My Mother And Her Vibrator

Three years ago, this Shameless Woman convinced my sister to go in on a vibrator as a gift for our mother for her birthday. I think my mom must have been turning 78 or 79 at the time. My mother is a very sexy lady — in fact she wears a necklace that we bought her when our kids were born that says “Sexy Grandma.”

My father has been dead for over 26 years. Mom has been a widow for a very long time, since her fifties. There were boyfriends along the way, but the last one died years ago. I had spoken to my mother about masturbation and how important it would be for her to give herself this kind of pleasure, but she usually dismissed me.

And I understand that most people don’t ever want to think about their mother masturbating — and frankly, I really understand that! But I am not most people! I am a sex educator after all! I wanted my mother to be able to continue to have some kind of sexual pleasure in her life, so I thought if we got her a vibrator it might open up an entire new world for her. So we bought the vibrator. It was a very simple one. It wasn’t a pink-striped, pulsing, and twisting dildo….no not that. I didn’t want to scare her after all!

We settled on an old fashioned vibrator, the one that has a little “special applicator” attachment. It looked a little like a small mixer but without the beaters. We wrapped it up pretty with a bow and when my mother opened it, she laughed. And then she looked at us and said, “Maybe.”

It lived in her closet for years, until my mother turned 81. Every time I brought it up, mom would tell me that she was frightened of hurting herself. I would talk to her about this. “Come on mom, how are you going to hurt yourself?”

She could never explain to me her fears, and in the end the vibrator remained unused.

And then one afternoon my mother called me. I knew something was up at “Hello.” She had this cat-who-had-caught-the-canary kind of voice….

“Well, I used it!” She gushed.

“Used what?”

“The vibrator!!! I was watching this show on television today and they had this expert on the elderly, and she was taking about how important it was for good overall health for older people to continue to have sex, and how unfortunate it was that many women lose their mates…and that the elderly should be encouraged to masturbate, and this really impressed me! It is the Today Show after all. And then the expert said that we should all go and find a quiet place and explore….so I got the box down!”

Okay, I tried to not be insulted that after three years or more of having this very same conversation with my mother, and even buying her a vibrator, and giving her lube (think about that a moment — I gave my mother lube!). It took this stranger who was on the Today Show to impress her!