This weekend, I took my baby boy to the zoo for the first time. We saw zebras and giraffes, and witnessed a tiger leap. We delighted in watching a family of gibbons. While the father swung about, mother and baby gibbon played together on an eye-level platform.
The baby was obviously a very naughty ape. He was impulsive, hyperactive and climbed all over things. (Thus, if a boy, he would have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.) He and his mother grappled in a round of mock battles that even Ultimate Fighting Championship fans would have appreciated. When his attacks became too truculent, mother swiped him in a giant blow, sending him sliding across the floor, cartoon-like. Baby would then dive back to her, but instead of continuing the melee, he'd collapse into her chest and begin suckling.
It struck me that my baby and I spend our time together in similar ways - breastfeeding, wrestling, cuddling, biting and making silly sounds that could easily come from the wild. It also struck me that taking my son to the zoo for the first time may have been more exciting than any date I've ever been on.
The intimacies of mother and child, whether ape or human, are so physically and emotionally deep that everything else fails to compare. Consequently, I wondered if Papa Ape felt left out and that's what all the incessant tree-swinging was about.
Lambasted for her 2005 New York Times essay, "Truly, Madly, Guiltily", Ayelet Waldman became famous for expressing this one thought: that she loved her husband more than her children. So outraged were mother's groups in the US that Waldman was called forth by Oprah to defend herself.
The essay itself is a good read. In it, Waldman also explores a woman's erotic transition from focusing on her partner to her child. She writes, "... the real reason for this lack of sex, or at least the most profound, is that the wife's passion has been refocused. Instead of concentrating her ardour on her husband, she concentrates it on her babies. Where once her husband was the centre of her passionate universe, there is now a new sun ... Libido, as she once knew it, is gone, and in its place is all-consuming maternal desire."
Therapist Esther Perel, in Mating In Captivity, believes many of us fall in love with our children, literally. Child centrality, Perel argues, has reached unprecedented, almost cult-like stature.
Discussing these ideas with my own mother's group, one of the women replied, "With your child it's a different kind of love. It blows you away. I wasn't expecting the strength of it, and how wrapped up I am. It's hard to remember you also love your husband. It sucks a lot of love out of you. I'm so preoccupied."
In The Social Life Of Monkeys And Apes, S. Zuckerman writes that for many of these animals, foreplay includes prolonged play-fighting, bodily contact and exploration. One of the secrets of motherhood is that many women experience more intimacy with their children than their partners. The touching, kissing, stroking and caretaking involved in the care of young children can be a sensual practice of love.
I'm off to baby massage class now. Pity my poor husband.
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