Are you a man, or mama's boy?

The issue of men and their mothers came up at our dinner table on Mother’s Day — fittingly.  Someone said, “I will never forget this bumper sticker I saw on an old Saab somewhere in Sedona, Arizona.  It read, ‘The only woman I truly loved is another man’s wife... my mother.’” 

This comment opened the floodgates to more jokes and anecdotes about men’s complicated relationships with the women who raised, wounded, inspired, infuriated and loved them. It is a critical bond that shapes and defines a man’s character, something that needs to be renegotiated every single day in terms of boundaries.

It’s been said so many times that how and where men end up in matters of career, partner choice and family is largely dependent on how functional or dysfunctional their relationship is with their mother. There are countless theories floating around about how womanizers were raised by cold, detached mothers; how immature mama’s boys were coddled by highly controlling mothers; how commitment-phobes have been suffocated by clingy, overprotective moms, and how achievers and highly driven men were raised by impossible-to-please disciplinarian mothers.

This business of being almost solely accountable for how one’s son turns out spooks me to no end. When I had my son 14 years ago, I felt smug about my ability to raise him after having read tomes on mothering, bolstered by even more information courtesy of consumer reports and medical journals on how to prompt and promote certain behavior and all sorts of psychological gobbledygook; not to mention what books to read to him, what music to play, what toys to buy and other hocus pocus how-to tips.

Little did I know that how I am as a person — how mature or immature, how well or maladjusted, how calm or high-strung, how fair or biased, how content or discontent, how happy or bitter — and how I treat him and others is what will have the most profound effect on him, and not all those scholarly factoids.

My biggest fear was my son turning out to be a mama’s boy. I’ve known one too many of these creatures and the tragedy that becomes their lives haunts me in my sleep.

I heed everything that I have heard and read on how not to raise a mama’s boy: don’t dote, nag, coddle, baby, shelter, serve, spoil, boss, overpower, overprotect and overindulge. I might have been too paranoid, because I think I raised him to be independent and held him off with a 10-foot pole early on to make doubly sure that he wouldn’t turn out too clingy as a favor to all women including God and country. But when I came across an article by Uri Friedman for Foreign Policy, an online magazine, I relaxed.

He said that if history has taught us anything it is that some of the world’s most powerful rulers have had fascinating relationships with their mothers — some surprisingly loving, others ambivalent or just plain bitter. Friedman lists the following tyrants as having “mother issues.”

• Alexander the Great’s power-hungry mother, Olympias, is thought to have been a driving force behind her son’s ascension to the throne of Macedonia.

• Napoleon Bonaparte’s mother, Letizia, taught her son discipline (“She sometimes made me go to bed without supper,” he once recalled) and followed him to exile in Elba and then back to Paris before the Battle of Waterloo. 

• Hitler’s mother who he adored died of cancer when he was a teenager. In Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote in the 1920s, he reflected on his reaction to her passing: “I am thankful for that period in my life because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I now am... Though I then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight.”

• Joseph Stalin was the son of an alcoholic father who savagely beat him and his mother. But after the father left home, his mother, who worked as a laundress to support him through school, meted out violent punishments as well. Theirs was a passive-aggressive relationship that perpetuated until his mother’s death.

Yeesh. Okay, maybe tyrants and dictators aren’t the best anecdotal evidence.

But Filipino mothers need not be concerned about raising tyrants. Our matriarchal culture provides its own deterrent to producing Hitlers and Bonapartes. How?  Have you seen Filipino boys running around with their moms or yayas giving constant chase to adjust the towels on their backs peeking out of their collars, shoving juice and water bottles in their mouths and puffing talcum powder on their necks and backs to absorb sweat? Have you seen adolescent boys in sports teams marching onto the court or the field with yayas in white uniforms toting their gear?

If anything, we are most in danger of raising benign men with no backbones, something we must collectively guard against to ensure succeeding generations of better-adjusted men: sons, fathers, partners.

Here is some advice from Julie Fishman and Meagan McCrary of Glo online magazine on how to tell if your son or partner is a mama’s boy or if you as a mother are doing what you shouldn’t.

He calls her daily. If your man and his mom always chat, then he likely tells her everything. Not only will she be privy to intimate details of your relationship but also every argument you have. Guess whose side she’ll be taking?

He needs her input. There is something emasculating about a man who can’t make a decision without his mother’s guidance. We’d like him to respect her opinions but if he uses her as a crutch, he’s too insecure to stand on his own two feet.

He’s not appreciative. If he takes his mother for granted, he’ll take you for granted too. This type of man has an inflated sense of self and feels entitled. He doesn’t thank people because he feels they are just doing their duty, whether it’s a mother, lover, or friend.

They’re just not close. Some men just don’t have the patience, time or compassion to stay close to their moms. If he doesn’t value the relationship with the first woman to love him, he won’t make his succeeding relationships a priority.

He badmouths her. Regardless of how terrible a guy’s mom is, berating her is a poor reflection on his personality. A jab once in a while is understandable but constant bad-mouthing or worse, whining, shows a lack of respect for women.

He is not respectful. If a man is nasty to his mother in front of you and other people, then he is disrespectful. If he is capable of treating his mother with blatant callousness, he won’t hesitate to do the same to you.

He thinks she’s his maid. If his mom still cleans up after him, then this over-coddled man relies on others to handle his adult responsibilities. If he doesn’t take ownership of these tasks, then he is immature and lazy.

He still adheres to her rules. Men who live by their mother’s edicts long after they have left the house don’t have the balls to set their own values and standards. If everything he says starts with, “My mom says…” then it’s not only annoying but a signal that he’s afraid to live his own life.

He puts her on a pedestal. When mom is God’s gift to the world, whatever she says, does or thinks will always be superior to whatever you say, do or think.  You’ll never measure up in his book.

Here’s a story about a doting mother, Fe Ayala, who has since passed on — someone very dear to me and someone who, in spite of her indulgence, has raised one of the most remarkable men I know. 

Decades ago, her then-adolescent son was at an assembly in the backfield of his school, listening to the headmaster’s speech. Meanwhile, she was at home taking a shower when an earthquake struck. With nothing but her son’s safety in mind, she stormed out of the bathroom with her shower cap still on, grabbed her robe, hollered for the driver and got to school in record time. In her panic, she failed to notice that the mild tremor had completely stopped. She marched on to the field searching for her son in a sea of students who all seemed to look identical in their uniforms. 

She kept shouting his name, “Mike! Mike!” with one mission: to whisk him off to safety.

Her son, who had heard and seen her from afar, turned his back and pretended not to hear. But his classmates alerted him and waved the mother over to where he was. And so in her capped and robed glory, she lunged at him, relieved to find him safe. That was the only time she noticed that the earth had stopped shaking.

How, after this dramatically protective stunt and other similar ones, was this mother able to raise a highly evolved man? Humor, as always, is what saves us all.  This mother just happened to have an incredible sense of humor. She never took herself or anything too seriously and at the end of each day, wherever she was, there was happiness in her wake. She raised her son amid laughter, positive energy and all that is life affirming no matter how desperate the situation. 

Anyway, we all make parenting mistakes. With some effort we can make life a little less dramatic — shower cap and robe optional.

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.