T A B L E++T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

The foundling
By Sallie Tisdale
Adoption -- and giving birth -- taught me that biology has nothing to do with being a parent
(04/30/98)

Confessions of a teenage mom
By Tessa Souter
My son and I grew up together, will grow old together -- and saved each other
(04/29/98)

The worst mother who ever lived, and other light reading
Mythology may be the key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life
(04/28/98)

Fly girl
By Phaedra Hise
Flying with my toddler at the controls brings back the thrill I felt when my dad taught me to fly
(04/27/98)

How many working fathers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
By Elizabeth Rapoport
Dad helps out? Sure. Try this test
(04/24/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY MONA GABLE | My son is in love with me. This is no surprise. After all, I have nice green eyes and Jennifer Aniston-type hair, though regrettably not her long-stemmed legs. More importantly, I can tick off the names of the Los Angeles Lakers, play a tough game of Junior Monopoly and have a high tolerance for jokes that revolve around the letter "p." What 7-year-old boy wouldn't adore me?

I grew up in a house of rowdy boys, boys with no-nonsense masculine names like Jack and Tom and Jim. In some ways this made it easy for me when my son came along, red-faced and furious and eager to devour the world. I knew what to expect. Loud grunting noises and flying objects. Toilet seats never put down. Clothes left in a heap on the floor as if the Wicked Witch had just waved her broom and made the person in them disappear. A preference for toys with an excess of body parts and names like "venom."

What I was not prepared for, what caught me totally off-guard, was my son's romantic feelings for me. A few mornings ago I was standing in the bathroom, looking like a mean raccoon. My hair was piled loosely on my head, mascara ringed my eyes from the night before. "You look like hell," I said to the mirror. Suddenly, there was this little voice. It was so quiet and small, so unlike my son's normal full-throttle roar, I almost didn't hear it. "No, you don't, Mom." I looked down. My son was staring up at me, his huge gray eyes full of longing, his heart banging furiously in his little bony chest. "You're the most beautiful woman in the world." The scary thing was he meant it. What guy ever said that to me with such purity of motive and heart?

This intent pining for me began, normally enough, when he was 4. I'd go to sit down on the couch or a chair and he'd slide his hand under me, grinning madly. I'd go to hug him and he'd burrow his little head into my breasts, lingering there a minute too long. I'd be taking a shower and suddenly the curtain would be flung aside by a pint-sized blond in Ninja Turtle briefs. "Mommy's in the shower," I'd say. "Oh," he'd say, holding his ground.

That my son was intense didn't help matters. He was, as the books charitably call it, a "spirited child" -- which is to say volatile and active and completely unlike my friends' babies. Fervor extended to everything he did. For a time when he was 2 and 3, he was obsessed with his father. My husband would do something fairly nonthreatening -- leave the room, say -- and our child would go insane, flinging his skinny toddler self on the floor, or worse, hurling himself after my husband out the door.

I remember in particular one long, miserable weekend in Solana Beach. We'd driven down from Los Angeles to relax, have a good time, which only goes to show you how delusional as parents we still were. Every time my husband wanted to head out to go bodysurfing or for a swim in the pool he'd have to sneak out of our hotel room or frantic screaming would ensue. It mattered not that I, the mother, the one who had spent 30 hours in mind-altering labor, was readily available for fun and games, a romp in the pool. No, my son wanted his father. And how dare I presume to be a worthy substitute? Nothing like the rejection of a 3-year-old to make you feel really small. But by then I had another baby so I didn't have much time to brood about it.

So when my son latched on to me again it came as somewhat of a shock. He wanted me, but now he wanted me like Lyle Lovett crooning about unrequited love. He pouted if I didn't hug him tightly enough or cuddle with him on the couch. He cried if I wouldn't lay down next to him after I read him a story at night. "All right, leave!" he'd say angrily, turning his back to me in bed, as though we'd just had a lover's quarrel. Then, of course, he'd protest loudly when I did.

I tried not to let all this bother me. I knew that little boys did this, developed erotic feelings for their mothers around the time they turned 4. It said so right there in the updated edition of Dr. Spock, and that eventually these feelings would abate. Some of my friends' sons were also behaving this way, acting like drunken high-school boys on a date trying to cop a feel. I was damned if I was going to be uptight about it, do something that would make my son feel bad about himself or, God forbid, cause him to grow up sexually repressed. A child of the liberated '70s I was going to handle this right.

We had talks. Frank, straightforward talks. About how mommies and daddies touch each other. About how mommies and children touch each other. Whenever his hand would stray into the no-touching zone again, I'd remove it and gently remind him to keep his little mitts to himself. I bought a children's book that discussed boys' bodies and girls' bodies, with cartoonlike illustrations of vital parts. We said the words "penis" and "vagina" with devil-may-care abandon.

Every so often, my husband would happen in on one of these conversations, roll his eyes and accuse me of hopelessly confusing our son, perhaps even warping him for life. "He's too young. He doesn't understand," he'd say. "Of course he does," I'd snap back. I had no idea whether he did understand everything I was telling him, of course. It's not like you can give a 5-year-old a sexual comprehension test. But I was doing what I felt was right. I answered questions when he asked them. I kept the explanations simple. We rented "Look Who's Talking," and in the opening scene when the talking sperm are frantically trying to penetrate the egg and my son turned to me and asked, "What are those little wiggly things?" I didn't flinch, didn't turn off the set. I said they were sperm and that they came from the daddy's penis and that they went into the mommy's body. "That's how babies are made," I said. "Eeeeuuu!" my son squealed with a mixture of wonder and disgust. I knew then I'd done my job.

Then gradually, mercifully, the sex problem went away. My son grew older, got distracted from his passion for me, lost interest. There was another girl in his life, Sarah -- Sarah with the long blond braid and big gray eyes, who raced him every morning on the school blacktop. I was relieved.

Then a few months ago, something happened that jolted me back awake. It began with my son and his best friend, James, who lives next door. I adore James. He's as round, mellow and dark as my son is wiry, incendiary and pale. If there were a movie made about the two of them it would be called "Buddha and the Little Beast." Another reason I adore James is because he finds it impossible not to tell the truth. This is bad for my son, but good for me.

On this occasion James was over at our house playing basketball in the patio. He and my son were talking about James' teenage brother. I was in the kitchen when I heard them giggling wildly and in the next split second the uncommon phrase, "He sexed her."

N E X T+P A G E: You love Daddy more!