[A sannyasin and her young son are present. She says: It’s very difficult for me – I feel he is very strong and I don’t feel strong at all. I don’t know what to do in certain situations.]
Osho – Let him be strong! Why should you be worried about his strength? It is good. He has to be strong and the mother has to be soft. He has to be strong; only then can he grow into an individual. If he is soft and the mother is strong, he will be killed. That’s what happens to many people: the mother is too strong and they are soft, or the mother would not allow them to be strong. Then they go on hanging around the mother for their whole life. Even if they are old and the mother is dead and gone they are still holding on to her apron strings; deep down they still psychologically depend on her. That becomes pathology. Then the man may start looking at his wife as if she is his mother. He cannot live without a mother; he needs somebody to mother him.
Because of this tendency, breasts have become so important. Artists go on painting breasts, sculptors go on sculpting breasts, poets go on writing about breasts; it seems to be really a great obsession. Basically it is just an indication that these people are still hankering for the mother; the breast represents the mother. If children are free of the mother, the breast will disappear from poetry and films and painting. They will take the right proportion, they will be natural parts of the body. Right now it seems that it is not the woman who has breasts but the breasts who have the woman; the woman seems to be secondary. This is a very pathological state.
Children have to be very strong, so help him to be strong. It will be difficult for you to manage because the stronger he is, the more trouble he will create for you; if he is weak, there is no trouble. But one has to be strong in life: life creates trouble, life is risky, it is challenging. If he is dull and stale and just dead, he will sit in a corner and will not give you any inconvenience but then he is not alive! If he is alive he will create many many problems for you. You have to face them. That’s what it means to be a mother: to face those problems. And by facing them you will also grow, by giving him freedom and strength you will also grow. Mother and child grow together.
Remember always, the day the child is born the mother is also born. Before that you were just a woman, not a mother. Once the child is born you are a separate phenomenon, a mother; something has bloomed in you. And now the growth of the child will be the growth of the mother too. If one day you can help the child to be completely free of you, you will also attain to your inner freedom. So help him to be strong.
Source – Osho Book “Don’t Bite My Finger, Look Where I’m Pointing”