"My husband makes me do it"

"I hope you're making The Boy sleep in your room while N is away," went my mother.

I always knew she didn't get why The Boy sleeps in his own room. I mean, I still sleep with my mum when I go to my parents' place on my own without N. But now I know she thinks it's because N and I want to have sex while he's neatly tucked in his cot in the other room!

On the other hand, The Boy refuses to sleep even in my lap, so used to he has become of sleeping on his own in his own space. Even when he's sick and wants to be hugged several times at night, he still protests with all his might when I as much as put him on my chest and lie down to make him sleep close to me.

But she used to claim that he's not going to be close to me if I make him sleep away from me. "That's how it is in the west," she would claim, as if she knows so many families from "the west". "They're never close to their children; it's because they make them sleep in separate rooms."

Now I can just hear her think, "My poor daughter! She can't even hold her son close to her because that cruel husband of hers wants to have sex with her all the time!"

When she came to Melbourne some 5 years ago, she asked me to remove the little God's parking station that I had going on my bedside table. I'd just about cleared the dust off it before she arrived. I didn't understand why she was asking me to not have it in my bedroom, and argued innocently that she has hers in her bedroom back home, too. And she simply said, "but we are old" -- ie: we don't have sex any more, so god doesn't mind being in our bedroom.

It's interesting how in her world, the husband can "make" the wife do anything and it will all be forgiven and forgotten in the garb of "making your husband happy". I am allowed to have wine in front of my very-religious very-small-town mother and she doesn't even raise an eyebrow because it's under the excuse of "can't help it; that's how my husband wants it".

I bet I should start smoking in front of her now and shrug my shoulders if she questions me.