Gods and monsters

To my 3-year-old daughter, I am love incarnate. To my teenage sons, I'm nothing but a servant-jailer. Is it any wonder I feel schizophrenic?

By Marion Winik

Jul 11, 2003 | Everybody knows what a monstrous emotional burden it is to have a mother. Whether the mommy in question is angelic, asphyxiating, absent, or just annoying, it is the task of the child to endure her, escape her, and then explain her, to unload her like containerized cargo, perhaps in therapy. In our child-centric culture, we see the relationship from one direction, as if the child were the living thing, and the mother something tremendously powerful yet insensate, like the ocean, or the weather.

But this high-pressure system I'm in right now is hardly barometric. As the mother of two teenagers from my first marriage (I was widowed in my mid-30s) and a toddler from my current one, I am experiencing simultaneously two phases that really should be separated by a decent interval -- the wild tumble of falling in love with a baby and the bewildering pain of living with adolescents. As I respond to my daughter's dependence on me with a passion that is no less fearsome for being evolutionarily ordained, I'm also coping with my sons' break for the fence. Check out this bad love affair from my point of view, and you tell me who's being scarred for life.

To my barely 3-year-old Jane, I am the world, I am God, and I am love incarnate. She can barely stand to let me out of her sight. She cries my name as soon as she wakes up and anytime we are separated. She lights up like Las Vegas at my reappearance, often leaping into the air with joy. There is almost nothing I cannot fix with my embrace, very little she prefers to my attention -- sorry, Dora the Explorer, but it wasn't even close -- and she showers me with positive reinforcement at regular intervals. "You're such a good helper, Mommy," she tells me when I hand her the toilet paper. "That's beautiful," she says, when I put on a pink shirt. "I lub you," she reminds me every hour or so, in case I have forgotten, sometimes racing into the room and shouting it as she flies past me, sturdy legs churning, dark blond tresses flying, as urgent in her errand as a medieval messenger.

I am not the only person to bask in the light of this little love-machine. She adores her father, whom she calls "Honey" with imperial confidence. She responds to her older brothers and sister (my husband has two kids from a previous marriage who live with us on weekends) with pure delight. But I am Mommy, and I am No. 1. What do you expect? The germ of her had been stored inside me since my own birth; for 18 months she took her food from my body. To say I am her favorite means little in such a rigged competition, I know, but I am.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. I remember the infancy of my son Hayes, now 15, as one long, golden afternoon, a swoon of nursing and cuddling and staring into his big dark eyes, the ceiling fan spinning overhead and the Dream Academy playing in the background. I had lost a baby, a full-term stillbirth, less than a year before he was born. Hayes washed over me like morphine for a person mangled, lying in the woods, waiting for medical assistance for quite a while. Then a couple of years later Vince came, so charismatic and radiant we called him the baby messiah.

But Jane is the last, and I know she's the last, and I thought I would never do this again; I thought I would have sons but never a daughter. Even as struggle and irritation find their way into my responses, even as she learns to say No and Get my shoes! to whine and hound, Mommy this Mommy that Mommy Mommy MOMMY! -- I am stunned to realize how connected, how consumed, how converted to a tool for her use I have become. (Again!) If anything were to happen to her, I think once or twice a day, and stop myself right there.

And something is going to happen to her even if none of my worst fears comes to pass and she grows normally to adolescence. At that point, I can expect to have precisely the inverse experience of the festival of love I am enjoying now. Torn from my pedestal like a statue of Saddam Hussein, I will be rejected as powerfully as I was once embraced. For just as a toddler is devoted to cathecting you, so a 12-year-old uses all the force of his being to tear free.

With emotionally muffled Hayes, it was a quiet junta, a revolution of rocky sullenness. He responded to less than a quarter of the conversation I directed to him, and to that fraction with icy rebuff or curled-lip scorn. The idea, it seemed, was that I would wait on him hand and foot while staying entirely out of his way, requiring nothing of him, and completely avoiding all public and private displays of affection. The summer he was 12, I remember, my mother asked him why he was being so mean to me. He replied simply, "Because I hate her."

Next Page: My baby messiah has turned into a demon-child and he's determined to drive me away

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