Hi Sandra,
Here is a bit about Jason’s background that I promised.
Jason’s parents are working class folk, with middle class aspirations for their kids. Hard working pleasant people. Jason has one older sister born sixteen months before Jason. His birth was difficult in fact it was a wonder either mother or baby lived. His mother’s womb burst, she was rushed to hospital and Jason was delivered by cesarean. Pronounced dead, Jason was laid to one side as they worked on saving his mother. It was some minutes later that a nurse noticed that Jason was in fact still alive. It was to be another four days before mother and baby were united.
I believe that the foundation for Jason’s deep sense of abandonment were laid down at that point. His little body would have been flooded by the panic that his mother felt when her womb burst and the subsequent four days with no contact with his mother would have reinforced his anxiety. For Jasons mother her subsequent physical and mental health issues meant that Jason would continue to experience through most of his young childhood times where his mother was inaccessible to him either physically or emotionally. A pattern was established of great emotional closeness followed by separation, a pattern that left Jason desperate to please her and deeply afraid that he would lose her again. He loved her deeply but was afraid of her too.
Her physical discipline of him could at times be unexpected and extreme. For example a sudden smack under the chin with her open hand if she caught him with his mouth open that would leave his tongue bleeding. At other times Jason would be sent to the bathroom where he would have to wait until she came with the leather strap to smack his legs or sometime wait an hour or more until his Dad came home so that he would strap him.
It was the emotional abuse however that has left its deepest wounds on Jason. On a number of occasions his mother would for some minor childhood mistake threaten to send him to a social welfare home for naughty boys. On a number of occasions she would carry this threat though to the point of getting down a suitcase making him help her pack it with his clothes then sit him on his bed next to his packed case Teddy in his arms waiting for the lady for the social welfare home to come and pick him up. He would be sobbing and begging not to be sent away promising her that he would be a good boy for Mummy. She should be crying and saying that she loved him but she had to send him away. Always at the last moment he was given a second chance. From the age of three to five these scenarios were played out on several occasions and he was terrified by them.
Jason has told me that the big lesson he carried with him from those experiences
was that even if your Mummy loved you, and he never doubted that she did, she could still abandon him. He has never felt completely safe with his mother but has never stopped loving her, and amazingly, never blames her.
By the age of six, he had developed an anxiety based speech impediment. In a world that seemed overwhelming and confusing he intuitively came up with the idea that if he could once more be just a little baby, loved and cared for with no expectations on him other than just to be, he could then achieve the emotional safety he so needed. The longing that formed that idea and the idea itself has never left him. His parents sent him to speech therapy and by the age of eleven he had conquered that disability, but not the longing to return to a mothers arms as a baby. As he grew into adolescence his mother was no longer the object of his longings, part of him was separating from her, but subconsciously he was looking for the loving gaze of a mother in every girl he met.
His schooling was hugely disrupted by the numerous shifts of his family, six schools by the time he was twelve, but he emerged at age of twenty two a University graduate, but with a great emotional hole in his life that he did not know how to heal and over which he felt deep shame. He continued to seek relief by wearing nappies and retreating into an imaginary world of maternal nurturing, where he would imagine himself to be a two- year old toddler cared for by a kind and nurturing Mummy.
I met him, as you know, while we were both at University, he doing post- graduate studies. I fell in love with him and he found in me the kindness that gave him the courage to share his story. Rather than repel me his plight captured me. To my love for him was added a sense of mission. I began to mother him, aided I might add by my studies in child development which were a big part of my teacher training. Those studies provided me with much of the intellectual tools to understand this man who was in some deep ways emotionally stuck in toddlerhood.
In the last seven years I have bought to his life deep joy, even ecstasy and a measure of peace and security that was not there before. I feel good about that but I now know that I will never fundamentally be able to change him. His longing to be treated by me as my little boy is hard wired in. I have come to accept that’s the way he is, but he still feels deeply conflicted and ashamed of those needs while at the same time delighting in them.
So there he is, a sort of hybrid man, a Peter Pan with his Wendy, a lost little boy who longs to be a nappy wearing toddler again, a hurt little boy trapped in a mans body. At the same time he does not want to completely give up his adult life, he enjoys his adult friends and does well in his work. The mindset of returning to the nursery where he is cared for by a strong and protective mummy who will change him, nurse him, praise him, train him, discipline him and play with him is however an enduring desire, and one he lives with every day.