A Change of Needs Read Online Free Page A

desperation or loneliness, she was commendably true to herself and her responsibilities to the boys, she chose her partners, few though they were, cautiously. Like everyone she had her “types” that she gravitated towards, a predisposition it would seem for authority figures, older men, and bad-boy alpha males, the only common denominator being that they had to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation. She would eventually come to find something of what she sought, short-term perhaps, in Glen, her Developmental Psych professor. They would have a brief courtship before a Dillon South Carolina marriage and Myrtle Beach weekend honeymoon, and not long afterwards a daughter together, Natalie. However, for a psychology professor he wasn’t particularly insightful or intuitive. Perhaps because he dealt so much in theories and large schemes, that he missed the nuances of his own relationship, the warning signs, or billboards as they came to be, or perhaps, he would come to know after the fact he was simply out of his league with the woman. Intimidated by her on a number of important levels, and that seed of self-doubt, once planted in a man, cannot be unsown, and if unable to weed it out can render him incapable of satisfying those all important needs. And before long this marriage went the way of many others, becoming routine, emotionally vacant and impotent, and leaving some things to be desired by our gal Rae Anne, much as she may have in fact designed it. Enter our man Jake stage right…
    He was different, and he knew it, how could anyone have come out of the confusion that was his childhood and not have been. He understood others’ efforts and inability to categorize him, but he cared very little about it and made no apology for it. “He was who he was,” and he didn’t ask for, nor need understanding, only acceptance. While the sixties and early seventies are often remembered as a simpler time, before the dime-store became the dollar-store, when TV was black and white, carpet was shag, Playboy was risqué, and pornographic miniature playing cards were the most coveted currency of elementary school playgrounds, they quickly became a confusing time, a period of transition, struggling to make some sense of the explosion of culture, drugs, sex and the war in Vietnam. The era exposed the same complexities of life that had always existed, only less publicly, and brought them and the imperfections of the illusion of family life out into the open, try to think of it if you can as a black and white Kodak moment meets YouTube.
    Named after his father’s brother Jacob, and Garris after an Army buddy who had died in WWII, he had grown up in a middle class home in Guilford County, North Carolina, the son of two loving parents who did the best they could in terms of raising him. But he had come late in their lives, at a time when they thought having a child impossible, and both in their forties …at a time when they didn’t have the energy for one and as is sometimes the case, for better or worse, the older boys in the neighborhood would have a greater influence on his upbringing. He was an innately happy child, confidence was in his genetic make-up, his personal composition, but life seemed to be continually tripping him up and throwing obstacles in front of him and much as the acorn has the promise of the strength of an oak, it would be years in developing.
    His parents had their shortcomings like everyone. His father was a brilliant, gentle man, one of the strongest men he would ever know, mentally and physically, but he had one great weakness and that was his wife Ann, and she would exaggerate other weaknesses in him. Ann wore the pants in the family. Jake could never decide whether it was simply apathy that she hid behind a professed wall of fear and overprotection or just perhaps that at her age she was not willing to be bothered and burdened with the commitments that come with allowing a child to participate in