Mother-in-Law Horror
My wife's mother helped us move out of our apartment and into our very first house. We were new parents, so my wife was busy taking care of our baby. Thus mom-in-law went around with me and helped carry the bigger stuff. (Thankfully, what I'm about to describe happened before two of my best friends showed up to help, or else I'd still be crawled under my rock to this very day.)

The spare bedroom of the apartment was my office. It had enough space for a twin-sized bed along one wall, and in some sort of fatal miswiring of my brain I had completely forgotten that my entire stash of porn was hidden beneath it. Mother-in-law grabs one end of the mattress, I grab the other, and we lift and carry it out. Neither of us noticed a thing because the box springs were still on the frame. We come back and take the box springs next, and there's three stacks of quality glossy skin mags, over a dozen well-used videotapes in their cases (very vividly and explicitly designed, of course), plus a little treasure-trove of Polaroids in a shoebox--pictures my wife had generously volunteered to contribute.

Problem is, I was backing out and the box springs completely shielded my view of what had been revealed beneath them. My mother-in-law, though, had to step directly over it all in order to proceed toward the door. Upon returning to that room for the frame, I cluelessly decided to take a rest and grab a drink from the fridge. Mom-in-law, meanwhile, zipped right back there without a word. I find her about five minutes later, sitting in my cheap little desk chair, turning the case for "Rocco Goes to Prague" over and over in her hands. No expression on her face. Polaroids of her naked and very enthusiastic daughter are laid up and down each thigh in two neat little cascading rows. She'd looked at each and every one.

As luck would have it--if you could call it that--I had entered the room noiselessly. So in effect I snuck up on her and "caught her" gawking at my stash. She was startled and jerked in surprise. All the Polaroids went sliding away off the tops of her thighs, and she actually made a motion like she was going to hide the videotape behind her back; but then she gathered herself and just calmly set it on the floor in front of her and began to politely pick up the naked pictures of her little girl and stack them back inside the shoebox. "Sorry," she mutters. Her face goes from red to purple.

What could I say? How could I even continue to live, for that matter? But, somehow, my voice sort of croaked out this lame little response: "Well, um, thanks for your help." And I turned and walked back out, sat at the kitchen table, and waited for the worst. But you know what? Next thing I heard was some innocuous "goo-goo-ga-ga" baby talk of mother-in-law's; she'd gone into the master bedroom with my wife to oooh and ahhh at the baby. And she stayed in there for a good long time, giving me the chance to box up all my porn and get it safely into the moving van. And we went back to working together a little while later like nothing had happened at all.

She never told, God bless her.

But I rather quickly (sad to say) discovered that the entire set of porn was effectively useless from that point forward, because my mother-in-law's presence was overpowering in my traumatized mind every time I tried to get out one of those mags or play a tape. And so the Polaroids went in a thick envelope in the back of my sock drawer, and the rest of it got dumped. Happy ending -- I got to start acquiring new stuff, and that coincided nicely with our first ever Internet account, so you can imagine how quickly I was able to ease my pain over losing so much lovingly-collected porn.

But of course, even to this day, I stilll can't look her straight in the eye.
(tookishlad, Wed 2 Jun 2004, 14:13, Reply)