A Victorian Mother

My mum was an aristocratic English woman, trapped in the body of a prudish Australian. I know nothing real about my mum's sexual history before she met my dad, or during the brief period they were engaged.

I knew she was repressed about this part of her life, but I also knew, from the rhythmic creaking of their bed in the the next room, that mum and dad were having sex. I found Viagra among dad's prescriptions after his death, indicating that he and my mother were sexually active well into their 80s.

My mother first explained sex to me when I was 12. It was a very incomplete description, and I became aware that sex was something decent people didn't talk about. My earliest sexual experiences were masturbation, which I enjoyed immensely. When my mother discovered spent seed on my sheets, she pulled me aside and told me that boys who masturbated went blind. It was an evil, filthy thing to do, and she was sure that I wouldn't be having any more "wet dreams." That's when I discovered the added uses of toilet paper and value of long sessions behind locked bathroom doors.

The question that grew during my early teen years was "why?". Why no drinking, smoking, masturbation, premarital sex, pornography? When I dared ask, I was insulted by comments demeaning the character of one who would ask such questions or by the more common "because." "Because" was a lame answer, but what else did they have? Both fine people, my parents were generations past absolute moral standards. They were operating on cruise control, guided by traditional values and fear of anything that challenged those values.

I struggled to break out of fear of and guilt regarding sex, but lived in the shadows of the words which had been spoken to me. I believed that sex was a natural part of life, unrelated to the "because" word, but I couldn't perform when given the chance, one of the earliest sufferers of an epidemic we now kindly call erectile dysfunction (ED).

I finally got it right (much to my relief) and got together with the woman who is now my wife. We lived together for 18 months, withstanding withering looks and criticism from both of our parents, scurrying around late at night to be together when staying with them, suffering obvious discrimination in every way from a culture still obsessed with the way things "should be."

In January 1971, Ann and I dedicated ourselves to Jesus and both decided that we should stop living together. Neither of us wanted to do something "because," but wanted to act on specific instructions we believed we had found.

There is more to this story . . .