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MOMMY DISEASE
the regretted child
I know people so incredibly handicapped by emotional cowardice,
they tend to invent surreal scenarios: a Bizarro World
latticework of a fragmented, delusional non-reality where they
are the hero of their own story and whatever ultimately
ridiculous and extreme betrayal of faith they commit becomes
somehow justified by my motives- which they've invented in their
head. Much simpler to walk out on your wife than say, "Sorry."
Much simpler to invent some scenario where she had it coming.
Somebody keeps calling my house and hanging
up without leaving a message. The number
shows up on Caller ID but there is no name,
so I have no idea who this is. Regrettably,
I also have not much curiosity, except to
assume whoever this is is a woman. Men leave
messages. Women have feelings; some
emotional recourse that prevents them from
simply identifying themselves. Whoever this
is is someone who is convinced they love me,
and so is entitled to stalk me night and
day.
I find this really curious. With each
caller ID alert, I study the flashing light
and wonder what's going through her mind.
It's such an odd paradox of warped logic
that informs the stalker; typically someone
obsessed on some level with the subject of
their harassment. I love you, therefore I
shall harass you endlessly. This happens to
me so often that I've just grown accustomed
to it. I could call this person back, but I
figure anyone too cowardly to leave a
message is not worth knowing.
I have a hate-thing going with my
telephone. The telephone and mailbox are
rarely deliverers of glad tidings or joy.
They are ticking bombs. Pandora's Mailbox.
You turn your key in your mailbox, and all
manner of hell can and often does leap out
at you. A blocked Caller ID could mean
anything. I am frequently stalked. I'm not
even famous, but I am frequently and
globally stalked. I was once stalked from
Spain, as if I was actually going to return
that call.
There is a certain emptiness that informs
nearly all of our actions, what 17th century
mathematician Blaise Pascal, in his famous
Provincial Letters directed against the
Jesuits, and his Pensées, called "The
God-Shaped Hole." It is, ultimately, our
need for God and our search for Him,
something religion rarely provides real
solutions for. As I approach 40, I find
myself embracing an almost Vulcan ideal of
emotional discipline. I find that most
everyone I know is, emotionally, a drunken
sailor, reeling about from crisis to crisis,
thin-skinned and desperate for validation
and acceptance. Just going out for a pizza
is nearly impossible, and relationships
require patience, hefty maintenance and good
emotional distance.
We all too frequently become invested in
denial. Clotheslined by insecurity and
hampered by rampant ego (perhaps not enough
or, worse, too many hugs as children), many
become so completely invested in whatever
stupid, indefensible point of view they'd
been advocating that they will torch
friendships and family rather than admit
they were wrong. I think I was about twelve
when I first realized simply saying, "Hey, I
was wrong," would cut a two hour argument
down to about fifteen seconds. "Sorry"
drains all the energy and stress out of a
fight and reduces it to a fairly simple
question: Who Wants To Be The A-Hole? See,
the A-Hole is the one who keeps fighting
after the flag has been dropped on the play.
Whoever is still fussing after the "I'm
Sorry" is the A-Hole. Tag. You're It.
But, "Sorry," is beyond the emotional
resources of a great many people. I know
people so incredibly handicapped by
emotional cowardice, they tend to invent
surreal scenarios: Bizarro World
latticeworks of a fragmented, delusional
non-reality where they are the hero of their
own story and whatever ultimately ridiculous
and extreme betrayal of faith they commit
becomes somehow justified by my motives—
which they've invented in their head. Much
simpler to walk out on your wife than say,
"Sorry." Much simpler to invent some
scenario where she had it coming.
"Sorry" is an admission that your world was
somehow wrong. That your belief system has
somehow failed you and you're now spinning
off into space with no sure footing beneath
you. "Sorry" is devastating to Self, and
Self is the enemy of most any attempt at
human contact. At that most surreal of
exercises, trying to synchronize the needs
and desires of organic, uniquely spiritual
beings into some organized social system.
I don't use the term, "Best Friend." Why
should one friend be the "best"? How could
one person be more "best" than another? It
burdens the relationship with a
responsibility: to live up to being The
Best, a weight no relationship needs.
Relationships— friends, family or lovers—
are intrinsically evanescent. People we
would die for today we hardly remember to
call next year. And we all seem to be
victims of a collective amnesia, passing
through this cycle again and again in a
misplaced hope of filling The God Hole with
fallible, imperfect mortals capable of only
fallible, imperfect relationships. How many
times have you been nuzzling someone and
whispering your greatest secrets,
fantasizing about a long and happy future,
only to eventually not even be speaking to
that person? Or, worse, maybe you've married
that person and he or she has emotionally
checked out, become one of the Walking
Emotionally Dead we see shuffling aimlessly
through shopping malls across America.
 Ever
see that? That dead look in the guy's eye as
he reluctantly sidles along with his wife—
who, in nearly very case, has neglected her
figure and succumbed to rampant Mommy
Disease— while pushing the ubiquitous
umbrella stroller with the fussy child who
came as a surprise to them both; a child who
is most certainly loved and, at least in
dad's case, most certainly regretted. His is
the mask of desperation. Kill Me. Kill Me
Now. Please.
I can always tell the married couples in a
restaurant by seeing who's not talking. If
you see a couple, with or without The
Regretted Child, who seem bored and aren't
talking to each other, they are most surely
married. And, whether they admit it or not,
they are both looking for the nearest exit,
which is likely to be some stupid,
meaningless fight that simply presents an
opportunity to end the misery they are both
enduring. These are the same people who once
couldn't keep their hands off each other.
Who used to talk all night long, take
interminable walks, who cried and prayed and
demanded of God an eternal bond with each
other, now rendered mute by the tyranny of
pancakes and Simulac.
The death of sexual intimacy usually
coincides with the purchase of the minivan,
the worst idea a wife could ever have. In
the ongoing struggle between emotion and
intellect, most wives I've met sabotage
their family's future by alienating a man
from his manhood, forcing him into maroon or
tan Plymouth Voyagers and so submerging
herself in motherhood that she denies him
the mystery, thrill and hunt of his glory
days. To many a married man, the arrival of
the minivan signals his best days are behind
him and the decay of his relationship with
his best friend is a slow retreat into
eunuch-hood.
 It's
emotion versus intellect. The desperate
woman married to the man who has emotionally
checked out, but choosing to see what she
wants to see rather than admit she's
actually alone in every way that counts,
and, worse, that she's not nineteen and not
built like Brittany Spears and her prospects
for happiness and security are totally
screwed if she lets reality in. So she goes
on pretending this man who barely speaks to
her, who spends the majority of his time in
the street, who never seems satisfied or
emotionally invested— this... child... who
once pursued her like the house was on fire,
who professed love and devotion over and
over, who stood before God and made a vow to
her, but whose interest in her has waned to
what's for dinner— she goes on deluding
herself that things are fine. Admitting,
even to herself, anything close to the truth
would be emotionally catastrophic.
Or, conversely, the guy whose manhood has
been beaten to death by a woman suffering
rabid Mommy Disease. He's allowed her to
become his mommy and she's allowed herself
to become his mommy. She looks like his
mommy. He has to ask her permission to get a
ham sandwich. Mommy, can I have a ham
sandwich? She treats him like a child, must
approve all of his activities and
expenditures, and he's somehow decided to
check his penis at the door and actually, my
God in heaven, pay good money for a minivan.
He allows Mommy to run rampant just to keep
the peace in the house, but in keeping the
peace he's not protecting his family: for
the family to be strong, the husband,
ideally, should be a man, and a wife a
woman. Denying him his manhood, even by
virtue of his own cowardice, erodes the
household's foundation.
And he's not helping her. No warm-blooded
woman wants to be Mommy. They want to be
Brittany. They hate Brittany because
Brittany has that body and that face and can
sleep with literally any many in the world,
including her own husband. But she has
retreated into Mommy because Mommy is safe.
The authoritative, pushy, demanding woman,
the edge of threat most always in her voice
(even when she's joking), is a cry for help.
This is an enormously insecure person. This
is someone who wants to be desired and loved
and romanced and dragged off to bed but,
failing the Brittany test, their self-image
hampered by the reality of child-bearing or
the march of time, has had her worst fears
confirmed by her mate's capitulation to her
Mommy act. She's brow-beaten him into
accepting her matriarchal position, and his
surrender is a damming condemnation for her,
a validation of her worse fear: that she is,
in fact, not Brittany. She is Mommy.
 Most
every single mom I've ever dated was a
ticking bomb. A person so devastated by
wrong choices; wonderful women who've borne
children to the most knuckle of heads:
thugs, lowlifes, idiots. Most every single
mom I know is emotionally scarred and
totally vested in being Mommy. Mommy is
their armor, their shield. And I am the
enemy. I have a penis, therefore any opinion
I have is ultimately worth less than one
offered by someone possessing ovaries. They
encourage me to bond with their kids and
then use the kids as a weapon when we have a
disagreement: Mommy is mad at Priest,
therefore the kids aren't even allowed to
call.
I'm tired of it. I'm so sick of it that I
don't even bother anymore. It's this stupid
power struggle; them trying to beat me into
submission, into a capitulation to their
Mommy Act, while I'm trying to see them as
human beings, worthy of and able to give
love. And, know something? If they win, if
they beat me into submission, their interest
in me evaporates. Many of these women could
never truly love a man who, by consequence
of such surrender, confirms her own worst
fears about herself. The body of evidence
seems to suggest many of these woman can
only get truly lathered up over men who seem
impervious to their Mommy Act: men who will,
ultimately, mistreat them.
I get chastised a lot for being a recluse.
"Recluse" has come to take on a negative
connotation, and I guess that's why I get
stalked. But, some people are cut out to be
recluses. Writers, most especially, have a
voracious need for personal space and quiet.
I am never happier than when I am freed of
timetables and dates, left alone to wander
and dream and create. I can't do that with
well-meaning stalkers hanging around.
I've seen this a million times: people
spending money and time and effort to cross
the city or the country to get to other
family members to celebrate this or that and
see how everyone's grown and so forth.
They've spent a fortune and they're
exhausted and, within an hour of their
arrival, everyone has exhausted all obvious
avenues of conversation and are reaching for
any lifeline in this forced repatriation
process. Most everyone in the house is
having the same thought, My God, when are
we/they leaving?
I used to get dragged to my mother-in-law's
house in Queens, and within an hour of our
arrival, the happy sisters have run out of
things to talk about and have immersed
themselves in an Amish barn-raising of
dinner preparation while we husband-units
were banished to the basement to watch
sports on a 12-inch black and white TV and
pretend we actually had something in common.
I hate sports. I think maybe, if I ran into
him on the street, I'd know who Michael
Jordan was, but that's about it. And,
sitting in the basement week after week, the
moral equivalent of my own minivan, I felt
my manhood waste off of me and became a
disembodied observer of my own life: of
these people who put themselves to such
great extremes only to find themselves
ultimately speechless and bored and
wondering why they came all that way.
This is what the ringing phone represents to
me, this hell of irreducible proportions. I
have absolutely no curiosity as to who this
is. Anyone too cowardly to leave a message
is not entitled to my friendship.
And, within minutes, the world is quiet
again.
Christopher J. Priest
October 2000
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