1
It wasn’t just Jason who needed weaning from his mother’s breast milk, according to his increasingly ill-tempered father. The literal accusation was that Sara needed to stop using Jason as an excuse, to stop nursing and coddling the little mommy’s boy. He wasn’t a baby anymore!
She had nursed him from infancy all the way to the age of six. It wasn’t simply that she couldn’t or wasn’t willing to stop. Jason was such a calm and affectionate little sweetheart. Whereas most other families’ kids ran riot tanked up on sugar, beating on each other and growing ever rebellious against their parents, Jason was an angel.
Sara didn’t want that to change and she didn’t want to stop breastfeeding, for the warmth, the bonding and the happiness that it brought. God knew that happiness wasn’t in surplus elsewhere in the household.
Tim, Sara’s husband, hadn’t been the same since Jason was born. He hadn’t been the same since they got married. She didn’t know about the affair with the secretary from work, or how badly it had ended, but she knew he had lost interest pretty early on.
Tim had gone so far as to threaten Kimberly to keep her mouth shut, only AFTER he fired her. He would have destroyed her life had she come clean about their office adventures after hours, purely in spite of her ruining what he had. But his conviction was fuelled only by the fear and anxiety.
After that he never dared to play around again, but his marriage soured ever after, at least his half of it!
Tim paid little to no attention as to what happened under his own roof, being that he spent nearly two thirds of his life in a business suit. He first discovered that Sara was still nursing Jason beyond the recommended age on the off-chance that he decided to spend one sick day in his own bed.
That was it! He put his foot down out of sheer disgust! What an utter disgrace! What the hell was wrong with that woman? Was she thick in the head?
He rode her back from then on, making her stop what she should have stopped over four years ago; attacking her with his subtle but vicious accusations, claiming that she had a problem and that she was going to leave the boy queer or psychotic later in life.
And so Sara lived for years with the burden on her shoulder that she was like a sex abuser with an addiction, like an alcoholic. The fact that she suffered cold turkey day and night in no longer taking Jason to her breasts left her empty and sleepless for a long time.
And for what? What was the big pay-off to her years’ long compromise? Jason was clearly hurt by being forced away from me in that respect. And the distance was tangible. And then Tim wouldn’t touch her at all. It was like their marriage had become a full-time job in itself.
2
Thirteen long years passed and Jason was now a strong young man. Life had defined him, with a little help from his mother. He had defied the bullies, those of the school yard and those of authority both, and in the end they were nothing but loudmouths who couldn’t put their money where their mouths were.
The bullies in school who, just like his dad, called him a mommy’s boy and a queer (but never a dumb ass, they could never seriously make that claim), weren’t all dumb as shit. Many of them were daddy’s little princesses and egotistical jerks who only ever picked on those who didn’t fight back.
After school most of them failed to show anything for their grades. Most of the princesses were pregnant by the age of eighteen. Some got into drugs and others got into worse crime. Jason got into the right circles and landed himself some on the job training.
Dad – the other authoritarian bully – didn’t want him to become no stinking grease monkey mechanic despite the money to be made and the assurance of steady work. There was no way he was putting the kid through college if he didn’t want to follow him into the corporation, so he was instantly muted the day Jason came home with the news that he’d scored an apprenticeship with the well-known J. T. Walker garage.
Dad, who hadn’t aged so well, was probably as bitter about that as he was about his marriage, spending most of his time at home in a drunk blackout, made a point of forgetting his son in a hurry after that.
Sara, however, couldn’t have been any more proud, especially how he defied Tim even further by parking his car out on the driveway to accommodate his first “foreigner” job for some much needed cash.
3
Jason was working on a neighbour’s car in the privacy of their own garage on a Saturday night. Dad had drunk half a bottle of whiskey in front of the game shows, then complained of a headache before going to bed for a lie down. With the television then switched off, the house was filled with nothing but the heavy grunting snores of the pig-headed old man, which caused the walls to vibrate. It wasn’t even ten o’clock by then!
Fresh from her shower, now that she could do as she pleased without treading on eggshells, Sara – now wrapped up somewhat conservatively in her favourite plush white cotton housecoat – dried her hair in the bathroom mirror, brushing the knots out of her long feather-light brunette curls.
Time had been much more kind to her. In the stealthiest fashion, being a housewife and doing more to keep her home and family happy than Tim ever did at work, that had kept her trim and her son had kept her sweet, being that he was where she got her affection and love from.
Oh of course at the age of forty-four she was showing a few more greys and the fullness of youth was gone. Her face was mapped out with hidden lines and there was a well-lived in tiredness to her as a result of having settled for Tim’s ways over what could have been. But if you could know what Jason saw in Sara, there was a beauty beyond typical that only a real man deserved. His father was not that man.
Sara finished in the bathroom, cleaning up after herself before heading to the kitchen to make a cup of tea for Jason. He would be parched, she worried. Ever since he started working at the garage and practicing on small jobs in the garage at home, he would lose himself in there all night long.
Shuffling into the garage in her slipper-clad feet, Sara settled their cups on the work top near Jason’s tool sets and stood watching as her fine young man bent over with his head under the bonnet, whirring away with his socket wrenches.
The garage hadn’t seen so much life in all their years here. With the lights on, the radio playing and the smell of grease and metal, it was as it should always have been. Jason was breathing new life into it now.
‘Can that wait until tomorrow, now?’ she asked, causing him to jump out of his skin so comically and scold her for sneaking up on him. She apologised and laughed. ‘You should rest now, honey,’ she insisted. ‘I brought you some tea, but all I really wanted was a kiss and a cuddle!’
Jason, with his unabashed pearly white smile and kind brown eyes raised up his oily black hands like some clawed swamp thing out of an old B-movie horror. Sara squealed and ran, yelling, ‘don’t you dare, Jason, not on these clothes,’ as Jason gave chase around the car.
Soon she had nowhere to go in the garage’s restrictive space, but after he cornered her and made her beg, he relented and surrendered his dirty hands to the air and let Sara have what she wanted.
Putting her hands on his chest so to keep a distance between her fresh cleanliness and his manly, sweaty grime, she pecked him on the lips once, then twice, and then a third time, which stuck between them for a moment.
‘The old crank must be asleep again,’ Jason guessed.
‘Of course,’ she nodded, ‘would you have it any other way?’
‘I wish you’d told me sooner so I could have showered. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting dirty with me,’ Jason said with a mischievous wink.
‘I only wanted to tell you how proud I am of you, making something for yourself like this. He thinks it’s just some fruitless phase.’ She brushed his dap fringe from his forehead and reflected on all his years, marvelling at the fine specimen Jason had grown into over the years, despite his father denying him so much – not to forget the nurture of Sara’s which otherwise might have known no limits. She still thought of that.
‘I don’t even care what he thinks anymore,’ Jason said. ‘It’s not about him. He should just be jealous that I get more kisses and cuddles than he does.’
Sara smiled at that with an otherwise forbidden expression, slapping Jason lightly on one of his solid chest muscles. ‘You used to get a lot more than that when he wasn’t at home’ she recalled before returning to the worktop to sip her tea.
‘What?’ Jason didn’t seem as mindful as she. His eyes narrowed, ticking over. His memory came up blank.
‘You don’t remember?’ she asked. ‘I breastfed you for such a long time, Jason. Oh I wished sometimes that I never had to stop. But that probably sounds weird.’
He laughed, blushed then too, and raised one hand to his eyes to hide his embarrassment. ‘Mom, as much as I love a hot pair of boobs in my face-
‘You think my boobs are hot, huh?’ she broke in shamelessly, crossing one bare leg over the other and looking down on herself.
‘Did you really nurse me for so long? I don’t remember. Oh my god, actually I do,’ he said. ‘Oh my god,’ struck by such a profound and strange thing, ‘I do remember. But why?’
Sara shrugged. It was no big deal to her. Not like it was to Tim. ‘I liked it. It made me feel closer to you and you were such a little sweetheart when you were in my arms…’
‘Aw!’
‘Looking up at me with your sleepy eyes…’
‘Aw…’
‘Sucking gently on my nipples…’
‘Jesus, mom…’
‘We started again later too, if you remember.’ But Jason, whether he remembered or not, was at a total loss of words by that point. ‘I don’t think there was any milk drank by that point but, well… we both needed the closeness. It was a shitty time for all. Leave it at that!’
So they did, just as she suggested. But there was no denying, to Sara, that her confession had left her buzzing deep inside with an undiscovered excitement. She felt naughty, almost sinful, telling him this; even though it had been meant in all good humour. Hadn’t it?
‘Kisses and cuddles are just as good, mom,’ Jason assured with a courtesy wink and excused himself to the shower.