Mother's love can be painful. The mom worries about your physical and mental and emotional health, not to mention your finances. She worries that she doesn't love you enough and that she is a bad person for not loving you more. She worries about your not accepting her advice and your silly idea that you are grown up enough to handle the tricks and pains of the world. Watch the young surgeon Jackson as he tries to continue to love his famous but pushy mother who is also a surgeon and automatically thinks she knows best for him, herself and everybody else. Watch Lady Crawley, an American, handle the news that her daughter has had a child who is now getting on in life but the news of her birth and lineage has been withheld from the Lady by the daughter and other relatives.
Watch the mother who loves her son and very much enjoys his company react to the news that the son has met the girl. He can't stop talking about her and is intending to marry her and live somewhere else with that girl. When will the mother get to see him? When will she get to talk to him and share in his life? As a woman who knows the way of the world and people, she assesses the likely future with her son in an accurate way and the result is pretty bleak. He has basically been stolen. Ok, the mother stole her husband from his mother but that was different.
So much of our typical pictures and discussions of love are about romantic and sexual love that strong non-sexual love tends to slip under our notice. Mothers can be in serious pain as they try to accommodate new arrangements such as college living far away and new families with new jobs located in new cities. Fathers are famous for looking askance at young men hanging around their daughters but it seems to me that the mother's love tends to be deeper and more visceral. Young husbands are well-known to be surprised at how much the baby seems to have replaced them in the hearts of young wives. I guess much of the mother-child relation can be explained by nature's aim to cement the mother's attention on the child for survival and upbringing purposes. Since mothers need to be able to decode a baby's needs before the baby has language, they may have sharper empathetic abilities than fathers. Mothers may feel a jolt of pleasure from each utterance of the baby and each step taken. Each drawing brought home for the refrigerator may tug strongly at the mother's heart. Don't be surprised if she needs a little time to recuperate after the loss of a perfectly wonderful son to some girl she doesn't know. If possible, it may be best to get grandchildren on their way. Grandchildren have a way of delighting a mother who has recently been promoted to grandmother.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
