My New Life

I dropped another worn-out cardboard box onto the tiled kitchen floor, watching the built-up dust blow away as it hit the floor. I then dusted the grime and cobwebs off my now sweat ridden dusty shirt as best I could. I'd been hauling boxes down from the attic for about thirty minutes. Sweat trickled down my armpits and my shirt was streaked with dirt.

“Wow, it's filthy up there, when was the last time anyone was up there?” I said, removing my dust mask.

My mom, Abigail, Abby for short, was sitting in one of our hard kitchen island barstools, leaning over the counter and sorting through one of the dusty cardboard boxes that I had previously brought down. Her velvety, wavy chocolate hair was back in a loose ponytail that jiggled as she poked and prodded through each box, pulling out their contents and arranging them into various piles. The kitchen was a mess of old books, board games, rusty appliances, family memorabilia and baby clothes. She paused, rested her hands on her knees and looked up at me with a small grin. The burgundy henley top she was wearing had a low cut and a few buttons open, and hung loose at the neck, revealing a glimpse of bra clinging to bulbous breasts that I instinctively glanced away from. She always did wear much skimpier, comfortable clothing at home, more than I was comfortable with seeing.

Mom didn't say anything, but I knew what she was thinking and reminiscing. She wished I had real friends here, not just online friends stationed all over the world. I didn't want to get into that argument again and must explain again how my online friends didn't judge me the way others my own age in the real world did. Online, I could be anyone I wanted with other like-minded people. There was none of the pretending to be interested in sports talk or any other boring bullshit like in school. None of the being teased for the way I walked or the way I dressed or my interest in things the other guys considered to be too girly or weird.

I wasn't muscular or dominating or physically imposing. Quite the opposite. I often felt constrained by the typical masculinity of other guys my age and sometimes, at night alone in my room, would wonder what it would be like to be a woman and escape this reality, where I could skimp through life relying on looks and beauty to achieve a better life. I felt that's what I should have been. I'd never revealed this secret inquiry to anyone in the real world let alone my mom but had found a niche like-minded community online where I could indulge this fantasy.

“Look what I found,” mom said, changing the subject and picking up a stack of yellowed notebooks from off the table. “Your old schoolwork.”

I took them and flipped through them, laughing with mom at the spaceships and cartoon characters doodled in the margins of my middle school notebooks.

“Wow, I remember this one,” I said, turning a full-page drawing of a cowboy battle to my mom.

She took the notebook and smiled as she flipped through it. I flipped through another stack. Occasionally we'd laugh and hold up an old drawing or an old story I'd done. Suddenly mom grew quiet, and I looked down over her shoulder to see what she'd found. It was a family picture I'd drawn when I was about seven. My stick figure mom smiled as she watched her stick figure son on the swing set. And holding her hand was my stick figure dad. Mom put her fingers on the stick figure dad and let out a small sigh.

See, Dad, died when I was 2 years old, and I hardly have any memories of him, but by some miracle a few months before he died, dad got a great job and applied for large life insurance policy, $1,000,000.00 but somehow there was an error in the application and the decimal points for the cents were added to dollar amount and my dad ended up with a $100,000,000.00 life insurance policy. He apparently only noticed this after the payment left their bank account, draining it and financially ruining them. While, figuring out what to do with mom, they decided that since it was already paid for it made no sense to downgrade the plan in the middle of the first year. Rather to downgrade before the next payment.

Oddly enough, he'd passed away from a heart attack only a couple months after he got the policy. My mom said that the insurance company found the whole thing suspicious and spent a long time investigating before they reluctantly paid up. According to my mom she didn’t want the money to corrupt either of us, so she decided to use a bit to pay off their debts and the mortgage and put the rest away until I was older and mature.

She got a normal job that paid our bills, but I always felt it was just to keep her distracted from her loneliness and to keep her occupied when I was at school. It was normal for her to miss him, but sometimes I worried...I don't know...that she missed him too much or something. Like the memories of him were holding her back from living her life. She'd practically put her life on hold after he passed. She hadn't dated anyone and rarely went out with friends. If she wasn’t working, then she was fully committed to taking care of me.

Once the thought of my mom dating would have been horrifying to me, but as I'd grown older, I'd come to realize that my mom was a person, too, with her own needs that she'd foregone for far too long.

I squeezed her shoulder. “There's a lot more boxes,” I said gently, “Let's just get this stuff organized and cleaned up, okay?”

Mom nodded and sniffed, setting down the notebook. She swiped a strand of brunette hair behind her ear and gently wiped away a lone tear. She then resumed picking through the next box, choosing what to keep and what to give away. I watched her for a second as she worked, the dappled sunlight creeping in through the kitchen blinds flashing against her moist, radiant skin.

Her face in profile was picturesque, with her perfectly sculpted nose and exquisite cheekbones. Delicate eyebrows sat over almond shaped eyes. 5’8”, on the slimmer side, but started to put on a few pounds recently and began losing her hourglass figure, however her breasts seemed to stay vibrant, perky and jiggly after all these years. The jean shorts she currently wore were cut in a mom jean style, high-waisted and clutching a wide bottom. Her solid thighs poked out beneath, leading down to trim slender calves. She could easily land another guy if she wanted to. It wasn't at all that I was attracted to my mom, but if I just could have looked a little more like her maybe my life would have made more sense.