Posted on 05/01/2008 7:14:28 AM PDT by forkinsocket
Ask any man when he last phoned his mother, and he will pull a guilty face. Ask him when he last talked about her to his friends and he will look at you as if you are insane. Why is the mother-son relationship so complicated? To find out, our correspondent asked someone who should know – his mum
Men are more likely to confess to a predilection for pornography than admit to a close relationship with their mother. There isn’t much left that the modern man is made to feel ashamed of, yet confessing to your friends that you sometimes call your mum for a chat is something few do. Even though a man’s mother is likely to be the second most important woman in his life, even though he may have deep feelings of love for her, this is a relationship about which men are sheepish, secretive and often outright embarrassed.
Why are men ashamed to be seen being kind to their mothers? Cultural pressure is a factor. On film or television, if you see a man talking to his mother, or (heaven forbid) listening to her advice, you are probably watching a comedy, and the conversation will be the screenwriter’s way of letting you know this is the kind of guy you can push around. But is there something more complicated at work here? And how do mothers feel about their sons’ reticence? There is only one person to ask: my mother.
I call her up. She is pleased to hear from me. Of course she is – she is my mother. When I explain why I am calling, she tells me that she is, at that moment, listening to a radio dramatisation of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, in which the arch-creep Widmerpool is always talking about his mother.
“Isn’t this very hard on mothers? And unfair?” I ask her. She responds by reminding me that she is a woman as well as a mother, and every woman knows that there is something unhealthy and unattractive about a man who is too close to his mother. As a mother of boys, you know that your job is to prepare them to be handed on, she tells me. You know that you harm them by keeping them too close for too long. “I was constantly torn between not being overinvolved and not seeming indifferent,” she tells me. “It’s a hard balance to strike, and you never know when you’re getting it wrong. I still don’t know.”
I have just written a novel about adult men and their mothers, in which three women, all with childless, thirtysomething sons, persuade one another to go and visit their uncommunicative progeny, uninvited, for a week, to find out who they have become. My mother has read the book, and she says she likes it (she is my mother, so that is not saying much), but only now, on the eve of publication, have I asked her if she thinks I got it right. The book, ultimately, is rather hard on the sons. It puts forward the idea that mothers get a pretty raw deal from the men they raise. It suggests that, after all the effort women put into the first 18 years of their sons’ lives, what is subsequently given back is a pretty meagre reward.
Her initial response comes as a shock to me. Having written a book about how cruel it is that sons don’t give their mothers a second thought during their twenties, I’m now told that she didn’t give me too much thought at that time. It was, in some way, a relief, she says, to reach the “job done” stage and to be able, at last, to throw herself wholeheartedly into her work. She reminds me that if adolescence is the process by which children cut themselves loose from their parents, it also works the other way. Teenage behaviour helps parents to cut themselves loose from their children: as your children love you less, they, rather helpfully, become less lovely.
I remember the urgency with which, as a teenager and a young man, I sometimes felt the need to get away from my mother. Stupidly, I never paused to wonder if she felt a complementary urge to get away from me.
As we talk, her take on the subject softens. “All mothers feel the pain of no longer being needed, but we don’t admit to it,” she confesses eventually. “It’s not an unmixed pain, though,” she says, hiding a little behind the double negative. “You wouldn’t want it any other way.”
When I ask her why nobody admits to it, she says: “You don’t want to seem abject.” She is rather pleased with her choice of word. I ask her what she means by it, and she comes up with another. “Discarded. You know that you’ve been discarded. You passionately want your son to find the right woman, but you know that when it happens, you are cast aside.”
A psychoanalyst might have something to say about her use of the word “passionately”. Perhaps it does all come down to Oedipus after all: the mother-son relationship is a deep and intense one during childhood, but, unlike the mother-daughter bond, a specific rupture has to be made before the child can be fully adult.
This is why men don’t look cool talking about their mothers. Women – with good reason – run a mile from a man who loves his mother too much. However wonderful and adorable a man’s mother is, the slightest mention of this fact makes him look as if he has not quite grown up and, therefore, deeply unattractive. A woman who reveres her parents will make a different impression.
There is an irony in all this, of course. That the pressure to disavow our mothers might come not from fellow men, but from women – the very women who are theoretically sizing us up as the person who might, ultimately, turn them into a mother – is curious to say the least. Are men, perhaps, merely the intermediaries in an intergenerational rivalry between women?
There is, however, another phase of life that changes everything. When a man becomes a father, his mother becomes a grandmother and everything is transformed. The process of separation goes into reverse. Quite aside from all the pleasures of becoming a grandmother, my mother tells me that you also, in some way, get your son back. Sharing love for the same child and interacting in new ways around the child pulls the whole family back together.
It was only as I looked after my own baby that I gave any thought to the first three years of my own life – to the time when my mother was my universe. And as I struggled with the exhaustion of parenting, I began to get my first genuine inkling of what my mother once did for me.
It’s a little late, of course, for gratitude, but I now know that as a parent, gratitude is not really part of the equation. At the very least, I now have something meaningful to talk to my mother about on the phone. And for the first time in years, I call her relatively frequently. Even if it is just to ask her to baby-sit.
“a man is a son until he takes a wife...a woman’s a daughter for the rest of her life....”
I know that is true from my experience.
I think men aren’t supposed to be close to their mothers because women are jealous and the wife will resent it if her husband remains close to her mother. A man can only successfully be henpecked by one woman at a time.
“A man can only successfully be henpecked by one woman at a time.”
yes but some women make up for that by doing twice the pecking.
True, some women will feel like the mother-in-law is trying to run her life by keeping a close relationship with her son. Granted, not all women are small-minded and insecure enough to feel that way but there are a lot who are.
Life is 'all about us', right?
I mean, we don't do anything because it is the right thing to do. We only do things if we expect to get the reward of our own choosing in the quantities of our choosing.
Right?
We certainly wouldn't do the 'right thing' if it was going to actually *cost* us something that wouldn't return multiplied.
Right?
I can’t belive the author spent so much time on the topic and missed the point entirely. Rather than Oedipus theories and the like the answer is simple. Men find it hard to strike a balance between admitting that they want a relationship with their mothers and appearing as though they need it. This is complicated by the fact that mothers have a hard time letting go and will attempt to prolong their son’s need for them as long as possible. The reason that women run screaming from men who are still clinging to their mothers is twofold. First they dont want a clingy, needy man who is going to substitue them for their mother and second they dont want to have to compete with another woman for their man’s affections. Being able to change the mother-son relationship from one of a dependance on the mother to one of support of the mother is hard for both the mother and son and usually takes a long time to iron out. A man who has successfully made this transition becomes extremely attractive to women who see that he is capable of a supporting relationship rather than a needy one.
I talk to my mother every time she calls. Which is never. That passive-aggressive stuff just doesn’t wash. I call her when something happens.
Mothers usually see their sons as they were before they left home ("when did you start putting mustard on your sandwich, you hate mustard"). Men are not emotional creatures so when they decide to show emotion it's gonna be to their wife, not their mother. Men also become friends with their dads as they get older because dads recognize them as men and not boys and are no longer responsible for teaching them to be men. Mothers have a very hard time seeing their little boys as men.
Call them and talk to her. If you are encouraging, everything will work out fine.
I find that DIL’s and MIL’s tend to sift every word looking for an opportunity to be hurt.
In some cultures, especially Italian and Jewish, there is a big Mamma fixation that I feel is unhealthy. Especially in Italian culture, mamma holds on like a pit bull. The sons grow up with an attitude that they can do no wrong because mamma acted as if the sun never set on them.
Yes, she sounds like she’s got it all together, though having a son who wrote his novel about son-mother relationships (three of them!) and had thought he was ‘sucking up’ by coming down hard on the sons probably gave her pause. You can almost hear the reticence in the tone as he relates her reaction. Thus, she’s assuredly relieved that he’s successfully made it to marriage and fatherhood.
The DIL was in the service for 8 years.....and now interested in "domestic engineering"...but lacks training. So, she follows me around like a puppy wanting to know, "how do you do this or that?", concerning homemaking, child-rearing, etc.
My son calls at least 2-3 times a week and my daughter phones almost every day. We do have "issues" at times....but they are quickly ironed out and everyone seems to enjoy getting together on a regular basis.
When both the kids left home, there were several years of scant calls...everyone being too busy to keep in close contact. I think that's normal.
ML/NJ
A long time ago I used to be slightly bothered that my mother didn’t call me. Then I started calling her once or a couple of times a week and realized that she loved talking to me and I to her. She died last August and I really miss our calls. Then I would call Dad just to say Hi, which is something that I never really did before. Dad died unexpected in Jan. I miss them both so much. I’m dealing with some issues that I never would have shared with Mom or Dad, but it sure would have been nice to be able to hear thier voices.
When at home, I always hear her yaking in the background. She's rude and lazy and arrogant.
Don’t worry about it. It’s HER insecurity...not yours.
Yep. My son is 24 and in the navy. It's hard letting go, but I don't want him to be a mama's boy and hanging on to my apron strings (though I admit that he e-mails me with problems and just to vent). His enlistment is up in a year and though we'll be glad to have him home again, Mr. sneakers and I expect that he's going to be home only a short time before he is out on his own again. Hard as it is, I already know I am probably the second woman in his life, and that's as it should be.
Incidentally, I love when my husband calls him mom (usually once or twice a week). He's a good son from a family of three brothers, and they all treat their mom with a great deal of love and respect. Of course, my mother-in-law is a wonderful woman. I hope I can be as good of a mother-in-law to my son's future wife.
Yes, this happened to me. My son calls me two or three times a week now and even my LOVELY DAUGHTER IN LAW calls me and sends me sweet notes even though she is very close to her own Mom. I guess I am one of the fortunate ones!
I’m Jewish too, but a Middle Eastern Jew (Arab Jew). We have very large families who live with each other in the same house or at least the same street. When a couple marries, they move in with the husband’s family & the new daughter-in-law basically becomes the slave of the mother-in-law. Don’t bother complaining to husband because ima (mommy) comes first. The daughter-in-law’s status only rises when she gives birth to sons.
My hubby always called his mom every week, especially after his dad died. Every now and then, she drove him nuts with questions and comments, but he always made sure he called her. What impressed me was that he wasn’t just going through the motions, either. He’d tell her about his week and what was going on in our lives. Even if she had been particularly annoying the week before, that was all forgotten.
this describes my son to a t...except since he was married 4 months ago, he has called me more than the last 5 years combined! Plus, we have gone places and to dinner more too. hhhmmm, wonder what that means?
I think that depends on what you mean by 'close'. My husband was close to his mom till the day she died, but she wasn't a smothering type, demanding to see him alone, and not trying to tell him how we should conduct our lives, or treating me as some sort of intruder. In fact, his parents both welcomed me into the family with much love.
Consequently, I was never jealous of the time my husband spent with his mom (or dad). Usually, I was there too.
I hit the mother-in-law lottery. The woman is a saint, and my hubby is very close to her and always will be.
Her company is a delight and I always considered their close relationship to be a sign of how he would treat me and his daughters.
Good men love their mommas and aren’t ashamed to fess up to it.
Jewish mother joke told to me by a Jewish friend:
Ring. Ring.
Mother, in a weak voice: "Hello? Is that you Irving? I can barely see the letters on the caller ID."
Son: "Yes, it's me. Hello, Mother, how are you?
Mother: "Terrible! I am weak and dizzy, my vision is blurred and I hardly have the strength to get out of bed."
Son: "Oh, Mother!! We need to take you to the doctor right away to find out why!"
Mother: "No need to take me to the doctor. I know why. It's because I have not eaten a single bite in three days.
Son: "Not eaten in three days?!? Why have you not eaten in three days?!?"
Mother: "Because, in case you had ever decided to phone your Mother in the last three days, I didn't want to answer the phone with food in my mouth."
My husband lied to me, withheld the truth, betrayed me, and stabbed me in the back for the sake of his mommy (and daddy). Finally, I told him he needed to choose between his wife and children and his mommy and daddy. He was packed and gone in less than ten minutes.
We’re divorced.
Big "Amen!" to that, neighbor. Do it while there's still time-- there's a clock running on all of us...
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