Mamma's boy

I see no other option today but to come out. For long I have fought down this feeling, for long pretended otherwise, looked away, waged a long-drawn losing war against it - but today I find myself completely incapable of not accepting this fact of life : that I am essentially what in popular parlance is described as a "Mamma's boy".  I of course claim no exclusivity on this count, no dubious distinction : for the vast majority of Bengali or other kinds of South Asian men that surround me seem to fit the mold.

This cunning process of total assimilation into maternal authoritarianism starts very early on in our lives. I remember being woken up, forced into the bath, handfed, having my hair brushed, my shoelaces tied and packed off into  the early morning schoolbus till I was maybe eight.  It was not something I was made to feel especially embarrassed or guilty about. The other kids were probably in an identical predicament.  My forced swimming lessons, strongly encouraged jaunts to a neighborhood library, and other such so-called "extracurricular activities" also happened under maternal supervision.  In certain respects,  I was luckier than the other sorry specimens I see around me.  My ma was after all a working woman, and of a very mild temperament actually.  I have seen people with viragos for moms, the kind that specialize in domestic duties. These would carry their kids' lunchboxes to school, forcefeed them, sit around discussing their grades or their teachers' attires, till let's say very late in their lives.  These would inflict corporal punishment for a low grade, for talking to girls on the phone or for an assortment of other well-documented transgressions of middle class model kidhood.  These specimens have been permanently scarred for life, well beyond repair, and would be fertile grounds for some Freudian analysis.

It's not that the troubles stop with childhood. The Big Brother's reach is temporally far longer (and spatially too).  Even today, from ten thousand odd miles away, she monitors the state of my room, the kind of people I hang out with, what my activities were in some time frame,  and so on.  She asks too many prying questions, many of which get summarily shot down or ignored.  She persists, and usually I have to answer 1 in 10 questions truthfully. Many of my more adventurous peers will probably have better-developed strategies to cope with this, for there are certainly not too many colorful details in my life that I take great pains to conceal.

Even other than this barrage of interrogative intrusion, there are more subtle tricks - plenty of little traps cast about in a casual conversation, a lot of extrapolation, intuitive guesswork, leaps of imagination, and other surprising methods of divination through which she manages to construct a very close to real picture of my life. She knows what kind of bed I sleep on, which articles of clothing are my own additions and improvisations to her selection of my wardrobe, what jobs my schoolfriends have these days, and even which girls I have felt things for! (I am pretty sure she can guess what my sex life is like, partly because there's not much to guess there. ;) ) 

Once this confession to the self has transpired, the next logical question is of course how to live with it. 

Surprisingly once the initial shock (I actually like to think of myself as very independent, and different from the common herd) dies down, so does the stigma.  It's just part of accepting myself for what I am, a product of my culture and society and upbringing.  And my own inherent nature.  I for example would not take recourse to sex-drugs-rock 'n roll as some sort of liberating, belated coming-of-age experience.  I would choose politics, intellectual rebellion, unconventional career paths, and the like, to express my individuality (to an extent I have done that already).  A large part of it is essentially acceptance, compromise, actually relishing certain aspects of it (this adult bonding with parents), and a sly realization of how this model has certain significant advantages to offer over the conventional Western one. Well there's sentiment of course. Which is always not such a bad thing, however much I despise Bollywood.  Most westerners you would speak to might envy you certain things that I do not care for - like forcefed pakoras on every visit home. A genuine case of grass being greener etc. Again part of the problem is hugely resolved in my case, through being amicable peers with parents, and not having the usual domineering power gradient between us.  I count myself very lucky in this regard. I really have never needed any best friends or girl friends or other kinds of friends to provide shoulders to weep on.  I wonder whether that makes me even more of a mamma's boy.

Our model for parenting does not stand up to feminist critique so well though. Every one knows that our much hallowed family security is obtained at the cost of the freedoms afforded to women.  That aside, the very gendered roles that the two parents play in our upbringing could have interesting implications for future parent-progeny relations.  The mother is always cast in the more nurturing caregiving roles, which while developing a more animal-like familial bond, also breeds some childhood resentment. For it's often she who has to do the dirtier jobs - like coaxing me to shower or do homework.  Dad, the rarely available dad, who builds your intellectual side, and shares the more fun moments, is the childhood superhero.  But with adulthood, some inexplicable resentment gets added on to the reverence.  With girls this is somewhat different. For them the parental restrictions and maternal monitoring are often stronger, the freedoms afforded fewer, and the resentments against the mother become stronger with adolescence, while they still like to remain daddy's little girls. Generalizations. But they hold surprisingly generally.

ps : Surprise, surprise! This was posted very close to Mother's Day, an awesome case of coincidence which I  noticed just now. :)