He’s a Mama’s Boy

I was ready to talk about a whole different event that took place yesterday night, but something came up that I had to address. I was having a conversation with my father and he mentioned that one of my friends was a “Mama’s Boy”. When looking up the phrase mama’s boy it defined it as an unhealthy reliance on your mother at an age deemed inappropriate. It is used as an emasculating term to bully men who have a relationship with their mother. Now we usually see this phrase used to define men who can’t live without calling their mother every second of the day or more of a helicopter parent situation where even at an older age the parental structure still has control. But what I want to focus on is this disdain for the actual relationship between mother and boy. A relationship that is formed from conception, being the first connection that a child has with another human. The mother meets and loves this child before it even arrives, caring for it during their whole gestation period. It makes me question if men become jealous of the relationship between mother and child before they come out and how that unconscious resentment can manifest in ways to dissolve that connection. Creating boundaries from an early age to separate men from the feminine. Going so far to punish their sons for their investigations in feminine play. I question this further by saying that men do these types of gender alienations because the love they receive from their partner isn’t unique anymore. That the love is altered from adoration to nurturing or reliance. Love is seen as a home within itself, and this change of expression leaves men feeling threatened. But this love isn’t gone, I believe it is just miscommunicated. That in different stages of a relationship you are loved in vastly different ways, and that disconnect early on in a relationship usually ends in the death of connection. But it's still there, this connection created with the wife, it just needs to be shared and it usually cannot be. This term mama’s boy is a way to enforce this separateness, but this disconnect from mothers and sons can be more harmful than we could possibly think. Because you are forcing you boys to be unfamiliar with the love of a mother, of a woman. Without this fundamental love as a child, you are throwing a live grenade into a crowd of bystanders and hoping it's a dud. This is not at all a problem with the mother, as they love as they can, it is directly the involvement by father to split these connections in hopes that the love they grant their children will have to come back to them, but usually it is resentment instead. And when I look at my own emotional relationship with my mother I see nothing. I do love her, but masculinity has done its dirty work in keeping me distanced. I have rebuilt with other women in my life, but it took several years of work to know what motherly/modern love should feel like. We need to restructure the conception of love and how we can better understand its movements in our lives. We have lived too long in this repressive masculine structure that something needs to change, and it all comes back to how men cannot express love.