I won't stop swaying

Is the Love You Forever mom understandable or creepy?

My husband refuses to read the book Love You Forever to our son. At first he said it’s a mommy-son book, so it didn’t make sense for him to read it. But being a true feminist, I pushed back on that idea pretty fast. Why can’t a father read a book about a mom and son? 

Then he shared his real feelings. This mom is creepy. 

Maybe you have similar feelings too. If you aren’t familiar with the book, you might have your memory jogged by this Friends episode where Rachel and Ross are throwing a birthday party for their one-year-old, and their friend Joey comes to the party empty handed. Embarrassed, he searches around for something to give them last minute and is inspired when their other friend Phoebe says she wrote a song for her gift. Using Joeys (sub-par) acting skills, he does a spur-of-the-moment reading of “Love You Forever” with these lines being the repeated refrain of the book:

Then it flashes to everyone in the room sobbing, and Phoebe being annoyed that his unplanned performance had a way better response then her planned song.

Why is everyone sobbing from a reading of this book? If you’re a true fan of Love You Forever, like me, you see a beautiful story of a mother who loves her son through the ages. A mom who never stops seeing her son as her baby.

But, if you’re like my husband, maybe all you see is a creepy mom. I’ll let you decide.

The book starts off with a mom and her baby, rocking him to sleep, singing the I Love You Forever refrain from above. Then he becomes a toddler on the next page and all his terrible toddler problems are listed, but despite his whiles, the mom still wants to sneak in while he’s asleep, pick him up and rock him back and forth like a baby.

Then the toddler becomes a boy, and the mom still sneaks in and rocks him. 

Then the boy becomes a teenager, and she still sneaks in and rocks him while he sleeps. 

You think this charade would end when he becomes an adult and leaves the house but NO. Despite the distance, she straps a ladder to the top of her car, drives over to his house in the middle of the night, climbs into his bedroom window on the second floor, picks up “this great big man” and rocks him while he sleeps singing:

The story goes on to the mom becoming sick, and the son coming over to rock the mom. Now he sings her the same song, trading out “baby” for “mom”. And then the son comes home and rocks his baby girl, singing the nostalgic song of mother-child love. It makes sense that even in a fictional episode of Friends, everyone would end up sobbing.

But my husband, despite all that sentimentality, cannot get over the creepy mom crossing boundaries and snuggling teenagers and adults in the middle of the night. 

Maybe this is a difference between fathers and mothers. To be fair, I understand the boundary-crossing creepiness of this mom. If you ever find me actually trying to rock my full grown son while he is sleeping, please intervene.

In all seriousness, while I may never do the crazy things this mother does, I see the hyperbolic actions reflected in the love I feel for my son. That creepy mom lives inside of me.

Because even after hard, difficult days, when I put him to sleep and I see his dozing face, all I want to do is pick him up and rock him. All I want is to smother him with my love, freeze the moment and stuff it inside a glass jar to save for later when he’s large and no longer my baby. Even now at 2.5-years-old I know I’m pushing it, calling him my little baby. He loves it but I stop and question myself, “Am I becoming the creepy Love You Forever Mom?”

I could shun or try and banish the inner creep, but to be honest I kind of love her. I love that I have the capacity to love a living being so much. So much that it could veer towards too much, even towards creepy.

I love that I will probably sway a little standing in lines for the rest of my life. I love the way my son looks up at me when I hold him in my arms like a baby, and he pretends to be smaller than he is. I love that the moment when I’m carrying him in my arms, limp and asleep to put him in his bed. When I pause as my eyes run over the soft lines of his chubby face.

If Love You Forever has taught me anything, it is that time passes by faster and faster. Mere flips of a cardboard page. This soft face will become defined. His voice will go from sweet toddler high to old and low. One day he will stink, not from a dirty diaper but from good ole B.O.

So I say, let the creepy mom live in me and live in you.

One day I will have to reign her in, let my son go. I will have to restrain myself from strapping ladders to the top of my car to traverse the night and hold him in his sleep, though I am sure I will want to do this desperately. I will have to let him slip away into independent adulthood.

But for now, I hold him tight. I will call him my baby, because who cares. And you better believe I won’t stop swaying.

This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Sway."