My mother the famous author – part 1

My mother ran away from home at seventeen to start living together with a man. She quickly became pregnant by him and when that happened the man left her. Therefore, I have never known my father and my mother adamantly refuses to talk about him. With her actions my mother had ‘shamed’ my old-fashioned family and consequently they didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. She had to live off welfare.
The first years of my life my mother started to write children’s stories, simply as a hobby. When I was three she half-jokingly sent a few to a publisher, who, to her own surprise, immediately wanted to publish the stories. Her first book, Goppy the green giraffe, became a massive success and before I went to elementary school it had already been translated into some thirty languages. By then my mother had also made so much money from her books that we had moved from the small apartment where I had been born, to a large mansion in an uptown suburb.
I hardly remember anything from the first years of my life. My earliest memories are from the mansion and the nanny my mother hired to take care of me. I saw very little of my mother herself. She was away from home to promote her books in various countries and when she was home she usually locked herself in her study to write. To compensate for her absence, she regularly bestowed me with expensive gifts. As far as I’m aware this way of growing up wasn’t a traumatic experience: I didn’t know better than that all children were raised by nannies and I certainly liked all those gifts.
Therefore, the fact I saw my mother more often on television than in real life (being a cute, good looking children’s author she was a welcome guests on all kinds of game shows and talk shows) didn’t disturb me at all. Quite the contrary, I was rather proud of my mother.
At a given point in time, I was in my puberty by then, I discovered a side of my mother’s life that she had always been able to conceal from me until then. I awoke at about three in the morning and didn’t feel very well. I was getting the flu and felt incredibly thirsty. I could have used the mansion’s intercom system to ask Anna, the housekeeper who had replaced the nanny by then, to bring me something to drink, but I liked her – she was always very nice and caring – and decided not to wake her in the middle of the night. I got out of bed and walked from my room in the west wing to the stairs to get something to drink myself in the kitchen downstairs. I was just about to take my first steps down the stairs when I heard stifled noises coming from my mother’s bedroom. I couldn’t hear the sounds very well – my mother’s room was situated in the east wing, quite far from the stairs – but they did pique my curiosity. I looked at the bedroom door and saw light coming through the keyhole and the cracks. Slowly I made my way in the direction of the room, taking care to make as little sound as possible. While I came closer, I could hear the sounds a little better: laughter, giggling, moaning and groaning, all simultaneously. As soon as got really close, I could hear that all these sounds came from two different voices! Was my mother . . . I found that hard to imagine. I know that all children rather not picture their parents doing ‘it’, but I had no reason to assume my mother was having sex.