Am I My Father’s Son?

Parents pass along all kinds of traits to their children. I am blessed to have blue eyes, an articulate demeanor, a 6’3″ muscular stature, and a pendulum between my thighs. But there is one thing that I believe my parents handed down and I’m not exactly sure what to think. I’m not unpleased by it… it’s just that I struggle to nail down who gave me the trait. My sexual deviancy had to come from one of them, but which one? It’s a conundrum that has plagued me as of late.

I’m not a geneticist, so I will admit that I assume my bedroom deviancy is genetic. This assumption is based solely on the perversion being there since my first raging erection. I have always had this innate want to take a glorious moment of fornication and add Thriller-like choreography or maybe a dash of production value to give the encounter some semblance of a Jerry Bruckheimer film. This impulse is as natural as my left arm… or right leg… it’s a part of me.

In all sincerity, I prefer not to think about which one of my parents provided the DNA that created the man behind the stories in Memoirs of a Serial Bachelor. But, regardless of my wishes, as I get older I begin to see aspects of myself that reconcile to one parent or the other. I cannot ignore it… unfortunately.

So, which parent gave me the wherewithal to wear a panda costume while banging a Southwest Airlines flight attendant? My mother is much too adorable and meek to be at fault — I will not let anyone convince me otherwise.

It had to come from someone though… and as my parents, after almost 34 years of marriage, begin to head down the emotional path that is the divorce process, I cannot help but feel that I will soon find out who gifted these particular talents to me. My parents will, someday soon, re-enter the dating scene and I think that frightens me as much as my entrance to the scene must have frightened them. The fact that either one may confide in me has the same devastating affect as when I walked in on them having sex — I was barely old enough to understand what those pleasure-filled screams meant. I have not and will never fully recover.

I secretly plead that this deviancy came from my father — I just don’t believe that I can cope with finding out that my mother once took a high hard one from a guy wearing an animal costume in 1977. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a costume, but the natural, furry spirit all men wore in the late-70s… and now I cannot get the image of Burt Reynolds out of my head.

Even though it would bring me a bit of closure to know where my oddity came from, I’m not sure I really want to know the answer.

Please let it be my father. Please.