Uncle John’s Presents Mom’s Bathtub Reader (36 page)

After decades under the microscope, mom’s love can get some respect!

I
f your mom gets on your nerves when she ruffles your hair or smooches your cheek, relax. Scientific investigators have discovered that a mother’s loving stimulation aids in the development of the brain’s circuitry and reduces stress.

In the late 1950s, a psychologist named Harry Harlow performed experiments that made him a villain in many animal-rights circles. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers and substituted a wire-mesh “mother” with a bottle for the infant to nurse from and a cloth “mother” that the baby monkeys clutched for comfort. Harlow wanted to study the effects of severe affection deprivation on the little animals—and he got effects all right!

Harlow’s monkeys all became severely disturbed. When they weren’t acting out aggressively, they often showed an autisticlike syndrome, clutching themselves and constantly rocking back and forth. Harlow’s troubled animals revealed how much they needed socialization, touching, nurturing and . . . well . . . plain old motherly love.

If mom’s TLC—or lack thereof—could throw such a monkey wrench into behavior, could it also affect brain chemistry? Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, proved that if baby rats got more licking and grooming from their mothers, their genes activated more brain receptors for benzodiazepines (tranquilizers). The added receptors increased the brain’s response to the calming chemical.

When baby rats had more fondling from their mothers, they were also higher achievers. While they swam through a floating labyrinth to look for submerged objects (a ratty I.Q. test), the well-nurtured young’uns learned faster and had the best memories. Turned out that the ratty Einsteins each had a hippocampus (a part of the brain dealing with stress control, attention, and memory) containing more synapses than those pups that had less mothering. Attentive mothers could actually improve the neurological systems and even the genetics of the pups. So could foster mothers if they fondled their foster babies.

Okay, the effects of motherly affection are powerful if you’re a monkey or a rat, but what about in us humans? Most researchers never expected—or wanted—the chance to work with human children who lacked any maternal or parental care. But they got it anyway.

In 1989, a repressive dictatorship in Romania fell, and an international crisis arose. The state had forbidden birth control, but people were too poor to feed their big families. Thousands of kids had been left in Romanian state
orphanages. They were warehoused in cribs or on dirty cots. Aside from being fed and changed, they were left alone without toys and with little touching or affection.

Sadly, many of these orphans showed autistic behavior problems (social withdrawal and repetitive rocking or movements) similar to Harlow’s monkeys. Harvard researchers also found that the orphans’ cortisol (a stress hormone) measures were very high compared with children brought up in family homes. The orphans also showed signs of being more anxious and fearful than other children.

The findings from these studies, along with other research, convinced many neuroscientists that our brains are molded not only by our inherited set of genes, but also by our earliest interactions. According to Alan Schore, assistant clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine, the most crucial component of these earliest interactions is the primary caregiver—usually the mother.

We don’t know about your stress level, but if you can read this page—give mom extra hugs of thanks for helping make you so smart. And never underestimate the power of a mother’s love!

Moms gone wrong—They’re no fun to live with, but they’re sure fun to watch. Here are our flick picks for the best in bad moms.

Mommie Dearest
—Come on, you know the words: “No more wire hangers ever!” This is a classic of the celebrity child-abuse genre (there is, thankfully, not that much competition). Faye Dunaway plays 1940s star Joan Crawford as completely unhinged and cruel, particularly to her adopted daughter, Christina, whose real-life memoir is the basis for the movie. Dunaway’s portrayal and the breathless, trashy, camp vibe of the entire film are so over the top that even Christina Crawford was taken aback. “They’ve turned it into a Joan Crawford movie!” she memorably complained. It’s no joke—this film was so successful in defining the public’s image of Joan Crawford that these days when people think of Crawford, they don’t actually think of the woman herself but of Dunaway’s portrayal of her. That’s some delicious Hollywood irony for you.

Cinderella
—A classic evil-stepmother tale, lovingly animated and bibbity-boppity-boo-ilized by the folks at Disney. Some people prefer Snow White’s wicked stepmother—and to be fair, the wicked queen
did
order one of her minions to cut out Snow White’s heart. After all, most of us don’t know anyone who would literally cut out our hearts, but we
do
know someone who would figuratively
stab us in the back. What Cinderella’s evil stepmom has going for her is a streak of pettiness as wide as the ocean. She doesn’t want Cinderella dead (because then who would do the laundry?), she just wants to make sure Cinderella is very alive and dreadfully unhappy. Eleanor Audley, who also provided Maleficent’s pipes in
Sleeping Beauty
, struck just the right tone of cruelty as the stemother when smugly telling Cinderella she could to go the ball only after her impossible list of chores was done. The scene where she breaks the glass slipper rather than let Cinderella try it on is a classic of cinematic venality. Sadly, the film never shows the stepmom getting her comeuppance, although a 1998 live-action version of the story,
Ever After
, has the evil stepmom ending up in a nunnery, doing the laundry. Turnabout is always fair play.

The Grifters
—Anjelica Huston (who, it must be noted, plays the evil stepmother in the just-noted
Ever After
) does something terribly, terribly monstrous to her son, played by John Cusack in
The Grifters.
Scratch that—she does
two
terribly monstrous things to her son, one right after the other, and the reason she does is because she is a con artist for whom relationships take a back seat to the score and the cash. You might think that Cusack’s character, a con artist himself, would know this about his own mother. But, see, he’s not a very
good
con artist. And he’s perhaps a little too trusting of people he shouldn’t trust, including, alas, dear old mom. No, we won’t tell you what horrible things Huston’s character does. Watch for yourself. You’ll be in awe of her.

The Manchurian Candidate
—Angela Lansbury is best known these days for playing an animated teapot in
Beauty
and the Beast
and a mystery writer who always seems to be around when people drop dead in
Murder, She Wrote.
But in this controversial 1962 film, she tried on another role for size—that of an ambitious and domineering political wife wrapped up in a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate, a plot that just happens to involve her war-hero son (played by Laurence Harvey), who’d been brainwashed to be the triggerman. It’s a very complicated plot, and Lansbury’s part is equally complex. She plays a mother happy to use her son for her own political gain. Call it “Assassination, She Wrote.”

White Oleander
—Prefer your bad moms to be from the 21st century? Look no further than 2002’s
White Oleander.
Michelle Pfeiffer plays a mother whose somewhat impulsive murder of a boyfriend causes her teenage daughter to get shipped from foster home to foster home, each with foster moms of varying niceness. All the while Pfeiffer’s character hovers over her daughter’s psyche, offering her poisonous advice and commentary during visiting hours. Pfeiffer comes across as a marvelously interesting sociopath, which is why at least one film critic compared her character to Hannibal Lecter. Which is not usually a quality one wants in a mother, especially one’s own. The movie’s ultimate tagline: “No matter how much she damaged me, no matter how flawed she is, I know my mother loves me.” Which is, indeed, one way of looking at it.

Still angry after all these years.

A
t the ruins of Castle Rising, in Norfolk, England, tourists hope to glimpse the ghost of “She-Wolf” Queen Isabella, who has haunted the castle since the 14th century.

Queen Isabella was born in France, and she had been given in a political marriage to King Edward II. Though they had four children, they also had one of the worst royal marriages in English history—which is really saying something. King Edward II was a weak king, who lavished his attention on lovers other than his queen. In 1325 the queen took a lover of her own, Roger Mortimer. Not only did she gain a boyfriend, she also found an ally against her husband. Roger and Isabella gathered an army, attacked, and defeated Edward. He was forced to abdicate and transferred the throne to his young son and heir, the future Edward III. Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, became the virtual king until the young heir came of age.

Isabella didn’t stop there. She had her husband imprisoned and schemed with Mortimer to secretly have him murdered. After that she and jolly Roger did quite well—until
Edward III reached his majority, became king, and decided to avenge his father’s death. King Edward III executed Roger but spared his mother’s life. She “retired” to Castle Rising, where she was furious at her son for sending her away. Today, according to legend, she haunts the ruins of the castle, still furious after 700 years—and still screaming at Edward III and her fate.