Blame sissies: The hate women have for mama’s boys who blame it on their absentee dads

It is hard being a sensitive guy these days. Girls are so demanding. It’s amazing how you can meet a woman whom you buy flowers, open doors for, call regularly... only for her to retort one day, “Spineless wimp. Grow a pair. What kind of man are you? Mama’s boy! Go back to your mother and come back to me when you’ve learnt how to treat a woman. Crap!”.

Mention mama boys and women react sharply. Women are not exactly into ‘threesomes’ especially when the extra wheel is a man’s mother. Do a Google search on mama’s boy, and you’ll encounter hundreds of articles on how to spot one from a mile. The signs are self-evident. For instance, the man who fulfils his mother every wish, including the unreasonable ones, like interrupting a dinner date in the middle of a night-out to rush to the chemist to buy his mama’s pills and deliver them personally to her residence in Rongai.

Then there’s the 30-year-old man who has to run every decision by his mother before he can make up his mind. “Aah about that Zanzibar trip...Let me speak to mum first. She gets very worried when I am around the ocean. You know her favorite uncle died in an ocean accident in 1975.” The man who compares any dish he eats to his mothers’. “Babes, your curry is yummy...all that is missing is mum’s chapos. #Culinaryheaven.”

House-bound sissies

No woman enjoys playing second fiddle to her mother-in-law. Men who keep comparing their wives to their mothers have issues but there is a reason for this. It is called socialization. We are society of men that have been largely brought up by our mothers.

We start as house-bound sissies who never venture out of the house to be men. Our fathers are absent from our lives for various socio-historical reasons. Most are trapped in the vicious economic and social cycle of provision which means they spend exceedingly long hours away from the home.

Many fail to cope and are undermined by unemployment, never fulfilling their obligations as men and abandoning their homes all together plagued by feelings of inadequacy. A large number also die before their time. The death rate among men is high and Kenya has more than its fair share of widowed women.

Where a father figure is absent, young men, desperately attempt to fill the large shoes as the man in the home. They are exposed to the harsh and bitter reality of patriarchy in Kenya and are naturally predisposed to protect their mothers from other men who may disrespect her. While at the physical and financial level, most boys grow up to earn the capability of becoming providers and protectors after school, it is the emotional duress carried by their mothers that leaves young fatherless men confused.

They take on the ‘collective male guilt burden’, shouldering the hurt and frustration of a failed marriage. In trying to rid mother of her unfulfilled marital expectations, boys take on the impossible responsibility of guaranteeing their mothers happiness at the cost of their own personal development. It happens to many boys with absentee fathers, where young men are molded in their mother’s ideal image.

It is said the child is inclined to try to satisfy the emotional needs of his mother. Boys fear the rejection if they go off on a limb and assert their own independence. Mothers will naturally hang on to their boys with motherly concern, never quite letting them grow up. However, there are consequences to this attachment.

Depressive personality

How a mother relates to her son determines to a great degree how he will relate to women.  Because mothers are the first impression that a boy gets of women. Mothers give us clues in what we find attractive in the women we date and eventually marry. Therefore a man’s understanding of women is usually an interpretation of what his mother demonstrated. Mothers, who were warm and loving, bring up men drawn to women with similar characteristics.

Where mothers were independent and purposed, men seek partners who mirror these traits. But where mothers were manipulative, confrontational and controlling, a boy grows up believing that it is his job to rescue women from themselves. He only ever knows how to respond to a woman in distress and his personal needs are always secondary in the relationship.

A mother who has a depressive personality, who switches from hot to cold on a whim can turn a man into a commitment-phobe, always afraid to get too close to his partner, as a result of the fear of past emotional hurt experienced at home. Masculinity is what we inherit from our fathers or in their absence, positive male figures in our lives. The role of the father figure is to help the boy confront his mother by cutting the metaphorical umbilical cord and become his own man.

It is only when men learn to see their mothers for who they are as human beings, with their challenges and flaws, that they come to truly appreciate a mother’s love and reciprocate on their own terms as men. When a boy stops craving his mother’s attention and earns her respect, he becomes a man.