The most lasting gift of my mother was born from her loneliness

One of the joys of writing anonymously is that it makes it possible to write as if nobody is listening.  To be raw, and truthful.  And also, I might say, to be hurtful.  There are things we cannot and should not say in polite society.  But is this where we are in an anonymous world?  The rules shouldn’t change, but it is the very anonymity which confers privacy.

I make less and less of a secret of it.  I have become a sex worker.  It is early days, too soon to see if I will ever be any good at it, but it is enjoyable for so many reasons.  ‘She’ writes too.  Only she is face out, as in, not at all anonymous.  Whereas, on these pages, I remain deliciously free.

It would hurt other living people to know about some of the things I said about my dead mother.  It would hurt them to know some of the things I have said about them, or their relationship with my dead mother.

My mother was a gorgeous woman.  As a dominatrix who I sometimes referred to as “Mommy” once remarked to me after I told her how beautiful she was:

“All babies think their mommies are gorgeous.”

I get that.  But growing up, I couldn’t see that or say that.  I think I hated her.  She tortured me mentally and emotionally, dangling affection, using a baby’s need, then a child’s need for a loving parent, at least one, against me.  My father was almost completely out of my life by the time I was two and was really not a figure.

My mother was desperate to find a man.  She had us work incessantly in the garden: pruning, weeding, planting, fertilizing.  Our front yard was a riot of spring colour, blossoms, bulbs.  It was beautiful.  Our back yard was more private, but equally sculpted.  As a teen I had this sense that all of this house decoration, adornment, was like dressing a pussy.  My mother was putting out “attraction” vibes, and we were part of that narrative.

In the end, we all rebelled in different ways, but since I was so much younger, I was left behind and rebelled the most profoundly, all on my own.

My wife once said to me, “I married you because you had such a healthy relationship with your mother.”  I nearly choked on my biscuit.  My adult relationship with my mother consisted of minimal exposure.  I couldn’t be around her for visits for very long before I would start to lose it.  I had a hair trigger for being manipulated by her from years of having been subjected to it.

I digress.

My mother was profoundly gorgeous.  Her sister was also gorgeous, and objectively so.  She graced the cover of Vogue, Town & Country and other high society magazines, she lived a glamourous and jetset life founded on her beauty.  She flitted about Europe in private planes, spending winters in Cortina, visiting Venice or friends in Tuscany, but socialising in New York. She was the face of one of the most sought after Italian fashion houses of her era.  But next to my mother, her beauty was overshadowed.

My mother, on the other hand, never realized how gorgeous she really was.  I don’t remember if I allowed myself to recognize it, but I do love to watch a woman get herself ready to go out.  It is one of my deepest and most cherished kinks.  Indeed, I used to pay a woman to come over and get ready to go out with someone else…it was a replay of many a childhood scene, and just like then, it was a babysitter who tucked me in.

My mother was tall.  Statuesque and very slim.  Fine boned.  Fragile.  She would wear her hair up and tendrils would fall across her face, which highlighted the delicacy of her neck.  But this grace came late, and she grew up with a feeling that she wasn’t pretty.

It amazes me that the extent of how we feel about ourselves becomes manifest in our energy.  My aunt knew she was beautiful, and she wore her sexiness and glamour with ease.  My mother was an ethereal, other-wordly beauty, but she never knew–her beauty was abstract, untouchable, like in a glass case–but not even she had the hammer to break it.  What she did know was loneliness.

It was that loneliness which led her to marry my father, a toxic narcissist.  I admire him, nonetheless, for having broken a cycle set down by his own father, who was a shit of a man, a sex abuser who exposed himself to 6-year-old me, and who ran off with his secretary, leaving a family who were forced out of their home, abandoned, and poor.  Despite these disadvantages of circumstance, my father managed to get a good education and have a noteworthy career.  But he has never been one to “do the work”, as self-reflection is not in his makeup.  So he got stuck with narcissism and never moved past it.

My mother, on the other hand, just never believed in herself.  Feminism became something she wanted to believe, I think, but her actions showed that on some level she didn’t deserve to be treated equally.  My siblings have labelled her a “whore” in the sense of using female virtue to police her—she liked to have sex.  She had lot’s of boyfriends.

At the time, I didn’t like that she used men.  At least that is how I felt about it then.  And I felt it was wrong somehow to use her power of attraction to become dependent, which was the pattern I observed.

I knew from her laments about dancing school when she was growing up, that the lingering feeling of not being asked to dance because she was taller than all the boys, had left lasting damage.  She was still the woman left sitting on a chair against the wall while her friends danced all around her.  Never mind that she was invited to the White House as the date of one of the most attractive vocal heart throbs of her era.

He was a black man.  She was a white woman taller than him.  They looked incredible together.  When I think back, civil rights were one of the issues of the day.  Their appearance on the red carpet was also symbolic, for him, and for her.  My best friend at the time was from the only black family in our neighborhood.  We were in elementary public school together.  Later, his brother and I became classmates at the institution where their father had gone before.

If we are not discriminated against, it is so easy to live without ever knowing what that is actually like.  The greatest gift of being trans has been the discovery of irrational hate, and who close it is to the surface.  I don’t mind that suddenly two-thirds of the world is no longer safe for me to visit.  Or that there are places even in the remaining third where I am not safe.  That the UK political landscape is discriminatory against trans people, and that the US is too.  Of course I don’t like it.  But it is also good to have a greater understanding for the lived experience of the vast majority of people…starting with women, but any minority, any profession which attracts opprobrium.

These things make me strong.

My mother was profoundly lonely.  She never got over being left on the edge of the dance floor.  Never believed how beautiful she was.  But she taught me a valuable lesson from this experience.

We were in Colorado skiing.  At dinner with her second husband.  I was in college, and speaking of a gorgeous woman I had a crush on.  Made all the more acute because she took me home from a party once and tucked me in, read a book to me, and then kissed me before going back out.  I honestly don’t know how these things happen to me.  Can we manifest without even knowing it?

My mother said, “the prettiest girls are the loneliest.  People are afraid to talk to them.  You needn’t be.  The prettiest girls want you to talk to them, and to be you.”  It was so much about her, but also so very true.  

And it is a life lesson that I have always held fast to.  If there is a woman more beautiful than any other in a given room, I will go up to her and talk to her.  No matter what.  No matter who she is with.  I will let her know that her energy is beautiful to behold.  It’s what I see, and what I want her to know.

That is how I met Star Child.  That is how I met two of my besties.  It is how I met the dominatrix I see.  It is how I found my mentors—both of them were the most beautiful women in the room.

Female power is so colossally seductive.  And when a woman also knows that she deserves it, is it, it becomes even more beautiful to behold.  This is part of what I admire most about a certain kind of Sex Work, escorting, but also any kind of female empowerment through sex—domming especially.  This is a woman channeling her power, using it, owning it, going beyond the elephant-in-the-room status to being the room that we both inhabit as we interact.

And that is how it is with me and a beautiful woman.  She creates a bubble around us.  A magical envelope into which I can crawl.  And the sad thing is that sometimes it is the prettiest women of all who don’t know they have it.  I don’t blame her, I blame a society which makes being a woman an impossible ball of contradictions.  But you know what?  Only a woman would be strong enough to handle it.