Blame Mommy

What happens when a man becomes a killer? It's his mom's fault--if she didn’t love him too little, she loved him too much.

Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

When I first became a mom, I knew I was bound to make mistakes. I was correct about that, and I’ve written about some of those mistakes. I was too permissive with my spirited firstborn child. I failed to set boundaries around his picky eating, and to this day he eats only five foods (arguably, this might have been inevitable no matter what I did—two feeding therapists said there was nothing even they could do.) I anticipated that I would make mistakes like these, but the one thing I never anticipated was that I could be too close to him.

Sure, you don’t want to be the mom showing up uninvited at your child’s dorm room when they’re in college, but I never saw the issue with showing tons of unconditional, snuggly love to a child who is still young enough to enjoy it. I didn’t even think it was that big of a deal to be the annoying mom whose kisses her preteen wipes off before school—better than being distant and cold. I never saw the problem with going on “mommy baby dates” with your child, unless you do something weird that implies role-playing for eventual romantic dates (for example, making your minor son pay.) Although the topic hasn’t come up yet, I plan to make it clear to both my children that I will never kick them out of the house, even as adults. I have worried about accidentally making my kids think I don’t love them (if I raise my voice, will that traumatize them?) but I never worried that I could love them too much or be too close to them.

Until now, I guess. For a while, I thought the “boy mom” archetype was limited to the real wackos—the mom who wears white to her son’s wedding, for example. But the tragic shooting of Charlie Kirk unearthed a new way that moms can apparently screw up. Within minutes of the shooter being identified, people began digging up his mother’s old Facebook posts in an effort to get to the bottom of how she raised such a troubled young man. Internet psychological sleuths came to the conclusion that she was too close with him, as evidenced by mother-son dates and mom-jokes about how her kids “ditched” her on Halloween to go trick-or-treating. Never mind that her other sons haven’t murdered anyone. Her being an “emotionally incestuous boy mom” was the cause of the murder, not her adult son’s actions.

Plenty of people speculated about his politics (and continue to do so) but nobody speculated about his father being too distant or too close. They saw evidence of an involved, present, loving mother and decided that everything had to be her fault—maybe she wasn’t neglectful or abusive, but that’s exactly the point. If you only show evidence of being supportive, loving and nurturing, you are “emotionally incestuous.” If you don’t show evidence of being supportive, loving and nurturing, you are “neglectful and cold.” If you’re a woman and your son grows up to do something horrible, it’s going to be your fault no matter what you did.