“All little boys love their mothers,” they said. “Little boys love their mothers differently,” they said. Wait until he asks you to marry him!” they said. But they didn’t say anything about the tongue kissing, or the eye surgeries, or the way a tiny tyrant of a child might, despite the meticulous detail with which you have built your marriage and your family, decide he can replace his father.
“Oedipus Rex” – you know the story. The mythical Greek king of Thebes, son of King Laius and Queen Jacosta, the doomed prince who fulfills the Oracle of Delphi’s prophecy that any son of Laius will kill his father, marry his mother and destroy his family. Bane of high school classics courses, he was the inspiration for Freud’s Oedipus complex, the stage of psychosexual development when a child feels varying degrees of jealousy toward his father.
In classic Freudian psychology, the Oedipus complex rears itself between the ages of 3 and 6. By my calculations we were right on schedule. Not long after my son’s third birthday, he didn’t so much pop the question as state his intentions.
“Mama, I’m going to marry you when I grow up.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet. But I’m already married to Daddy,” I answered.
“How about at night? Can we be married at night?” he asked.
Adorable! My son wanted to marry me. I wasn’t just charmed, I was awash in a rare sea of complete fulfillment. It had taken my husband three years to ask me to marry him. It took my son three years, too. Clearly I could win anyone over with a little effort, a concerted approach, and whole lot of Goldfish crackers.
Had I perhaps been trying too hard? In a word, yes. With my first son, I was one of those mothers who was all-in, and my son knew it. I practiced attachment parenting. How attached were we? I don’t think I laid him on a surface other than my chest for the first five months of his life. It wasn’t that I was some kind of obsessed mother interested in the benefits of skin-to-skin contact. My son screamed every time he was out of my arms. Blood-curdling screams, the kind you might wish on telemarketers.
Everything I did, I overdid. I made four-layer baked oatmeal on the weekends. I planned afternoons of Shrinky Dinks and elaborate puppet shows. I read to him constantly, easily 25 books a day. I went from my natural baseline of being a champion snuggler to an Olympian of the sport, always training, always nearing the peak of my form. From the very beginning, I wasn’t raising children. I was crafting the greatest hearts-and-minds campaign of my life. Is it so wrong to want your son to love you?
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