It wasn’t that I was some kind of obsessed mother interested in the benefits of skin-to-skin contact. How attached were we? I don’t think I laid him on a surface other than my chest for the first five months of his life. With my first son, I was one of those mothers who was all-in, and my son knew it. Had I perhaps been trying too hard? In a word, yes. Clearly I could win anyone over with a little effort, a concerted approach, and whole lot of Goldfish crackers. It had taken my husband three years to ask me to marry him. I wasn’t just charmed, I was awash in a rare sea of complete fulfillment.

“How about at night? Can we be married at night?” he asked.Īdorable! My son wanted to marry me. But I’m already married to Daddy,” I answered. “Mama, I’m going to marry you when I grow up.” Not long after my son’s third birthday, he didn’t so much pop the question as state his intentions. By my calculations we were right on schedule. In classic Freudian psychology, the Oedipus complex rears itself between the ages of 3 and 6.

Bane of high school classics courses, he was the inspiration for Freud’s Oedipus complex, the stage of psychosexual development when a child feels varying degrees of jealousy toward his father. The mythical Greek king of Thebes, son of King Laius and Queen Jacosta, the doomed prince who fulfills the Oracle of Delphi’s prophecy that any son of Laius will kill his father, marry his mother and destroy his family. But they didn’t say anything about the tongue kissing, or the eye surgeries, or the way a tiny tyrant of a child might, despite the meticulous detail with which you have built your marriage and your family, decide he can replace his father. Wait until he asks you to marry him!” they said. “Little boys love their mothers differently,” they said. “All little boys love their mothers,” they said.

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