Your parents naturally have trouble accepting the fact that you are a genuine grownup. You may view yourself as a mature, self-reliant person, but your mom views you as a person who once got lost in the department store and got so scared that you pooped your pants, which caused you to become so ashamed that you tried to hide in the Ladies' Lingerie Department, where the nice clerk was able to find you because she noticed the highly unromantic aroma emanating from somewhere inside a rack of negligees. Likewise your dad still has occasional back pain related to the time you fell asleep on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland and he had to carry you for the rest of the day, covering an estimated 450 miles.
It's because of many vivid memories like this that, on a fundamental level of your parents' psyche, you're always three years old. Everything that has happened to you since infancy- puberty, marriage, career, parenthood- is just a temporary phase you're going through. This is why, even though you're the president of a large corporation with a personal helicopter and authority over thousands of people and millions of dollars, your mom still, automatically, when you leave her house, zips your jacket all the way up to your chin.
It's because of many vivid memories like this that, on a fundamental level of your parents' psyche, you're always three years old. Everything that has happened to you since infancy- puberty, marriage, career, parenthood- is just a temporary phase you're going through. This is why, even though you're the president of a large corporation with a personal helicopter and authority over thousands of people and millions of dollars, your mom still, automatically, when you leave her house, zips your jacket all the way up to your chin.
—Dave Barry Turns Forty
Let him [Robb] grow taller, she asked the gods. Let him know sixteen, and twenty, and fifty. Let him grow as tall as his father, and hold his own son in his arms. Please, please, please. As she watched him, this tall young man with the new beard and the direwolf prowling at his heels, all she could see was the babe they had laid at her breast at Riverrun, so long ago.
—Catelyn Stark's thoughts, A Game of Thrones
I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be.
—The mother, to her son, repeatedly throughout his entire life, Love You Forever
[Amrah] was a slave, of Egyptian origin, to whom not even the sacred fiftieth year could have brought freedom; nor would she have accepted it, for the boy she was attending was her life. She had nursed him through babyhood, tended him as a child, and could not break the service. To her love he could never be a man.
