Mothers & Sons, the tyranny of the nipple

Funny business, mothers and sons. Barely knew mine and remain astounded that people of my age have had mothers all their lives and still have them. They're in the news a lot, now, mums, what with Iraq and Afghanistan and of course with young Tommy often having had a series of uncles or you're-not-my-real-dads. The both-ways intensity of some of these relationships appears, to my curious eye, a bit too close to Iris Robinsonism for comfort, not incestuous as such but out on the unnatural end of parenting.

There's that geezer, wotsisname, the hacker, forty years old and cute enough to sneak into the cyber Pentagon and piss in the drawers but there, too, is his Mum, Mother McKinnon, all glammed-up, bleating about her Gary, like they were lovers. He has one of these syndromes but maybe it wouldn't be quite so disabling if he wasn't so mother dominated, I dunno, I do get impatient with syndromees.

Wearisome, how often we hear some poor, haggard, but optimistic biddy opining, with no ear for its incongruity, that Wayne is more than a son, 'e's me best friend, deaf to the Ruinous implications of such a statement, another sheet ripped from crass sentimentality's bogroll.

They are everywhere, syndromees, victims, separatees, divorcees, mothers in love with their sons, ready to die for them, or kill them. Like Frances Inglis, below, God bless her poor, mad mind. This is her mugshot. I've known a lot of murderers and they don't look like anything special but Frances really doesn't look like a murderer/ess, even so, at fifty-seven she's been given nine years, minimum nine years, for killing her comatised 22 year old son, Tom, with a heroin injection, succeeding on her second attempt, while on bail, charged with attempted murder, after her first crack at it failed. Fuck me, you couldn't make it up.

It seems such a vague stretch, nine years, not enough to indicate real wickedness or sadism or gain in the offence, yet way too long for a woman obviously, given the facts, living outside Reason's shelter, made loony by grief and guilt and imaginings, clinging to a distorted sense of ultimate responsibility for the fruit of her womb. We can argue that she knew what she was doing and she knew the likely penalty so let her enjoy her porridge and her roll-ups but we should be bigger and wiser and kinder than those who, deranged by cruel circumstance, offend us, shouldn't we?

We are awash with mistreated, mateless mothers, exploited, prey to passing strangers, bullying children, unstable, rudderless, making ends meet, firefighting; harangued, hectored and bullied by the likes of wee, salivating Michael Gove or Harriet Soursister; their relationships askew, often bizarre and it seems to me that in this case, as in so many, what's needed is that strong but gentle father's hand, keep Gary McKinnon on the cyber straight and narrow, tell him not that he's wonderful and talented and a very special person but not to fuck with Uncle Sam; to mediate between Frances Inglis and her isolation to regulate whatever chaos it was which saw Tom Inglis jump from a moving ambulance, his mother and her neighbours, au fait with the acquisition and administration of fatal doses of narcotics, adept at penetrating secure facilities, and at teaching her other children the jargon of grievance, this, friends, this is the apparatus of Ruin.

The boy, Tom, is dead, now; he might've died anyway, doctors may have eased his passing, he may have suffered, a bit, a lot, who knows; maybe Frances's remedy was a grim kindness but it wasn't her decision to make and she has transferred the boy's suffering, if such it was, to herself and to we, who must exercise our own freedoms, conscious that she for nine years, barring a successful appeal against sentence, may not. Lost her son, lost her freedom in her old age and distressed all who know her. And many who don't. Time to ring some changes.