TIGER MOMS, LION CHILDREN AND LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
Neville Raymond
In school we are drilled to remember the minute facts of history.
In real life we are conditioned to forget the momentous feelings of childhood.
Indeed, it is almost a marker of adulthood to forget what it was like to be a child.
Ask any child what animal they would associate with their ideal mom.
A mama bear? A cuddlesome chimp?
Not one child in a million would say, “I want a tiger mom.”
The qualities associated with a tiger – ferocity, wildness, bloodthirstiness, cruelty – are hardly the
kind of qualities children need in a mom. If anything, children need mothers who can protect them
from people who embody these tigerish qualities.
Raised in Calcutta, and sent to boarding school at the age of seven, I realized late in the arc of my therapeutic process that I was outmanned and outgunned by the forces arrayed against me. I was beaten down, cowed into submission and robbed of my voice.
Every March I would go through the same ritual. A black banged-up trunk, with my name stenciled on it, was lugged out of storage. My belongings were packed into it. And the countdown began to the dreaded day when it would accompany me to Howrah station where both trunk and I were loaded on a train bound for Sherwood College in a hill station called Nainital.
In one of my sessions, I realized a vital part of me had also been packed into that trunk. Since my mother made no room for my hurt, my despair, my fear of abandonment, I had to shove all these feelings into a box and slam the lid on it. It was a lonely place to be locked away into and hidden from the light of day - like being stuffed into the trunk of a car and abducted far from home.
The remarkable thing is I didn’t struggle. I didn’t pound my fists against the walls of the trunk. I didn’t wear myself out yelling and screaming. I didn’t let out a peep.
In fact, I was a perfect little lamb to the slaughter.
And you know what kinds of mothers turn out little lambs to the slaughter? Tiger moms.
They are fiercely invested in developing the child’s talents, industry and intellectual aptitude.
In the name of providing the best education possible, they subject the child to any number of
indignities and ordeals.
They are as tone deaf to the cries of the heart as they are indifferent to cultivating the heart as the
seat of emotional intelligence.
Talking to my mother was like banging my head on a wall. Obviously that left a huge stockpile of anger in me. But to whom could I turn to release it? Certainly not the one whose failure to listen was responsible for causing all that anger to pile up in the first place.
So my mother never got see the troubled, angry boy she raised.
She was spared having to deal with that mad side of me.
For all she knew, boarding school had done me a world of good.
I learned to make my bed, wear a blazer, stand tall and self-sufficient. Above all, I placed at the head of my class.
Talk about vindicating her decision to send me away!
I was now one of those polite obedient boys who, when approached by an adult, said, “Yes, sir, no sir. Good morning, sir, good evening, sir.”
My mother was proud of her good little boy, so soft-spoken, docile, and well-behaved.
At some point in adulthood I realized I couldn’t go on like that
I had to let the angry beast out.
And I needed just the right kind of Mother to do it.
In the course of reparenting myself, I had worked through a succession of Good Moms.
My real mom was flustered by the smallest things, and couldn’t abide the sight of my distress.
Roxanne was the first Good Mom I conjured up for myself. She was calm, kind, infinitely
understanding. She let me lay my head on her lap and cry my heart out.
Then there was Rowena, my Playful Mom. Unlike my real mother, who never had time to relax with
me, Rowena spent the whole day with me, reading me stories, hanging out with me in the park,
strolling with me on the banks of the Hooghly, taking me to Keventers for a milk shake and
accompanying me to the Lighthouse or Metro for a matinee show.
And finally, there was Ramona, my Protective Mother. She would stand up for me and be my
advocate when I was blamed for things I did not do, and shamed for being just who I am. She was
the mother I turned to when I needed to show my raging side to the world. Hers was the image that
came into my head when I needed to play Leo the Lion in a full-throated growl. She would make it
safe for my buried anger to spring into the open and give out in a ferocious roar. “Grrrr…you can’t
send me away! GRrrr…listen to me! GRRRR…don't act like my feelings don’t count!”
It was a liberating experience to make myself heard in thunderous tones. To assert my right to speak with a voice long forgotten and buried. My right to reclaim the deep, primal energy of my being and cut loose like a lion on my way to becoming a fully developed human being.
The boarding school masters into whose hands my mother entrusted my fate may as well have been trained gladiators, closing in around me to put the leonine part of me to death.
Don’t make a scene. Don’t raise a fuss. Don’t rock the boat. Keep your head down. Don’t let your voice be heard.
The end result was my MGM lion had become an MTM pussy cat. Remember how in Mary Tyler Moore TV productions the roaring MGM lion was replaced by the logo of a mewling kitten?
That was me as a child.
That was hundreds of millions of children like me whose tiger moms had cruelly imposed their will on them, and set out to crush their spirits and break their hearts, the better to teach them the enduring lesson of life.
Sit on your anger. Bury your rage. Tame the leonine magnificence of you humanity until you sound like a kitten.
It was a rule of thumb. Tiger moms raise MTM kittens.
Kind, nurturing moms raise children to be roaring MGM lions. Lions who are in touch with the source of their primal energy. Lions securely grounded in the strength of their being.
What an incredible world it would be if parents could let their children release their pain in full-throated roars.
It would give parents instant feedback when they were doing something wrong!
I’m hurting my child. I’m scaring my child. I'm driving my child mad!
Parents often whine that their children don’t come with a manual. The truth is that they come with something more infinitely precious. They come with a system of instant feedback. If they are hurting they cry. If they are angry, they scream! All parents have to do is to pay attention to these signals and modify their behavior accordingly!
Instead of doing that, parents can’t wait to crack down on their children’s right to indulge in tears and tantrums.
Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!
And how do children adapt? They learn to become two-faced little dissemblers. They act like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, while inside them is a furnace of rage that would melt tempered steel. And so the hostility they cannot express in straightforward ways comes out in all kinds of devious, crooked, perverse, and passive aggressive ways.
Who can count all the ways in which suppressed feelings are dramatized and unresolved pain acted out?
We take a ghoulish delight in horror movies and murder mysteries.
We are convinced it OK to batter an unruly child - or bomb an unruly country into submission.
We push clients into buying things that are not right for them.
We routinely carry out orders that cause untold suffering for millions.
We are thrilled by strong leaders who brutally impose their will on the world.
That Saint Augustine sure had it right.
Give me other mothers and I'll give you another world.
What if children were allowed to be more up-front about their buried caches of pain?
Would we have to worry so much about the wild beast lurking behind the civilized facade?
And what if children were free to roar out their primal anger and trumpet their primal grief to the world?
Maybe the world wouldn’t be such a jungle, after all.
