My mother has an advanced degree in creating obligation and guilt. Her masterwork occured one Sunday as we were driving past Gun Court prison in Kingston. There was a line of mostly older women waiting in the unbearably hot sun to get inside, clearly bringing dinner to their imprisoned sons. Her commentary essentially ran something like this, "See that there. At the end of the day, boys only have their mothers. When the chips are down, there are no fathers, no girlfriends, no so-called friends, not even brothers or sisters - only their mothers are there when the going gets really tough to bring them a cup of soup." Manipulative as it was, and I did do the obligatory rolling of the eyes, over time as I watched the ways of the world I came to see that she was in fact right.

Watch the networks and read the headlines as men make a mess of their lives, or drugs and disease make a mess of them. Whenever the glaring cameras are on, it is usually only the mother who remains. The drooling man in the wheelchair is often pushed around by his mother back to changing nappies. As he gets arrested for serial rape, murder or whatever is the current headline of the day, it's the mother on camera saying, "No way, not my son" when everyone else is running for cover: "What? Who? No, I never knew him. I have not seen him in years." There is a stalwart Jamaican woman I know whose son has been a lifetime of heartache, being in and out of rehab and prison, begging and stealing her blind, but when you ask her how he is, the answer for the last 20 years has always been, "Much better these days."

Motherhood is Nature's strongest relationship. Its near unconditionality comes from the fact that there is a pre-verbal and pre-existential relationship before anyone else comes into the picture. This is why lost pregnancies are so traumatic for many women; she is already developing a relationship with the goo.

Fatherhood is a discovered and constructed relationship. Fatherhood is discovered in the sense that only advanced tribes would have seen that the sex act, nine months prior, had anything to do with the baby. Early man would have feared woman's seemingly spontaneous power to bring forth life, an event for which he could not see he had any involvement. All births would have looked like "virgin" births until "science" discovered the connection between sex and children.

Secondly, fatherhood is culturally constructed: what must a father do? Societies have to build out the concept of fatherhood, which fails and succeeds only as societies and cultural controls fail or succeed. Fathers have to be told, taught, beaten, and shamed into their roles. It remains tenuous at best. It is not pre-ordained like motherhood.

Motherhood has nature's locks and women always, and everywhere, know what to do. There is barely a difference between how mothers treat their children in America, China, Jamaica and Saudi Arabia, but the difference in the way fathers treat their children in these various countries is measured in cultural light years. "Mothering" is taught by nature. "Fathering" is taught by culture.

To my knowledge there has never been any society that has ever faced a crisis of motherhood; her job being defined by nature. On the other hand, every society or group at some point faces a crisis of fatherhood, because the relationship is "unnatural," and purely cultural.

Every mother know the goo from which we have come and the goo to which we will return, and she loves the creation without any personality because it is entirely hers. A mother will love even the dullest and lamest child. Fathers often bolt at the first sign of difficulty. Father loves success (that's my child!), a mother absorbs the failures (that's still my child!), and she is particularly forgiving of her son.

Mothers and sons are a stronger love archetype than mothers and daughters. There is a war, pre-designed into the relationship between mothers and daughters that eventually ignites. As the daughter crosses into puberty she becomes a reminder of the mother's declining youth. "Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" Nature's mirror is the daughter who starts to become fairer.

She also sees her daughter making the grave errors that she made and does not want that to happen to "her" again. She punishes her daughter, her younger self, for her mistakes. Her harsher treatment of her "daughter versus her son under the guise of girls need more protection" is a cover for darker motives.

"Boys will be boys" was probably first said by a mother to excuse a son's bad behaviour. "Girls will be girls" has never entered popular lexicon. A mother offers no such easy forgiveness for her daughter who is her crime and her punishment. Even in the most politically sophisticated societies, there is an undercurrent of pity for the woman who bore no sons. In a brood of daughters, one will often morph into a son to answer subterranean family prayers.

Conversely, the mother is a constant reminder to the daughter of her (the daughter's) ignorance of the world, of all she does not know. Little miss beautiful meets big miss know-it-all. This tenuous set-up can only become more or less fractious but it is always in conflict. It is exacerbated if the daughter gets too close to the father/husband. Where it is not fractious, it is because a dominant personality (either mother or daughter) has won or they stay out of each other's space entirely.

Not so with sons. There is no such competition set up between mother and son. The only battle is him trying to make her not matter; a losing prospect from the start because, as the Pieta shows, from her he emerges and to her he will return. Even if he struggles against her, as he will in teenage years, to declare her irrelevance she just needs to stand still and he will return at his next weak moment. And pick him up she will. After a lifetime of sermons and miracles, even Jesus collapses into Mary's lap. Come home to mama, she will make it right.

Moreover, as she ages, her son becomes the only man who can never divorce her; the only real "till death do us part" relationship. Although in the panic of ageing and loneliness, she sometimes over-reaches to test his loyalty and dedication. In response he either recoils or relents. Eventually, she co-opts him and he morphs into all the things her husband is not; often becoming her primary provider. And she is all that his wife is not. If he disappears and does not call for three weeks, he can show up and she still cooks him dinner, never a nagging word.

A mother's natural but ludicrous enslavement to her son is the reason why successful marriages require distancing the husband from his mother. A wife cannot compete with the mother's unrelenting absolution for his sins. She must "slay" her mother-in-law for her romantic relationship to flourish; the only good mother-in-law is a dead one.

Wives who have displaced mothers do so by becoming mothers to their husbands. Marriages that have survived 30-plus years no longer act like married couples as they transform into mother and son archetypes. He starts their life together as her fearless protector and she ends life by dabbing his drool.

The greatest mother-son story in the Western tradition is obviously Mary and Jesus. Joseph is a footnote whose sole presence is to make sure that Mary is not branded a harlot and Jesus not called out for the bastard child he actually is. At some point early on in the story, Joseph completely disappears as all fathers must in mother-son relations. And it is Mary who goes on to get all the props for her son's accomplishments. Michelangelo's Pieta and all of Christendom talk of Mary and Jesus. Joseph who? Did he even get into heaven? Who remembers?! Mary's ascension was a huge celestial black tie affair. Heavenly A-listers only!

It is mother-son love and failed romantic loves that have most occupied the minds of the great artists from time immemorial.
Yet motherhood ultimately is a form of masochism. It is a giving without the prospect of any kinds of reasonable returns, except the privilege of more giving. Children are essentially vampiric in that they suck the lifeblood from their parents and then when they are done they toss aside the useless carcasses, now too busy with their own lives. In this way, Mother Nature and children are co-conspirators always focused on the "next in line". If a pregnant woman eats too little for herself and her child, it is the child who will be fed first, not her. For Mother Nature, the next generation rules supreme.

The glow of pregnancy descends quickly into the energy-sapping abyss of child rearing. Why maternal infanticide is not more common is a mystery to me. Exceptionally beautiful women are often transformed into grotesque manifestations of their former selves. Not so with women like Sandra Kennedy, Sharon McConnell, Michelle Neita, or Wendy Duncan who have retained their sexual allure well past when it is decent for women with children to do so. Whatever secret elixir these women are drinking needs to be bottled and globally marketed under the label CK Defiance. They have obeahed Mother Nature and thwarted her plans.

Nature's only true unconditional love is a mother to her children. And subconscious conflicts eventually taint the love between her and her daughters, leaving at the end of the day only the mother and her son.
In the movie Sophie's Choice, when Meryl Streep is asked by the Nazi which of her children she would rather have killed or he kills them both - in the panic she relinquishes her daughter and keeps her son. This is the movie being true to life. In lifeboat ethics, a mother will throw out the husband, the daughter and herself to preserve her son.

And so on this auspicious hallmark day to honour the mother, I would like to pay particular homage to my own mother's unconditional and untainted love. To the woman who has always looked past my crimes and misdemeanours against God, country and family, and found something to love amidst the deviance and decadence. Happy Mother's Day, Mummy!

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