Melville Cooke
Mania: Mental illness marked by periods of great excitement and violence; excessive enthusiasm, an obsession.
SO MOTHER'S Day 2006 has come and gone, with the love for mothers which borders on mania reaching a frenzy on Sunday. There were greetings and congratulations for mothers all around and concerts here, there and everywhere.
I have long contended that this much vaunted love for 'mama' is, in fact, as much a hatred at worst or absence of feeling at best for fathers, with the love that should have been shared between both parents being fiercely concentrated on the one who is actually a factor in the child's life. For the Jamaican single mother (a contradiction of terms is ever there was one) is so commonplace as to be expected and her sacrifices so routine as to be almost unremarkable.
The effects of that single parenthood (again a stark contradiction in terms), though, are horrendous, especially on the sons, and lead to the cycle continuing over and over again.
'MAMA' AND 'MAAMA'
There is only a drawl of a difference but a chasm of respect between 'mama' and 'maama'; many a big, tough back man is proud to still be Mama's boy, but very few would concede to being a 'maama man'. I contend, though, that in many cases the two terms should be combined to best express the situation which I see repeated over and over again, where the son becomes 'mama's man'.
Somebody who is 'mama's man' cannot be the best partner to his mate and father to his children that he could be (if any at all) and, in matters as delicate as those, any shortcoming can be disastrous.
A 'mama's man' is in effect married to his mother in all but the sexual sense, holding her up as the unattainable ideal of what a woman should be. Her soup is the best, her care is the best, her gentle touch would wake Lazarus before the three days were up and woe is the woman who dares to think that she can come between mama and her little man.
THE WOMAN'S INTENTIONS
Not that the woman intends to do so; she simply wants to be the best partner she can to her man, often seeking the male love that she missed out on as a child. But she is constantly, subtly and not so subtly, reminded that she cannot match up to the lofty standards set by her man's mama. Nobody can bear that forever.
The 'mama's man' is often a direct product of the single mother, who pours all her love (mania even) for her missing 'babyfather' into her son, raising a prize that she will not gladly share. And which woman can hope to measure up to the devotion a single mother puts into her son from birth?
And when things do not go well between the son and his mate, mama almost invariably welcomes him back home with open arms.
The irony is that by her doting, the single mother recreates the very spoilt, selfish creature who would abandon a woman who is pregnant with his child. So single mothers breed single mothers and without direct sexual contact at that.
I am always slightly befuddled at the Mother's Day mania, though, because I know that all these vaunted mothers could not be the saints they are made out to be. In fact, I am sure that quite a few were hooligans who beat the living daylights out of their children physically and/or mentally (and I have seen enough of this in my not so short lifetime) as the frustrations of a hard life took hold. Still, the lives of saints are best well edited and so are the memories of 'mama's men'.
Next week: That 'babymother' word.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
