MommasBoy1

Momma's Boy I Flesh No. 660

Toby was the undoubtedly the apple of both his parent's eyes, but they had very different ways of expressing it. The young teenager's mother Lucy was a sweet, homely woman who loved to dote on and spoiler her only child wherever she could, whilst his father Scott believed the best gift he could give his beloved boy was a rigid, disciplined upbringing. If it weren't for her husband, Lucy would be the kind of mother who'd spoiler her kids rotten. Needless to say, Toby had a favorite parent.

His father's favorite medium for discipline was physical sport; rules, regulations, fitness, consequences and social structures were exactly what a growing boy needed. And they needed a lot of it. Toby had shown a slight talent for swimming at a younger age and his father had decided that he was destined to be a swimmer. This meant a rigorous schedule of swim training almost every day of the week, coupled school soccer as well as swim related exercises and an extremely measure diet. His father would have him weighed and inspected in his swimmers fortnightly to make sure he was keeping to his specified calorie intake. This kept Toby very lean for a boy his age, but it made him very unhappy.

Scott and Lucy were very dissimilar people, but they both grew up in a time and a place where men were hard, women were soft and that's how things were. Lucy had snuck Toby the occasional treat to quell his hunger, much to his father's disapproval, but mostly she stayed out of it entirely. Scott said that spoiling a boy at his age would turn him into a lazy brat forever. Lucy tried to tell herself that every time she saw her boy's face after getting dressed down by his father during the his fortnightly inspections. She told herself it was for the greater good.

Or at least she did up until one fateful night. She had tried to block out her husband's raised voice during the weigh-in session, but it only got louder and louder. Eventually Scott stormed into the boy's bedroom and his yelling hit fever pitch. When Lucy had made her way upstairs to the room Scott was bellowing at their son with an empty Doritos packet waving furiously in his hand.
“Look what our son has been hiding from us!” he screeched, the boy in tears on the floor.

Later, when Scott had gone to the bar to blow some steam off after shouting down his boy, mother and son sat in the kitchen. Toby was still in his swimmers, crying. His mother did her best to console him but could manage to find a way to do that without saying his father was in the wrong.
“I don't really care about swimming,” Toby blubbered, “I just want to eat chips and candy like my friends! I just want to be normal!”
Lucy's heart broke. How could she look at her boy, skinny in his swimmers to the point of being gaunt, crying his eyes out. A mother's natural instinct was to nurture and nourish her young.
“Look,” she hesitated, “maybe… your father isn't always right…”
But Toby was too busy crying to hear her.
“Aw Toby! Please don't cry!” she was starting to get distressed now, “What if… what if I happened to have a pack Reese's Pieces left over from Halloween?”
Toby stopped crying for a moment, “Mom?”
“I know you're not meant to have snacks on your swimming diet,” Lucy said slyly as she fished the packet out from its hiding place under the sink, “but what your father doesn't know won't kill him.”
Lucy knew straight away when she saw her son's eyes light up that she had done the right thing. Toby wolfed the entire pack down like a hungry dog, thanking his mom over and over and over. Truth is she didn't do it for the thanks, just to see her boy smile was enough.

Scott yelled at his son during the next weigh in, and he screamed at him in the one after. Toby was still terrified of his father but he couldn't say “no” to his mother's sneaky treats. It was a milkshake here and a cupcake with cream there but the microscopic changes in the reading on the scale were enough to set his father off. He also had been putting in less and less effort into his swim training and getting bad times. It was mostly due to the comment his mother had made about his father not always being right. Suddenly trying his hardest at a sport he didn't enjoy at all didn't seem very important.