Mothers and sons: Tears that betrayed the unbearable grief of a little boy lost

Frank Lampard's crucial goal for Chelsea last Wednesday was a poignant tribute to his mother, who died six days before the game

The expression on Frank Lampard's face after he scored his goal at Chelsea on Wednesday was of such intense anguish that it seemed indecently intimate for the camera to linger on it. Here were the extremes of human experience, of love and loss.

Lampard is nearly 30, with daughters of his own, but for that moment he was a powerful embodiment of the Lost Boy. The first demand of boys to their mothers, "Look at me mum, look at me", was shouted to the heavens at Stamford Bridge. The son ripped off his armband, fell to his knees and wept. Sports commentators had speculated that Lampard would miss a game to be played six days after his mother's death. How could he? Every boy promises his mother glory, and Lampard kept his word.

Prince Harry returned from his curtailed service in Afghanistan with the same sense of duty fulfilled. He went to serve his country – and for his mother. "Hopefully, she would be proud," he said, with a slight hoarseness in his throat. All children want their parents' approval, but maternal admiration is sunlight to boys.

Boys wait to be dressed, waving their chubby limbs, puffing out their chests. Girls tend to be nimbler and quieter. They can function without applause. I am not sure how much of this

behaviour is congenital and how much cultural. I have just read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. I am indulgent of the fussing over boys until I remember the Taliban's view of girls as subhuman.

In the West the love of sons takes a more innocent form. The worst effect of unconditional mother love is that boys never learn to pick their clothes up from the floor. Lampard admitted to a great reluctance to leave home. He also noted that he and his mother were "very compatible, if that doesn't sound stupid, talking about your mum".

Lampard's father was a footballer and nuanced in the game. His mother watched her son. For some sporting mothers the spectacle is unwatchable. Jonny Wilkinson's mother heard about her son's winning drop goal at the 2003 rugby World Cup final when she was in Tesco. She burst into tears.

Lampard's observation that he and his mother were compatible goes to the heart of the relationship – a kind of make-believe marriage. How many little boys have solemnly pledged to protect their mothers and to make them rich, particularly when their mothers are downtrodden? All they ask for in return is unconditional and eternal admiration.

When mothers neglect the sacred compact, the revenge can be terrible. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has denounced his mother relentlessly in his books as a dissolute slut who abandoned him when he was a small child. If she failed to look at her boy then, she cannot ignore him now.

It is generally true that writers who turn against their mothers do so in a marital sense. Julian Barnes grits his teeth over his mother's habits in Nothing to Be Frightened Of as if they are an out-of-sorts Darby and Joan. There is none of the forgiveness that distance brings. The most famous literary mother-hater was John Osborne, who damned his mother as a "disease". Boys find it particularly difficult to conceive of a mother's colourful life outside themselves, and Nellie Osborne paid heavily for hers.

Psychologists claim that the mother-son relationship is charged because it is shaped by dependency followed by wrenching separation. Daughters do not have to be given up, as sons must be. So, in a final gesture of chivalry, boys lay out the achievements of their lives before their mothers like Sir Walter Raleigh's cloak. Lampard's most significant goal was a poignant farewell.