Sex runs in the family.

The love you feel for a parent and the love you feel for a spouse is the same, giving new meaning to the term ‘motherfucker’. There’s nothing dirty about it, unless you actually go through with it, of course. Then it’s pathetic and disgusting and punishable by law. Maybe the memory of suckling at mother’s breast is always there, exerting an influence the psychological equivalent of gravity. Most memories do. I know I wish I could forget some things. The love you feel for your wife is the same as the love you feel for your mother, obligation that is, unless of course, one of you breaks it off. My mother disowned me, for murky reasons that would never hold up in a court of law. The punishment hardly fit the crime. She died about six months later. I always thought that I willed that to happen, flattering myself, obviously, to imagine that I have that kind of power. Now I realize that her failing health is what made her so hateful in the first place. She was always borderline resentful, of what I don’t know, probably my freedom. Almost all the women in my life have been. The approaching end pushed her over. No matter how much she resented my freedom, she acknowledged my responsibility. When her father was senile and unable to care for himself, I got the call to care for him when my own father was unavailable. She knew whom she could trust, even if she was incapable of true love. Love gets lost in the shuffle of a stacked deck, a rigged game, a foregone conclusion. The last words of a dying man or woman are seldom repentant, much less inspiring. They specialize in denial. Death ain’t pretty except for the newborn for whom this world of biology is the dark side with its eternal struggle. The need for closure tends to close everything in its wake regardless of truth or consequence. I love them all, despite it all, someone else’s mothers, someone else’s kids.

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