keep back the family presents from my mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles (I have two of each) to open on my actual birthday, but that the other presents – from my own friends and a few of my Mom’s long-standing friends who had been regular babysitters when I was a child and who are my honorary aunties – were opened as they arrived, which spread the fun out over several days.

It just never crossed my mind that this might be a late present for Mom’s birthday which had somehow got delayed in the post – her birthday seemed ages ago, I was so fixated on anticipating mine. So, with great glee and pleasure, I ripped open the lovely shiny gift-wrap, found the black oblong cardboard box inside and eagerly opened it – to my resulting shock and dismay.

I knew at once not only what it was for, but also who it was from – and what was meant by the language of the little note that had been inside the box, resting on top of that frightening and amazing phallic plastic rod. For around ten years now, Diane has been my Mom’s best friend (well, duh!, now we know why, I thought to myself!). They had met quite early in their professional careers – actually, it was around the time that we moved out from my grandparents’ house to our own apartment; it was during one of my Mom’s first jobs, and they were both juniors at the same large law firm. No, wait a minute, Diane is a couple of years younger than Mom, and is only thirty-three – I remember now, she was interning there after finishing college, in fact they met when she was assigned to help Mom prepare a complicated case. They hit it off straight away, and though soon afterwards they both moved on to new jobs with different firms, they have stayed great friends ever since.

A thought suddenly struck me like a blow to the solar plexus, almost knocking the wind out of me. Shit! – have they been lovers all this time, all these years? Maybe they have, I thought, seeing some old memories in a strange new light – dear Lord, I think they have! It had never seemed odd to me that Mom did not have a boyfriend or even go out on dates – I was happy to be the centre of her attention (solely, I had assumed until now), and balancing a successful legal career with being a single-parent was more than enough for anyone to do. Nor had it seemed odd that Diane was resolutely single – she was ambitious, clever and hard-working, and was making a real name for herself: in fact, only about a year ago, she was made a partner at her law firm.

Thinking back now, I realised that Diane had been around a lot after they first met – she used to come to the apartment every weekend, arriving around the middle of Saturday afternoon, and then chatting with me and helping me with my homework whilst Mom did some chores and made my meal. Then, whilst Mom oversaw my bath and bedtime, Diane would cook a grown-up dinner for the two of them – cooking was one of her few relaxations, she always said (and now I know the other one, a voice inside my head remarked: lesbo fucking with my Mom!). I had always assumed that after eating they sat around chatting over a couple of glasses of wine, or maybe watched some television or a film, and that Diane left sometime mid-evening – I never heard her go, but then I would be fast asleep, so I never expected to. Now I realised that almost certainly something very different had been going on, maybe in the sitting room with the TV turned on to cover any sounds, but more probably in Mom’s bed, and probably Diane had stayed most of the night and did not leave until dawn.

Other pieces of the jigsaw suddenly fell into place – Diane had visited us less often as I got older, but quite regularly Mom would arrange a babysitter for Saturday night and tell me that she and Diane were going out for a few drinks, or maybe a movie, ‘to have a little fun’. Yeah, right, I thought sourly, I have the feeling that this ‘fun’ all took place in Diane’s bedroom, and they probably never left her apartment at all!

More recently, having become something of an authority in her particular legal specialism, Mom has been doing more consultancy work, which she can do best from home over the internet: there is more peace and quiet to concentrate here, especially with me out at high school for most of the day. So Mom usually works at home for one or two days a week, and on most of them when I come home from school Diane would be sitting with her in the kitchen having coffee, having ‘just dropped by for a while on her way home’. Mom always seemed happier and more relaxed after Diane’s visits, even sometimes quite flushed, which I had thoughtlessly put down to the pleasure of gossiping and joking with a friend – but now it dawned on me after reading Diane’s note that she probably arrived much earlier than I had assumed, and these afternoons were their regular lesbian love-making sessions.

How had I not realised any of this? Well, I guess when their affair first developed I was much too young to understand what was going on, and their ‘friendship’ was just the normal background to our life as I grew up. I had to admit, they had been careful and discrete about it – indeed, until this delayed and misdirected package had given the game away, I had had no idea at all about what was going on! One reason for that was probably the self-absorption typical of every teenager, giving little thought to what goes on around them as they struggle with the challenges of puberty and immaturity. However, during the last year I had been even more preoccupied than most teenage girls, because it was now clear that Mom and I have one more thing in common than I had hitherto suspected – one very major fundamental thing indeed!

Yep, you’ve guessed it – I’m a lesbian too! The understanding of my sexual orientation dawned on me nearly a year ago, not long after my sixteenth birthday, as I became aware that I had no interest in boys or in doing things with boys (yuk!) – or, what would be even more unpleasant, in letting them do things to me (mega-mega-yuk!!). At the same time, especially after a vivid crush on a pretty young female teacher at my school, I realised that I was developing stronger and stronger sexual feelings about girls. And I guess I really am my Mom’s daughter, because all of this focused on my sweet long-time best friend, Carrie-Anne, who to my everlasting joy and relief I had slowly discovered felt just the same kind of attraction to me. We started just fooling around physically for a while, joking and pretending that it was only girlish fun, before we accepted the truth and became lovers seven months ago, quite soon after Carrie-Anne turned sixteen (she is four months younger than me). I was staying at her house for a sleepover, but instead of staying in my sleeping bag on the air bed on her bedroom floor, we had kissed and undressed each other and then got naked into her bed, where I stayed until the dawn, as we explored each other’s budding femininity with our fingers and lips, coaxing each other to a series of powerful and drenching climaxes.

From that sweet memory, my thoughts returned with a sick lurch to my immediate problem. Glancing downwards, I realised that it was going to be impossible to pretend that the package had not been opened. Whilst I could perhaps have used some fresh paper to re-wrap the inner box, as we had some birthday paper in the house, that would not solve the real problem: in my eagerness, I had torn open

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THE END