PART ONE: THE SET-UP

Until I was three years old, my mother sexually abused me. She made me sit in front of her in the bathtub and she demanded that I put my finger up her vagina as I faced the taps of the bathtub. On the final occasion of this horrible act and request on her part, I protested. Of course, my mother belittled me by saying that she was the adult and the parent and that I had to do whatever I was told. I massaged her clitoris as I was directed, while she massaged my penis. Boys will be boys and men will be men and I was no exception to the rule of hot-blooded males. My mother managed to get my sexual urges running wild within me and I begged her to let me copulate with her in the bathtub. She told me that that was wrong between a parent and child and that my penis was far too small to please her.

She had intimidated me, but at the same time she had shown too much conscience towards this sexual relationship of ours. I was able to reason that putting my finger in my mother's vagina was just as 'wrong' as copulating with her and so I shouted for my father, saying that my mother was doing something wrong. My father burst into the bathroom and demanded an explanation. He told me to go to the safety of my bedroom and that I had not done anything wrong. He reprimanded my mother and threatened her with divorce, if she did that sort of thing again. Neither my mother nor I ever went to therapy. Much later, my father said that it would have cost too much to have sent us to therapy.

There were always sexual tensions, sexual undertones, and sexual overtones between my mother and me.

About two or three times in my life, my mother was supportive and encouraging over my possible girlfriends, but she usually stopped any chance for romance for me behind my back. I overheard her once say on a phone call with someone else that she wanted sex with me.

This sexual tension and abuse from my mother made me feel guilty about my sexual desires and made me shy of the opposite sex. In addition to this, I had an extremely strong libido.

When I was about sixteen, I fell into puppy love with a member of my church. She was sweet on me and I on her. Her father was against our teenage relationship. He was afraid that his daughter would marry me at a young age and that our marriage would end up in divorce as his other two daughters' marriages had done. He and his wife phoned my mother and demanded that our relationship end. He won.

I was devastated. I was a strong believer in God, but I blamed myself for what was going wrong in my life. I was ill-equipped to fight the sexual issues in my life. I regressed. In so far as romance was concerned, I crawled into a shell. I become introverted with the young ladies whom I liked. If I liked a young lady, I would feel traumatized: I would go weak at the knees, red in the face, and be unable to speak to my love interest. I convinced myself that there was no way that the young ladies, whom I liked, could possibly like me. I was shy only around the women, whom I liked, though. I always managed to say something to these women in the end.

This was my frame of mind and the useless mental baggage that I carried around.

At the age of nineteen, I went to work for a major Canadian department store, which was called Eaton's.