Between Care and Suffocation

About Mammoni and Why Love Can Sometimes Care Too Well

In Italy, there is a word that sounds both affectionate and faintly accusatory: mammone. It refers to the grown son who, despite his age and often a life of his own, remains firmly anchored in his mother’s world. He may live independently, have a career, even a family of his own, yet somewhere there is always a mother who knows whether he has eaten properly, whether his shirts are ironed, and whether that new girlfriend speaks about him with sufficient respect.

The word is usually spoken with a smile. Sometimes with a resigned sigh. Rarely with shame. It isn’t a failure; it’s a culture.

You see it in small details. In men who aren’t quite sure how the washing machine works. Who, after years of marriage, still ask where their socks are, as if socks were a mystery solvable only through maternal intuition. In men who, at a body temperature of 37.3°C, begin edging convincingly toward their deathbed, embracing their theatrical frailty while happily submitting to the devoted care of mother or wife.

At times it is endearing, at times genuinely funny. And at times, once the humour fades, distinctly painful. Because behind the stereotype lies something less innocent than it appears: a form of adulthood that never quite had to finish growing up.

The man who cannot fry an egg, let alone prepare a proper meal that doesn’t emerge from a microwave, is rarely incompetent by nature. Far more often, he has been raised in a structure where care was so abundant that practising autonomy simply never felt urgent. Why learn when someone else does it faster, better, and with loving dedication?

Care and abundant love can be so complete that they quietly take up space where growth might otherwise have unfolded.

What intrigues me is not so much the absence of practical skills, but the fact that for years there was no need to develop them. There were no consequences. There was always a safety net, always a hand ready to step in, always someone who knew how it should be done.

Incompetence slowly transforms from a shortcoming into a comfort zone. And comfort, however lovingly intended, can be addictive. It rarely invites growth.

Someone who has always been caught never quite learns how to fall and, therefore, never learns how to stand up again. Someone who has never fully carried responsibility does not experience adulthood as something practised and earned, but as something that simply arrives. And so he never truly discovers what he is capable of.

Yet it would be too easy to look at this only through irony. Because within the same culture, I also see an intensity of involvement that commands admiration. Mothers who continue to care without questioning whether it is still necessary. Who not only feed their sons, but protect them, guide them, defend them. Here, family is not a stage one outgrows. It is a structure that endures, even when the calendar insists you are an adult.

The line between involvement and hindrance is thin, and constantly shifting.

Sometimes it seems that some men are quite comfortable “not knowing how.” Ignorance becomes a subtle strategy. If you say you don’t know, you don’t have to do it. If you claim you’re bad at something, it is gently taken out of your hands. And once care is offered, it is rarely declined.

But this dynamic is never one-sided. It is relational. Someone has to be willing to step in. Someone has to derive meaning from being needed.

And this is where, for me as a mother, the reflection becomes personal.

In Northern Europe, many of us were raised on the belief that independence is a virtue. A good parent gradually makes themselves unnecessary. Children learn early to make their own sandwiches, tie their own shoelaces, correct their own mistakes. Independence is not an accidental by-product, but a deliberate goal, synonymous with freedom and strength, a quiet badge of successful parenting.

Yet autonomy has its shadows too. Early independence can mean that warmth is rationed more sparingly. Practical help may give way to principled distance. “You can do it yourself” may express trust, but it can also signal a subtle retreat.

Between Italian protectiveness and Northern European letting go, I try to find my own path.

I want to care, to protect, to guide. I want to be present when it matters, to carry the weight for a moment when arms are still too small to hold it. But I do not want to suffocate. I do not want my love to render her incapable. I want my daughter to try, before someone steps in to solve it for her. I want her to feel what it means to master something on her own. Not because distance is a virtue in itself, but because strength must grow from within.

At the same time, I want her to know that there is always a place she can return to. That connection is not a contract that expires once you become independent. That care is not control, but presence.

Motherhood lives precisely on that thin, nearly invisible line. Too little closeness turns cold. Too much closeness softens where resilience is needed.

Perhaps the difference lies not in how much we do, but in when we choose to do it.

The other day, we stood together in the kitchen. She was perched on a chair slightly too high for her, while I stood beside her, mildly anxious and yet determined not to intervene at every moment. She stirred a bowl with the intense concentration of a three-year-old convinced she was undertaking something extraordinary. Flour drifted across the countertop, found its way to the floor, settled into her hair and landed delicately on her eyelashes as though it belonged there.

“Myself,” she declared firmly, leaving no room for negotiation.

I steadied the bowl so it wouldn’t tip over, but I did not take the spoon from her. I didn’t correct every crooked movement, nor did I smooth the batter beyond what she made of it. It remained lumpy and uneven, but it was hers.

When she looked up at me with the proud little face of someone who has just accomplished what moments ago seemed impossible, I knew what I ultimately want to give her.

I am here.
I believe in you.
And you may try.