MotherWoman Group Discussion: When they hang all over us.

By Liz Friedman

We are going to start putting up conversations from our MotherWoman groups on our blog so that we can continue them on line.  Here’s the first.  Let me know what you think.

In a recent MotherWoman group we began our conversation focused on our relationship to our bodies, to the ongoing “lookism” (obsession with looking like young beautiful women that we are surrounded by all the time in our culture) and how that impacts us individually.  Of course, this went in many many directions, from our relationships to health, our bodies, our sexuality, to our relationships with our sons and daughters and gender stereotypes and the limitations that are experienced.  There were true confessions and real frustrations expressed, as always.

One that really resonated for me was this ongoing struggle that I have with my children (who I have brought up to be physically intimate with me) when they cross my line and want to be more intimate with me than I want.  They want to be hanging on my body, touching my breasts, putting their heads up my shirt to be right next to my skin.  The mama bear image of swatting the bothersome baby bear was presented and we discussed a bit of what might be behind that type of behavior from the children’s perspective and what is going on from our perspective.

This is one of those places where I can really lose it.  Where I can lose my temper and end up saying some ridiculous thing that I can’t even believe is coming out of my mouth, like:  ”stop touching my nipples!” or “no, you can’t put your tongue in my mouth!”

My 2 year old has had a thing about soft from day one.  She loves anything incredibly soft.  She carries around stuffies, blankies, old pieces of ratty rag — if it’s soft she carries it just like the archetypal Linus character. Thumb in the mouth, blankie touching her face.  She’s finally realized, hey,wait a second, mommy is really soft!  She doesn’t realize that I’m the “original” soft that she’s been wanting.  So she looks for the softest parts of my body to touch and she’ll fight for being able to touch them. And yes, she has discovered that my nipples are really soft.  Well, thanks for the compliment honey, but really, you just can’t lie in bed and stroke my nipples.  That is not going to happen!  So I swat her away.  Mama bear energy.  And sometimes I can turn it into another game, sometimes I can’t.

So here is my challenge for myself this month. I am going to notice when my children are all over me and how I respond; the good, the bad, the ugly.  Not with judgement but with observation and see if I can come up with why I think my children are doing it and what strategies I can come up with that seem to shift it in a positive direction for all of us.  I want to try to notice what it is that they are really trying to get to in those moments.

This morning I turned the nipple touching (that woke me up from a much needed sleep) into a wrestling game. I playfully pushed her away, she climbed back, I rubbed her belly, she wanted my tummy, I pushed her again, she laughed alot.  That seemed to work today.  We’ll see what happens next time.