Mama's boy no more: Why men must let go of their mums

Mama’s boy no more: Why men must let go of their mums (Photo: iStock)

Last Sunday, the world celebrated Mother’s Day. Before that, a trio of Meru comedians created a hilarious video outlining their mothers’ prowess. It was funny but also brought out the other side of invincible mothers, soft brutality. A few men were courageous enough to post about their bittersweet memories of their departed mothers that Sunday.

It reminded me of a video I shared with Oyunga Pala, the manosphere guru long before writing about masculinity became vogue locally. Someone was saying how Oyunga once said that every man must breakup with his mother. The mother-son bond could be tighter than father-daughter bond. The Igbo have a saying that the mother is supreme: the goddess of love and good nurturing. 

It got me thinking about another writer, Jackson Biko, better known as Biko Zulu. He lost his mother in 2012 and for a few years after that, he would remember his mother and blog about it. Every time he travelled home to Kendu Bay, he would write how your mother will one day disappoint you, or today my mom will die. He always reminded me to appreciate and be there for my mother while she is around.

More importantly, Biko Zulu reminded me that the mother-son bond is tighter than Taita–Taveta. The father–daughter relationship balances it off. The mother-son bond gave us the Oedipus Complex, coined by psychologists to describe the developmental sexual attraction between children and the parent of the opposite sex. It comes from a Greek legend about how Oedipus killed his father unknowingly and then married his own mother. A mother’s job is to keep you safe, while fathers are meant to introduce you to the world. A mother denotes safety, and nurture, and, in most cases, she lives anxious about how her children are faring in the world out there. 

No wonder Oyunga’s mother’s view of a job was permanent and pensionable, a big office with a big title. She would ask every influential person she knew to help her son get a job. In his speech, he acknowledges that after his father died when he was a teenager, he became a mama’s boy. His mother, in a way, did not approve of his writing as a job even after showing her his full-page column in a local daily. It got to him and so he gathered courage to confront his mother.

One evening, he sat his mother down and explained to her what writing is and how his gift is storytelling. He told her that he was not going to be the man whose image lives in her mind and she needs to stop asking everyone to get him a job. That day, he broke up with his mother and the mother realized that he had become his own man. He advises every man to cut the placenta for a second time.

The second birth of a man is when he cuts the placenta in adulthood. It doesn’t mean that you hate your mother or ignore her needs or even shun connecting with her. All it means is that she understands that her son is her own man. A man who can be there for her without necessarily her overbearing in her son’s life.

The Bible had to remind us that a man “shall leave his father and mother” and be united to his wife. There are many explanations why this had to be included in the holy text when it is supposed to be obvious. It just reminds us that even back in the days before Jesus showed up, mama’s boys existed and men struggled to break away from their mothers’ warm and comforting hold.

The relationship between children and mothers is complex right from conception. The cells of a foetus in all animals with placentas migrate into the mother’s body. They have been found in injury zones of the mother, where they rush to heal the mother. 

Sigmund Freud, the renowned neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, says Oedipus Complex ends at the age of five when the child begins to identify with the parent of the same sex. He considers the reaction against Oedipus Complex to be the most important and may be first social achievement of the human mind.

I believe that even after overcoming the Oedipus Complex early in life, the internal conflict comes because human beings depend on their parents longer than other animals.

It complicates further if for some reason a man has to use his mother as a crutch in adulthood. A mother’s love is that antidote we need for the waves of a brutal world. However, a man must regulate how he receives that love because to a mother, all her adult children are still babies in need of her embrace.