I promise they won't all start out like this Ch. 2

2

I like to think that I made an independent discovery of masturbation. Not like most boys who hear about a new kind of tango that doesn’t take two then go home only to be discovered doing the mashed potato in their bathroom when they should be getting ready for their night-night kisses. What a terrible time to be a mother. Little Johnny, 11 years old, wanking it. Not me, I made an independent discovery. One eleven-year-old night I was curled around my teddy bear and things just started happening. It was ok though, that bear and I had been friends for a long time. I’ve heard a lot of relationships start that way. Needless to say I was hooked. I didn’t know it but I was embarking on a long and as of yet unfinished journey that would take its course through many twists and transformations ultimately becoming one of my life’s most adhered to and abhorred rituals.

Of course, at the time I didn’t know all that. I had just found something pleasant, something to look forward to at bed time, something to help me sleep when I couldn’t drown out the sounds of mom and dad screaming at each other. It was all mine, my own little world. I didn’t even know it was masturbating and it was a good span of time before the action and the label became acquainted. Thinking back now I feel as though it was society that turned masturbation against me. With the appropriation of that label I began to understand that masturbation was deemed a ‘not-good.’ It was used as a punch line or an offhand reference. Like the penis in 4th grade anatomy, hinted at but never discussed.

After a time I came to internalize this particular quibble of society’s undiscussed moral code. My midnight rendezvous took on a darker tone and transformed into a source of shame and tension. What was once relief and release from an acutely unpleasant family life now boiled up against me. My parents divorced my sophomore year in high school and as I got older the relief, the get-away that had made masturbation so necessary during my preteen years wasn’t really needed anymore. The white capped waves of a rocky marriage had subsided to the mere swells of post divorce-court life and with it the fervid angst that so drove me to masturbate. All that was left was the release, that one moment in male sexual interaction. Shallow fantasies had lost the air of self-medication and turned into an addiction that had me burning on the inside. Stopping was impossible but so was telling anyone about my problem.


Third installment coming tomorrow...