prologue
It was a Friday when the home pregnancy test told me the time had come. My husband, Thayer, drove home early from his job as a hospice social worker to receive the news and saw me sitting on the big rock that was our front stoop, holding the pink stick in my hand like a magic wand poised to change our lives forever.
I had not spent my life longing for a baby. Instead, my considerable passions—as a writer, as a person, and as a Zen student—had always been directed at being born as myself. And then, at thirty-six years old, I came to believe that becoming a mother would teach me something necessary about being alive.
I was right.
When my daughter, Azalea, was born in 2006, I was relieved to see that even though I had approached motherhood with a bit of distant curiosity, I absolutely, unreservedly loved her with a squishy-hearted, swooning love: Those perfect human ears; those dark blue, deep-set eyes; her sweet, milky breath; those miniature fingernails!
But it wasn’t long before I also started to sense that something was missing. When she cried, I resented the interruption. When she wouldn’t settle down, the heat of my frustration unnerved me. One time, when she was six months old, she was supposed to be taking a nap but instead was trying to pull herself up in her crib, nonstop crying. I was frazzled, running on fumes. I sat on the floor in her room and seethed, yelling at her to just go…to…sleep!
I thought back to all the difficulty I’d had with relationships—starting with family, with friends, with boyfriends, with myself—and wasn’t surprised to find that this was hard, too. I had always feared I was a damaged person, the victim of an unloving and maybe even dangerous childhood, crippled by something I couldn’t name. I believed I was broken, unable to truly give or receive love. It was no surprise, I told myself, that I was a terrible mother, especially since my own mother was so cold and rejecting. She and my dad threw me to the wolves—my two older brothers—who never loved me. Then, when I was thirteen—Azalea’s age as I write this—my parents divorced and my dad moved across the country, which didn’t bother me at all. Because I had always felt alone.
That was my story.
And then I discovered the science of attachment. As I began to immerse myself in the decades of rigorous research that lie far beneath the popular “attachment parenting” movement—and in fact, in many ways, contradict it—I started to wonder if the thing I was missing was in my understanding of who I was rather than in my DNA.
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AT THE HEART of attachment theory is an evolution-based explanation for the sometimes unbearably up-close identification we feel with our children. All newborn mammals attach to their caregivers in order to be fed and kept safe from predators—to stay alive. For human infants, born incapable of everything but the most basic bodily functions, our early dependency on a loving caregiver is so total that parent and child must operate, in a sense, as a unit for many years. And yet, as my Italian American, Jersey-born-and-bred Zen teacher used to say, “You and I are the same thing, but I am not you, and you are not me.”
How painful that reality became when Azalea was born. Our indisputable one-thingness—when she was in utero we shared everything, including food and oxygen—crashed into the rough physicality of being, in fact, two things: me over here, feeling angry that she, over there, was a bundle of need demanding something of me that I didn’t think I had or wanted to give.
What kind of mother am I? What kind of person? These were the questions that plagued me.
When I stumbled onto the science of attachment, something called to me, the shadow of a question not yet formed. In my reading, I began to see mentions of a laboratory procedure called the Strange Situation that was used in clinical research to observe and assess attachment patterns between caregivers—mothers, mostly, in the beginning—and their one-year-old babies. A mother and her baby enter a room with two chairs and some blocks on the floor. The mother sits down and the baby plays. Or not. A stranger comes in and the mother leaves. The baby is left with the stranger, and then alone. What happens next has been found to reveal something so profound about the relationship between the two that it will impact that baby forever. And, as I would later learn, the mother, too.
I was instantly drawn to the promise of this very strange situation to tell me what kind of mother I had been. I hoped that what I learned would let me off the hook for the damage I was afraid I was inflicting upon my daughter. But even more, I wanted to learn everything I could about the Strange Situation, because I thought it could point me to something important about love. And I was immediately drawn to the “lady professor” named Mary Ainsworth who’d created it.
Ainsworth was born in 1913 and died in 1999, when she was eighty-five years old, a celebrated expert in her field and by all accounts a brilliant researcher and theoretician. Her New York Times obituary described her as a “developmental psychologist whose work revolutionized the understanding of the bond between mothers and infants.” Inspired both by her own questions about the nature of a child’s relationship to its mother and by a passion for the scientific method, she spent her career observing, then developing an understanding of, the parent-child dynamic—first for a few months in Uganda in 1954, then in Baltimore from 1964 to 1967—with a depth and a rigor considered “unparalleled.” Her work in Africa was what she called “an experiment of opportunity,” inspired by a Ganda ritual regarding weaning that intrigued her, but turned out to be a rumor. The truly fortuitous opportunity lay in the fact that she was in Africa only because her younger husband had insisted on going for a project of his own and she, being a dutiful 1950s wife, went with him. Never one to squander a moment, she decided to do a study of her own—a research project about the early love that forms between parent and child.
Visiting and chatting with twenty-six Ganda mothers and their babies every couple of weeks, watching the babies crawl, scramble, and toddle back and forth across the floor to their mothers’ laps, Ainsworth began to wonder what made some of the relationships feel so easy and pleasant, while others felt disconnected and fraught, and she started to form a hypothesis. Though her Uganda study was a little scrappy and off-the-cuff, it was the first of its kind, and it set the stage for what is now the long, complicated history of attachment research.
And for the insights that have changed my life.
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IN THE OPENING of the third edition of the Handbook of Attachment (2016), Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver write of Mary Ainsworth and her colleague John Bowlby that “it seems unlikely that [either of them] dreamed for a moment that their theoretical efforts would spawn one of the broadest, most profound, and most creative lines of research in 20th- and 21st-century psychology.”
While there is no way Ainsworth could have imagined that an online search—which of course did not exist in her lifetime—for “attachment” would turn up millions of entries, she did know she was onto something big. On January 2, 1968, she wrote in a letter to her graduate student and research partner Sylvia Bell, “This is really a tremendously difficult, subtle, and yet highly significant area of research we have gotten into…We can’t really miss!”