Miranda's Son
My son came home slumped and sheepish, resembling every overgrown undergraduate who had ever sidled into my office with a grudge and nowhere else to put it. I had just stacked a fresh pile of blue books on the Chesterfield and was savoring the last of the fancy tea my son gave me for my birthday. When I set the mug on a coaster, his gaze followed it, as if even my minor rituals required full study before he could speak.
“Mom, do you have a second?”
Not “Miranda,” not even “Professor,” as his sycophantic friends had always delighted to call me. I patted the couch next to me. He perched on its edge without sitting, hands knitting themselves into knots.
“It ended,” he said.
For a moment I thumbed through the names of his ex-girlfriends, trying to recall which one had lately annexed his time. I settled on Mallory, the cappuccino-colored TA with an immune response to punctuation. Never my favorite, but that wasn’t the point. He was enthralled by her. Until, it seemed, he wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I said. He blinked at this, as if he’d expected an analytic dissection, or as if the notion of simple condolence was somehow beneath me. Perhaps it often was. I let my palm rest against the middle of his back and moved it in a small, slow circle. “Was it mutual?”
“Not really. She said—” He drew in a breath so dense I could practically hear the exhale of his deflating self-respect. “She said I was too ‘repressed’ for a D/s dynamic. Her words.”
I would have laughed, but his wounded pride performed such acrobatics across his face I had to summon sympathy instead. “Submissive, then.” I said it quietly, neither a question nor a diagnosis. He nodded. “Have you always known?” I asked, a clinician’s curiosity layered over a mother’s concern.
“For a long time. No one ever told me it was because I was immature, though.” He trailed off, unsure if I’d want to finish the sentence for him. I did not.
“Saying you are repressed doesn’t mean you’re immature.” Sometimes I was unable to turn off the lectures. “It means you have a guiding force within you that you are unaware of.”
He was quiet for a moment. Looked down at his hands. When he spoke, it was so soft I almost missed it. “My guiding force is that I want to be told how to keep her happy.”
I sat with that statement for a bit. “That is far from a bad thing,” I said. “Most women would say the men with whom they keep company could use more of that.”
He laughed or tried to. The sound was fist-sized and hollow, desperate for an exit. A way of saying that statement didn’t fit with his experience.
“What happens next?” I asked, less as a prompt than a challenge.
He looked away, down at his shoes. Classic signs of anxiety and avoidance. “I don’t know. Everyone always says to be authentic, but my authentic self keeps screwing things up.” He flopped back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Why am I like this, Mom? What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you.” It was reflexive statement. The mother in me speaking instead of the clinician. I picked my words carefully. “One explanation for submissiveness in men is that they hold a romanticized vision of their mother. She is beautiful and powerful, the embodiment of feminine sexuality, but she is unattainable.” I shrugged. “The result is a desire to replace sexual intimacy with devotional service. To yield power for the sake ...