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Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words is happy to host Amy Lane, here today on tour for her latest story in her Johnnies series, Bobbie Green. Welcome, Amy.
Mrs. Bobby’s Mom
By Amy Lane
Okay, so my mother left when I was a kid and my dad raised me. It would be romantic to say “by himself” but the Goddess smiled on him hard, and he met my stepmom not long thereafter, so I did eventually learn that “Spanish rice” was NOT rice with ketchup and I never had to wear a “home cut shag” again. My point is, when all the feminists started freaking out about Disney movies because of the great animated mother-massacre (seriously—check out all the princess movies—where’s Mom?) I felt a little clueless. I mean for me, that wasn’t really odd, was it? That was just representation.
But now I’m a mother with grown children, and as someone who just told her fourteen-year-old that no, for the sake of sweet baby jebus, washing your pits once a week was not good enough, and you had to get soap and water in there and blow armpit farts with a washrag or it by heaven didn’t count, I can assure you I’ve been educated in how much boys and girls need a good mom.
Which is something not one of my Johnnies boys have had.
I don’t even want to count the ways those boys lost their moms. (Suicide-1, emotional abuse-2, desertion-3, 4, 5, car wreck-6… and so on…) And as I wrote book five, I must have been feeling the lack of moms. As Bobby’s boss says, early on in the book as he realizes Bobby’s been one step away from homelessness for the last couple of weeks, “Jesus Christ, you all need mommies! Where are all the fucking mommies! I can’t be mommy to the whole damned company!”
And it’s not fair to ask him. After all, if you read Dex in Blue, you realize his own relationship with his mother is… well, just read it.
So, mommies. We didn’t have a lot of good ones, and, well, I felt like I needed to represent a little.
Bobby’s mom is sort of awesome. She collects craft supplies and downloads free cross-stitch patterns and dreams about far away worlds. She reads paperback romances and lives in her little tiny town and hopes—just hopes—that she can get her son to a place where he’s not vulnerable to people like his father ever again.
And when she finds out her son is gay, she cries a little, because he’s her only child, and she needs to let go of some of the things she’d hoped for him, including a wife and a traditional family. But she still loves him, and God knows, Reg needs her in a big way, so she’s going to deal.
And when she finds out he’s in porn… well, her reaction is understandable. But it’s not extreme. And it’s not violent. (She does threaten to beat him with a shoe, but he’s pretty sure she doesn’t mean it. He’s built like a tank. It would have to be a really big shoe.) And she meets his friends, and his friends are kind. She meets the children in their lives, and she gets to hold babies—babies who don’t have the baggage her own kid had.
And she gets to be young again.
In short, Mrs. Bobby’s Mom is one of my better, subtler happy endings. She doesn’t meet the man of her dreams, no—but she does find some freedom. She gets to see her son happy. And she doesn’t do what so many of the moms in this series (and real life) do.
She doesn’t sacrifice her real relationship with her child for the sake of what she thinks it ought to be.
So no—I’m not Disney. I didn’t kill all the moms.
Because damn, moms—don’t we all deserve better than that?
Blurb
Johnnies: Book Five
Vern Roberts couldn’t wait to turn eighteen and get the hell out of Dogpatch, California. But city living is expensive, and he’s damned desperate when Dex from Johnnies spots him bussing tables.
As “Bobby,” he’s a natural at gay porn. Soon he’s surrounded by hot guys and sex for the taking, but it’s not just his girlfriend back in Dogpatch—or her blackmailing brother—that keeps him from taking it. It’s the sweet guy who held the lights for his first solo scene, who showed him decency, kindness, and a smile.
Reg Williams likes to think he’s too stupid to realize what a shitty hand life dealt him, but Bobby knows better. What Reg lacks in family, opportunity, education, and money, he makes up for in heart. One fumbling step at a time, they connect, not just in their hearts but in their bodies, where sex that’s not on camera, casual, or meaningless, becomes the most important thing in the world.
But Reg is hampered by an inescapable family burden, and he and Bobby will never fly unless he can find a way to manage it. Can he break the painful link to his unrealized childhood and grow into the love Bobby wants to give?
About the Author
Amy Lane is a mother of two grown kids, two half-grown kids, two small dogs, and half-a-clowder of cats. A compulsive knitter who writes because she can’t silence the voices in her head, she adores fur-babies, knitting socks, and hawt menz, and she dislikes moths, cat boxes, and knuckleheaded macspazzmatrons. She is rarely found cooking, cleaning, or doing domestic chores, but she has been known to knit up an emergency hat/blanket/pair of socks for any occasion whatsoever or sometimes for no reason at all. Her award-winning writing has three flavors: twisty-purple alternative universe, angsty-orange contemporary, and sunshine-yellow happy. By necessity, she has learned to type like the wind. She’s been married for twenty-five-plus years to her beloved Mate and still believes in Twu Wuv, with a capital Twu and a capital Wuv, and she doesn’t see any reason at all for that to change.
Hi, my name is Trevor. I’m a wolf shifter.
