I Got The Story From The Mother

 My mother was a very cold and unaffectionate woman. In fact, if I ever showed her any affection or tried to hug her…she would tase me. Guilt was her weapon of choice and she tried to control me with it as most mothers do, but when it comes to calculating who is the most nefarious of all mothers in the known universe, the crown easily goes to Italy. Many an Italian son who claims to have had the corragio to leave their mother after a lifetime of cooking, cleaning and washing, even devoting countless hours to expunging the hash marks from her beloved son’s underwear with a gold plated, personally engraved hash mark brush received for Mother’s Day with the money her piccolo bambino earned as a boy from his scungili stand, underestimates the length of the Italian mother’s tentacles when it comes to evaluating the chances of his ever leaving.

You see the Italian mother is perpetually petrified of aging and of ultimately being alone. What if there is no daughter, who by tradition is the one to do the heavy lifting? Who will make the sauce? Who will clean the house? Who will take me to Mass? What if I get divorced or become a widow, who will pumice my feet and pare the decaying enamel from my thickening, yellowing extremities? There is only one persona left that fits this bill. The Italian son that’s who! He is her last line of defense against the cold wind of outrageous fortune.

This is a very real problem for a lot of women, but the Italian mother is the only one resourceful enough to solve it and have the vision to do it decades in advance. But how can this amazing feat be accomplished when traditional guilt, pioneered by her ghostly double the Jewish mother, isn’t enough?

Put on your seat belts dear reader, it is time to take mothering to a whole new level. When the Italian son is 14 or 15 years old the mother sneaks into his room and performs an act she would never do in any context short of being at gun point and orally pleasures her boy. He doesn’t wake up, but fast-forward 35 years and there he is on his mother’s davenport playing Call of Duty 4 in his freshly laundered tighty-whities. He looks around at his surroundings, the knick-knacks, the bad upholstery and sadly thinks to himself…”How the fuck did I get here?”

The weight is tremendous, but he gathers himself and goes to a therapist with the money he was saving for Call of Duty 5. The doctor tells him he has mother issues and that something strange happened between them when he was a boy. Through hypnosis he discovers that his mother truly did love him, but goddamn!

After many days in his immaculate room lying in bed on sheets with hospital corners, our favorite mamaluke finally summons enough audacia and confronts his beloved Italian mother about the doctor’s suspicions. With a delivery as straight up and as hard as El Capitan this little woman always knew this day was coming lovingly looks at her little 50 year old boy then brings down the hammer.

“Son, it was never incest,” her steely gaze almost boring a hole right through him. “It was business...”