Liberal Mom (cw: 18+)

My mother tells me that if your lovers don’t give you head then they aren’t lovers at all, and to this I say,“Well mother, what are they then?”

And she says “Your father.”

And of course, this creeps the shit out of me. But it also comes paired with this weird, undesired, carnal anticipation that makes the adrenaline pump and the blood flow to the wrong places, giving me one of those Edward Albee moments that makes you wish you had control over your limbic system.

But it wasn’t until my mother said “and it’s not good head unless you leave with snot in your pussy” that I started to feel my skin fry. My arms burned so hot they started to scale, well pink scales, you-must-be-allergic-to-air scales, “am I making you uncomfortable?” scales.

I begin to ponder, I mean really ponder, what she actually meant by the crude remark “and it’s not good head unless you leave with snot in your pussy.”

How is a fourteen-year-old girl supposed to grasp the gravity of this statement? You ever try to understand something and the more you try, the more incomprehensible it gets? Sentences turn into sequences of indistinguishable phonemes. So, I try to break it down into a series of questions.

1) How would one get snot in their pussy?

2) Whose snot is in your pussy? Is it yours or your lovers?

3) Why would such a thing indicate good head?

4) And what experiences have inspired my mother into making such a ballsy normative claim?

I should probably ignore the fourth question for the sake of my future sex life. But I remained damned and thoroughly curious regarding how one would get snot in their pussy. I came up with the following scenarios.

Scenario one: I’m in a bar, and some scruff is sitting on a stool reading Simone de Beauvoir, and I want to punch him in the face because I hate people who fashion themselves progressive. I mean, he’s obviously just reading it to get laid. Then it occurs to me that I should mess with him a little. Yeah, let’s see how he reacts to a little gender role reversal. Let’s see how progressive he really is. So I go up to him, put my hand near my mouth, and I make a wall with it holding my finger tightly against each other to insure that my voice follows a direct path to his ear and like a caveman I say,

“Bathroom, you, go down, on me?”

He puts his book down and stares at me. He sizes me up. I’m impressed with how well he keeps his face blank. He is trying to figure out if I am serious. I try my best not to smirk. I keep my bull eyes on his bullshit lips until he says,

“You don’t seem like the type who’d appreciate ladies first.” I put a finger into my mouth-space and fake-gag.

He’s going down on me in the bathroom, and I’m thinking about some blonde lady that’s had a lot of plastic surgery, then I’m thinking about my 7th-grade teacher’s perfume that smelled like a gas leak and gave me panics, and somehow that leads to Jessica Lange. Not 80’s Jessica Lange but recent, old Jessica and I feel a tingle and, is that weird? If you think about pleasure and how you achieve orgasm, often you’ll find that the fastest route to climax is to think about people you would be too shy to cum in front of to get you going. And then to think about those who you would be comfortable cumming in front of—people who you could care less about—so you can muster up the courage to let yourself go. But sometimes I have trouble sorting out who exactly I am using for what purpose and sometimes that scares me.

I start to feel really weird about the images I am selecting, and I tell him to stop. He doesn’t seem to hear me, so I give him a good slap but it was a little too hard and snot comes out of his nose because he’s getting a cold. I say what the fuck man? You didn’t tell me you were sick! Get outta here!

Scenario two: I’m on an airplane, and I am sitting next to one of those wannabe Morrissey types with elephantiasis of the ego. He tells me about his plans to backpack around Europe and how he’s going to be a photographer, but mostly he talks about his ex-girlfriend who dumped him because he was too needy.

He thinks it’s because she’s “a pragmatic” and he’s “an idealist” and that she just couldn’t keep up with his irrational pursuit of all things narcissistic. They really just had “clashing core philosophies” and how do you raise a kid with parents that have clashing values?

There would be no sovereign, no commonwealth; he’d grow up in a world of contradiction, a dud without an identity. I don’t comment on this simplistic theory of his, mostly because I can tell that he has sensed the inadequacy of his generalization, and once someone starts questioning their own summations, the theorizing doesn’t end. I mean, what is theory really?

He tells me about his parents. I tell him about mine. He tells me how refreshing it is to hear someone who genuinely respects the choices their parents have made. He says this is endearing. He tells me I am enticing. I tell him he’s overreacting. He says that I am mature for my age. He tells me I have nice eyes, and I tell him I don’t fuck people 20 years older than I am. He thinks I am joking. I’m not kidding, but I’d rather not have sex with him, and by that I mean I don’t want to have sex with him. But he asks me if I want to join the mile high club, and I think this means to smoke weed in the bathroom, so I say yes. He pulls down his pants when we get in the bathroom, and I ask him what hole he smokes out of, and he laughs thinking I’m being absurd for the sake of being absurd, but really I am just grotesquely uncomfortable.

I stare at his dick, and I think to myself, well, I guess all parts are disgusting in isolation.

He looks at me confused because he doesn’t get why I’m just standing there staring at his dick. I laugh because I am uncomfortable. (I smile when I am sad.) He thinks I’m laughing at his dick. He looks upset. I say “I am sorry, you can do mouth and hand stuff to me if you want, I’m just scared that if we hit turbulence, I will bite your Wang!” He thinks this is a perfectly rational concern for a young lady to have. So he bends down, and I’m kind of bored, so I look in the mirror and start popping some whiteheads because why not? When he looks up at me he sees that I have marks all over my face, he looks kind of confused as to how that happened, but he bends down again because hell, he’s a giver, but then he starts crying (which is when of course the snot enters the picture).

He says “I’m sorry!”

and I ask Morrissey Like “what’s wrong?”

He tells me how beautifully uninhibited I am and how “his girlfriend was like that when they were having sex.” Now I think maybe this guy’s sex actually does merit the popping of pimples, and it’s not just because I can’t seem to feel my parts.

Scenario three: I’m waiting in bed, and she comes in just out of the shower smelling like fruit loops. She has a little moisturizer on the sides of her mouth that she’s forgotten to rub in completely. The excess masks her freckles. When she turns around and sees me naked, at first she looks angry and says “What the fuck?”

So I say, “I’m sorry I thought—”

And she says “Jesus I am not like that!”

And I say “neither am I.”

But, then something shifts in her, and she drops her towel and looks at me like I’m an opportunity. She stands there, rubs the side of her mouth, and when she’s done in her mousy voice she says, “Well, as long as you won’t tell anyone.”

Things escalate, but suddenly I realize I don’t want this. I mean I want this, but I don’t want this. I mean my body wants this, but my mind doesn’t, and suddenly it feels wrong. What was that look about anyway? I’m not an opportunity; I am a person! I want to say stop, but I am scared. If I say stop, she won’t stop, and if she doesn’t stop and I say stop I will feel even worse. So I don’t say anything. I think about the librarian smoking outside of the classroom, and I tell myself to breathe, which of course makes it worse. She notices that something is wrong, and she stops. I start to cry. A tear trails down my face as I stare down at the mattress in a crude attempt to conceal. My angle causes the tear to travel under my nose taking a little bit of snot with it, and I wish it were hers not mine because everybody knows it’s better to have someone else’s snot in your vagina than your own because nothing’s more lonely than being inside of yourself.

“What’s wrong with you, you’re the one that wanted this.”

She takes out her phone and takes a picture of me naked and crying and says, “If you tell anyone about this!” and flashes me the picture as if to say, “You connect the Goddamn dots yourself. I’m not going to do that for you.”

After these imaginative scenarios, I decided that it was time I bring one to life. I took my own advice. I connected the dots. I seduced the librarian at my school.

The librarian: Pin Prick pores, light skin, loose and wavy hair. The librarian was everything I wanted to put inside of me. So I did, her hands, her snot, and eventually her tears.

She sent them to me all soaked up in a salty rag. She must have rolled it up in a bathroom stall. She wrote me a note with it. All it said was “feel my pain.” A little melodramatic, but I still like to use it as a tampon sometimes. I like to keep her close. She’s lost everything, you know. I don’t feel guilty about it. My mother told me never to feel guilty for pursuing. I mean, the woman knew what she was doing. The woman’s been in jail for seven years, and I’ve kept the rag inside of me the whole time. Sometimes, when I feel alone, I like to put a finger in, you know, just to make sure she hasn’t dissolved.

Photo Credit: tannr93 via Compfight cc