The Most Powerful Bond of All

By Anastasia Toufexis

A mother-son relationship can sometimes exact a heavy price

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie's mother begged him not to marry until after she died; he waited one year after her death and finally wed at 52. Dwight Eisenhower interrupted planning of the Allied invasion of France in May 1944 to send a Mother's Day greeting to Ida Eisenhower in Kansas. When Franklin Roosevelt was quarantined with scarlet fever at boarding school, his distraught mother Sara climbed a ladder each day to peer through the window of his room to check on his recovery. Actor James Dean explained his troubled life this way: "My mother died on me when I was nine years old. What does she expect me to do? Do it all alone?"

The cord that unites mother and son may be Western society's most powerful bond, yet attitudes toward the relationship are either murky or coated over with cliche. "We think we're comfortable with it, but culturally what we get are caricatures," argues Carole Klein, a longtime observer of the dynamics of family relationships. Klein, 48, who shuttles between running group counseling sessions for women in New York City and writing about psychology and sociology, is the author of The Single Parent Experience (1973), The Myth of the Happy Child (1975) and, this year's Mothers and Sons (Houghton Mifflin; $14.95).

In the popular, and distorted, view, says Klein, Mom is either asexual and saintly or a devouring harridan who lives vicariously through her son and whose traumatizing influence is responsible for "everything that goes wrong, from failure in school to homosexuality." Such skewed portraits deny the richness and the intensity of the connection. "Indeed," says Klein, "the tie is stronger than that between father and son and father and daughter. Fathers can mitigate or reinforce a mother's views, but she is the life-giver and, even in today's changing society, still the chief nurturing figure in the family. The bond is also more complex than the one between mother and daughter. For a woman, a son offers the best chance to know the mysterious male existence."

Mothers and Sons was inspired by women's confidences, revealed in group discussions, about the troubling attitudes men bring to marriage. The book also springs from Klein's perception that there were gender-associated differences in the way she responded as a young mother to her own son William, now 27, and daughter Emily, 23, and the way they responded to her. "I tended to be more self-conscious with William," she recalls, "and more spontaneous with Emily."

Klein culled professional and literary works and consulted dozens of psychologists and psychiatrists for her book. She also drew heavily on questionnaires filled out by 500 mothers, ranging in age from their late 20s to late 60s. Almost half the women had in-depth follow-up discussions. Two hundred men, aged 15 to late 50s, most of them unrelated to the female respondents, were interviewed at length.

For many women, says Klein, a son means a sense of completeness. Said one subject: "It's as if, through him, I've found the missing half of myself." Fathers do not identify as strongly with daughters, seeing their role more as protector. The feeling of creating a lost half may account for the extraordinarily close relationship between some mothers and sons, but it is not without dangers. As the boy matures and is shaped by the woman's sensibilities, he may emerge as his mother's perfect man, her emotional and intellectual mate. Says Klein: "The mother may have to acknowledge that her son, not her husband, is the man she would have liked to marry."

A central dilemma for mother and son is when to ease the tie. "Traditionally," says Klein, "we encourage an emotional and physical distancing from mothers earlier in boys than in girls." Part of the reason is fear of the erotic potential of the bond, but in addition there is the cultural belief that boys should be stoic, competitive and independent. Klein believes the separation comes too soon for boys, and they pay a heavy price: "I'm convinced it is what creates fears of intimacy and makes them unable to express their feelings as adults." One sign that we may be putting too many early pressures on boys: many men say the happiest memories of their mothers are those that center on a childhood illness, when the boys dropped their fears of appearing unmanly and allowed themselves to be comforted unstintingly. "My mother would sit near my bed after she brought me lunch, and we'd listen to soap operas together," one man recalled. "When I went back to school, it was as if I'd been completely revitalized."

Curiously, the feminist movement, which has done much to break traditional gender roles, has been slow in turning its attention to the way boys are reared. "Feminists," notes Klein, "have been devoted to strengthening the lives of daughters, largely by adopting male traits. But we have neglected to prepare boys to be the mates of liberated daughters by fostering some feminine traits. Mothers agitate more to get their daughters admitted to a shop class or a ball team than they do to get sons into a sewing or dance group."

Feminists, says the author, have belatedly recognized that their resentment against a male-dominated society is sometimes misdirected against their sons. For some mothers a male child can become a symbol of male oppression. One concerned activist has put a lid on the more rabid rhetoric when her son is around, explaining, "How can he not grow up to be hostile toward women if they always seem so hostile to him?"

Klein is remarkably reticent about her own relationship with her son William, a public-radio producer. He is more forthcoming. His admiring view of women, he believes, was shaped in great part by his mother's ability to juggle career, marriage and children. He remembers a poster she once tacked up in her office at home. "It said SUPERMOM WORKS HERE," recalls William Klein. "And, you know, she was right."

--ByAnastasia Toufexis