Mama’s Boy

Audi!

Clyde has been raised by women.  His father and I split up when he was just 9 months old.  Though his father was involved and shared custody, the people around him most of all were me, Claudia (the children’s nanny) his grandmother, his aunt and his sisters.  Poor Clyde, people would say, surrounded by women. The other day Ivy put on a play necklace at my mom’s house.  He wanted one too.  My mom hesitated.  “Well, maybe we can make you a manly necklace, that a boy would wear.  Like, out of manly beads.” I had no idea what that might look like, but it sounded ridiculous considering there were already plenty of necklaces in the house leftover from Hazel’s princess phase.  Once when he saw me painting Hazel’s nails, he wanted me to paint his too.  I couldn’t think of a compelling reason not to, so I did.  He was very proud of his blue nail polish until his dad told him that was only for girls.  I’m not sure if he liked the look of it necessarily, but he just wanted to be one of the crowd and it so happened the crowd were women.

A typical early family photo. Clyde sobbing.

He and I have always been joined at the hip.  I suppose this is why people make off handed remarks about him being a mama’s boy.  But there’s a reason I think.  As a baby, he was a wreck.  He was born with torticollis, and low muscle tone on one side of his body.  His neck was was at such an alarming angle that it looked broken.  He was in physical therapy for nearly a year because of it.  They’d induced me early because ultrasounds showed he’d stopped growing -  most likely because his twin sister Ivy had sat on him for nine months.  When he was born, the doctor showed me a knot in his cord and quickly undid it.  I took him home from the hospital two days later.  I couldn’t believe they let me.  He was 4 lbs, 11 ounces.  He looked, when undressed, like some small animal kicked out of its nest.  For the first few months all he did was scream.  He even cried in his sleep.  He had acid reflux and he was screaming because it hurt to eat, screaming because he was about to throw up, or screaming because he was starving from all the throwing up.  He was up all day and all night which meant I was too.  I was a zombie.  I fell asleep once at the changing table.  Ivy was left to fend for herself.  I would put her in a baby swing and prop a bottle in her mouth, while I walked Clyde around and around.  He would arch away from me in pain from the acid reflux.  Claudia, who we’d hired for some relief, would come to the house with spare clothes she could change into because he so routinely threw up on her.  He would sleep in just two places: the downstairs bathroom with the fan turned on, or on the top of the clothes dryer in his car seat, dryer going, a brick wedged against the car seat so the vibrations wouldn’t topple the car seat over the edge.  And because his father could not deal with Clyde’s screaming, the job that was Clyde fell to me.  He went with me everywhere.   It was him and me.  He could barely stand to be separated from me for a moment.   And as soon as he could walk, he clopped around in my high heels.  He wanted makeup on.  He saw Hazel and Ivy in princess dresses and he wanted one on too.  Why not?  After all, that’s what the rest of the gang was doing.

But he was, and is, equally interested in the traditionally boy stuff.  He helps Arun work on his car (as much as a three year old can).  He points out all the motorcycles on the road.  He guns an imaginary engine on his bike before scooting off down the driveway.  But for some reason people seem unsettled by the girl stuff.  While no one comments when Ivy asks to play with Clyde’s fire engine, those same people give an uneasy laugh when they see Clyde diligently putting pajamas on one of Ivy’s baby dolls.  Mama’s boy. As if at this early age, it is somehow weird for him to be attached to me, as if it spells doom, and he will still be in my house when he’s thirty.

In fact he’s the one I worry about the least.  I know when he’s pissed off.  I know when he’s sad.  I know when he’s overjoyed.  The girls are quiet, mysterious creatures, I rarely seem to know what they’re thinking.  Sometimes when he’s upset or frustrated, he throws his whole body down on the ground – it doesn’t matter where we are, Target, the parking lot of Chuck E. Cheese, the driveway – and lays there like Victorian heroine overcome by a fit of hysteria.  “Get up, Scarlett O’Hara,” I used to say to him.  And if girls are supposed to be the compassionate ones, that certainly isn’t the case in our house. Neither of my girls worry about others the way he does.  From the time he could talk and ask for things, he would, without fail, ask that his sisters get the same.  I’d hand him a cookie and he’d prompt me: “Ivy and Hazel too?” He would not touch his own cookie until he had one for his sisters as well.  He worried if Ivy was crying and demand I do something about it.  She’d be wailing in the car about something and if he thought I was ignoring her, he’d shout, “Mom, Ivy’s CRYING!”  He even worries about fish.  One day last week when I was particularly exhausted, Ivy asked to feed the fish, which because she has eat and feed mixed up in her head, came out as:  “I’m going to eat the fish now.”  I was too tired to argue with her and watched her pull a chair over and, of course, put way too much food in there.  Clyde saw the whole thing happening and asked to do the same.  I already knew I’d have to clean the tank out, so I nodded to him.  He followed Ivy’s lead – too much food.  A while later he saw me peering into the fish tank at all the food pellets already bloated with water and turning white.  “We shouldn’t put so much food in there,” I told him.  “Goldie will get sick.  Too much food is not good for the fish.”  He was crestfallen.  “Oh no,” he said, eyes wide.  “I didn’t know that.  Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me he get sick?”

I have a picture of Clyde wearing a dress.  Smiling happily with his sisters, maybe taken when he was 2 years old.  They’re all dressed up as princesses.  I showed it to my mom and she seemed alarmed and uncomfortable.  It’s funny, no one will ever tease Ivy for being a tomboy.  But somehow boys aren’t afforded the same thing.  Girls behaving like boys indicates strength and independence.  Boys behaving like girls indicates weakness and foolishness.   Why is that?

One of these kids is doing his own thing, come on can you tell me which one?

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wonder about him wanting to be like his sisters and his mom. But I think it’s that he wants to be like his heroes, and his hero back then was me. It still is in a lot of ways, though Arun is certainly starting to edge me out. At our wedding he was thrilled to have the same suit as Arun, a tie like Arun, shoes like Arun. On Friday, he and Arun wore their white Converse. Arun took him to school and the first thing he did when he walked in the door was exclaim to the teacher: “Look at my shoes, they’re just like Arun’s!”