After years of therapy of various kinds I finally had to admit that most of my emotional problems could be traced back to my relationship with my mother and the secret thoughts I had about her. I had to go through much pain and torment to make real contact with my true inner self, and what I learned when I made that connection startled me and shocked me very profoundly at first.
This may be more common than we, especially men, want to admit, but the ramifications of the mother-son relationship can have an extraordinary, lifelong impact - and not always for the good. This subject has absorbed great minds for centuries, and most people are familiar with the concept of the Oedipus complex, which theorises that all sons want to have sexual intercourse with their mothers. One of the biographers of the English poet Lord Byron has speculated that the poet's conviction of the unreliability of all women might be traced back to his mother's tempestuous changes of mood. So who knows for sure what traumas can be visited upon us in the early years of that crucial relationship?
As I've said earlier, my mother was a glamorous, flirtatious woman. I'm sure she was quite promiscuous and might even have been addicted to men and to sex in the same way I later became addicted to alcohol. When I look back it seems there were men around her nearly all the time, although the full import of that only hit me later.
I think I was intimidated by her. I can't look back at our relationship and think of it as a normal mother-son relationship. This was not just because, given the circumstances of my father's alcoholism, I had taken on the role of father to the family, but perhaps because I may have unconsciously lusted after her.
This never manifested itself in any kind of physicality, and I don't think I knew what my true feelings toward her were at the time, but I know now that I felt bad then about the way I felt about her. Maybe even as children we can sense that a person is highly sexually charged, even if we can't express the idea that way.
I felt right from childhood that my feelings were suspect enough that they should be kept to myself but, as I explored my inner feelings more deeply, memories of events which I had long buried began to resurface. I recall, for instance, a time when I had committed some misdemeanour that had come to the attention of the police. This was followed by the usual series of visits to our house by the local cops. But these visits, especially by one particular garda, continued on the pretext that he was keeping any eye on me to make sure I was getting up to no more mischief.
On the surface, this was a noble gesture, but then I would see him and my mother talking and laughing at the hall door. Their joviality didn't square with his supposed interest in my welfare. They would disappear surreptitiously inside the house and all would be quiet for a while. I was probably too young to know what they were up to, but inside I knew something was wrong, and I didn't like the way it made me feel.
I never felt more alone than when one of my mother's lovers would call to the house and I'd be sent upstairs and everything would go totally quiet downstairs. On one occasion I was enraged enough to open an upstairs window and shout after one individual as he left, 'Don't come back here. We don't want you'. My mother dragged me in from the window and simply told me to go to sleep, although I doubt very much whether I was able to sleep, with the intense feelings of loneliness I was suffering.
My sister Catherine recently recalled that as a child she was in the local park with my mother one day when a man arrived who was obviously a close friend of my mother. After a brief chat he gave Catherine money to buy sweets in the local shop, but when she returned earlier than they had anticipated she found them having sex in the long grass.
This and other incidents confirm that my own suspicions were not based on some boyish fantasy. Unfortunately, not only did these suspicions make me feel bad inside, but I had nobody to talk to about them even if I had been able to verbalise them. So all these complex feelings were heaped on top of the fears of abandonment that had begun to trouble me from that first hospital visit when I was six. Perhaps my concern about my mother's sexual activities added to this fear, since each of those relationships brought with it the possibility that she would leave me for another man. Of course I had already been abandoned emotionally, but the fear of permanent physical abandonment was an even greater terror.
Somehow I could sense that she was not a normal mother. She was always extravagantly made up. She would regularly tell me some of the things certain men said about her - that she had fine legs, a fantastic figure or whatever. I don't think any child, boy or girl, expects his mother to talk to him or her like that. There seemed to be no boundaries between her and me in relation to sexual matters. Whereas most women, and indeed most men, adopt a modesty and a sense of privacy around their dressing and undressing, she would quite openly allow me to see her almost totally naked, putting on her nylon stockings, bra or knickers. Whether she was simply showing off or teasing me or whether she just didn't care who saw her in what stage of undress, I'll never know. I do know that such behaviour had an impact on me and certainly aroused in me some kind of sexual feelings towards her. But I was too young to be conscious either of her sexuality or of my own, so for me as a child it was all very confusing and damaging.
How often back then I wished that she would be normal and love me as a child should be loved. In a more mundane way, I would have given anything to see her wearing an apron, just like all the other mums I saw in the neighbourhood.
To add to my woes, her attractiveness was obvious even to the kids in my class at school. They would regularly ask me with a snigger if she was coming to collect me so that they could ogle her. They too could sense her sexuality. Few men would be in her company without flirting with her or passing some remark of a sexual nature, often accompanied by lewd guffaws or suggestive sniggering.
I think I felt threatened by her sexuality, and even if she had no intention of hurting me, I was the one left bearing the scars of her behaviour when all I desired was to feel loved and wanted. There were moments when I thought that such love was going to be forthcoming, only to have my expectations cruelly dashed.
There was one event that happened after I'd run away for the umpteenth time and was making a tentative move back towards the house, craving for her not only to want me back but also to show me some love and understanding this time. She met me on the road outside the house and seemed all-forgiving, telling me not to be afraid, to come and have my dinner and everything would be all right.
I was reluctant to trust her, as I edged my way along the hedge, but she somehow convinced me that this time she meant it. So I went in and sat down to a typical dinner of sausages and mashed potatoes with the other kids and everything seemed fine. I felt that maybe at last she had some compassion for me.
But not for long. As soon as I had finished eating, her attitude was totally transformed. She dragged me up the stairs by the hair, shouting and screaming obscenities at me, took off my clothes and beat the shit out of me with a belt.
When she was finished she locked me in the room as further punishment and took my clothes away to stop me from going off again. Of course the physical beating hurt me, but this was nothing compared to the ache of betrayal, and I was overcome by the need to be off again. I searched the room for clothes to wear and found a pair of my sister's slacks and a pair of her runners. Although they were several sizes too small for me I squeezed into them and escaped through the window, a ten-year-old child off again into the great big world in search of love, since the proper source of that love, my mother, was emotionally unavailable to me. Maybe I became addicted even at that early age; addicted to getting into trouble as the only answer to questions I didn't understand.
My mother left me feeling remorseful and guilty over the feelings I had for her, yet I had no way of acknowledging this and went into total denial instead. Even when through therapy as an adult I began to touch on these dormant feelings I tried to minimise them rather than face them fully. In this culture we're taught to honour our parents, so that pressures further prevented me from allowing myself to make contact with my true feelings. Instead, I would try to convince myself that it was me who was bad.
When my father, in his rages, called her a prostitute, I wasn't sure what he meant, although I knew it was a bad thing. In the fifties in Dublin there was a notorious brothel called Dolly Fossett's and the name would be the subject of crude remarks or dirty jokes. But I used to be terrified that, when my father called my mother a prostitute or a whore, maybe it was true and she was working somewhere like Dolly Fossett's.
So while it may seem irrational to others, as well as to myself, I've harboured a deep-seated mistrust of women all my life that has tainted even my most loving friendships with extraordinary depths of insecurity. Until I learned where all this stuff was coming from there were times in relationships when I tried to justify my mistrust by blaming my partner and exaggerating the effects of some trivial slight. I would blame her for how I felt and justify my behaviour in that way rather than having to accept the truth. I became angry, possessive, controlling and jealous to such an irrational degree that it must have mystified anybody with whom I had a close relationship.
I had yet to discover the truth of it, and I was always trying to fix 'the hole in my soul' by means that were outside myself. To me, in my appalling ignorance, it seemed quite simple. If a woman would only do exactly what I wanted her to do then I'd be okay. Today I can see this as age-regression, going back to old feelings from the past, but it set me up for co-dependency and I buried my feelings in alcoholism. Accepting where all my problems were coming from was the first, albeit painful, step towards understanding myself and allowing myself to grow. Until I hit on those inner feelings I had no true awareness of myself and wrote a song called 'Running From Freedom' about my earlier refusal to deal with my feelings.
Because of my feelings about my mother I've never had a successful relationship with any woman. On a mental level it all seems perfectly natural that I should have responded in the way I did, but that realisation itself does not heal the pain or give me back that lost childhood. Nor does it ease the inability to manage the buried feelings which often surface without warning, even today, and cause havoc in my head and in my dealings with others. Sometimes today when I speak about these matters I can feel all the grief lodging on my chest, and it affects my respiration quite badly. For my own sanity and for the sake of my own growth I have to face these facts. Rejecting my own feelings means I am actually rejecting part of myself. No matter how I or anybody else might try to dress it up, my mother was the way she was and there's nothing to be gained from denying any longer the extent to which I was affected by her behaviour. Nor is there any advantage in denying my feelings towards her, irrespective of whether these feelings are socially acceptable or not.
Understanding where all my problems stem from at least gives me an explanation for them, but it still doesn't stop me driving women away from me because they are essentially dealing with an adult spurred by the feelings of a child. I become afraid of other men in case they take my woman away from me. It's my main ambition to heal this, because I don't like being a co-dependent, depending emotionally on another human being to the extent that I do whenever I get involved in a relationship.
But I can take some comfort in knowing that I'm finally beginning to take responsibility for my feelings, and I feel no shame in making these admissions. Nor do I want to get stuck in the rut of blaming my mother for it all, but it is important to place the responsibility where it lies. n
* The Winner In Me - Don Baker's Story, by Jackie Hayden, published by Marino is on sale now, priced #9.99.