Strange Situation, page 16
I asked what kind of place Antioch was, telling him I’d never get into a “real college.”
“They’ll love you,” he said. “All you have to do is write an essay.”
After I applied, my mom drove me to visit the Ohio campus for a weekend, and we stopped for eggs and extra-crispy hash browns at the kind of greasy spoon we both loved. I met with the admissions department for an interview. The woman told me that, yes, my academic record was pretty weak, but they were willing to take a chance on me because they were blown away by the essay I’d written. They accepted me on the spot.
The essay was about my mom and our relationship, and how, though I had been angry about so much—especially for the way she just didn’t get me—I could also see how connected we were.
I think I even used the word “attached.”
chapter twenty-four
Sometimes I hang out and chat with other moms, and I listen to them talk about their own childhoods or teenage years, and to their stories of sneaking out, getting caught, getting grounded, smoking, doing drugs. My friends all seem to wonder how far their kids will stray, to what lengths they will have to go to differentiate, to rebel, to find themselves. They expect a certain difficult or angry or combative teenage stage, much like what they put their own parents through. And they’re afraid of their beloved children growing away from them.
I’m afraid, too.
But I worry more, and privately, about how closely Azalea will gravitate toward me, growing along some subterranean roots we share. Cuddling at night, watching Shark Tank on TV, she asks me to tickle her arm, and so I do, lightly, up and down, as she likes it. I look over at her relaxed face, watching some fumbling entrepreneur try to convince a cocky billionaire to take a chance. And I try to feel the way her heart beats. And breaks. She seems so together, so still. Are you what you appear to be? I silently ask her—the ups and downs, the tiny untruths revealed, the tears, the love of lemonade, the goofy spelling, the emergent edges.
What secrets are you keeping from me?
Ever since I discovered I was pregnant with Azalea, and I realized that I would be—already was—a mother, I have been afraid. Afraid of nausea, afraid of genetic deformities, afraid of giving birth, afraid of the next long, sleepless night, afraid of Azalea’s soft head crashing against the stone around the woodstove, afraid of myself and of my own heart.
But my biggest fear has been that Azalea would turn out to be just like me. Not in terms of my hair or my eyes or my difficulty with math, but in terms of the way I felt, and the way I was, the way I didn’t seem to value myself.
Or did I?
And in terms of the way I shut my mom out.
Or did I?
* * *
—
AS A TEENAGER determined to experiment with wholly illegal and dangerous things, I spent a lot of time lying to my mom and avoiding her. Years later, she commented on how I suddenly became “so modest” at sixteen, no longer wanting to change in front of her or jump in the shower, though we shared a bathroom. That was the year I got a homemade tattoo on my back.
As passionate as I was about my goings-on, I always felt bad about being dishonest with my mom and living a double life, especially since I knew she was working so hard to make ends meet and to support us all, and to make a nice home for my brothers and me.
When I was sixteen, I got caught stealing a carton of cigarettes. I walked through the aisles of a big-box store, grabbed the long carton, and put it in my coat. As I exited, a man in a blazer who had followed me out said, “Come with me, miss.” From the office, where I cried fake tears, I called my mom’s friend, who would know how to get in touch with my mom, who was at her favorite patio bar, where she loved to dance to the oldies. On the drive home, she mostly fumed silently, worried but at a loss, I could tell. Then she yelled, “You have to quit smoking!” We were both silent after that, which felt a little bit like we were laughing.
But she wasn’t laughing when I was up all night throwing up from drinking a pint of peppermint schnapps. Instead, she was sitting with me, putting a cold washcloth on my forehead and not asking questions.
I felt particularly horrible about her taking care of me because not only had I drunk too much, but I’d lied through my teeth about where we got the alcohol. I was so brazen as a sixteen-year-old and…developed, shall we say, both physically and in the fine art of deception, that I used to be able to strut into a liquor store, take a couple of bottles to the register—or ask for something behind the counter—and pay up. The cashier may have had some doubt that I was twenty-one, but I never got carded, even though I moved around to different stores to keep it interesting.
But when my mom came home early one night when she was supposed to be out dancing, my friends and I got busted because we reeked of alcohol. My mom demanded to know where we’d gotten it; I didn’t miss a beat. I told her a sob story about someone’s older sister, and how we felt so much peer pressure to drink, even though we hated it. I cried, peppered in enough detail to make it all sound true, and my mom actually felt bad for me.
At least she convinced me that she did.
In January 2018, The New York Times published an article about a researcher who studies deception in children. She found that kids who are good liars score higher in “theory of mind,” an ability to know oneself and read the feelings of others. Theory of mind is closely linked to mentalization. And it’s a trait that is almost entirely associated with secure attachment.
* * *
—
THE REASON BOWLBY’S early forty-four-thieves paper is considered so historically significant is that it draws a straight line between a child’s behavior and a parent’s affection, pointing out that most of his delinquents had suffered from significant child-mother separations. In other words, even before Bowlby or Ainsworth or anyone else could say why, he saw that a substitute parent who merely fed these boys wasn’t enough to raise them to be emotionally and mentally healthy. They were suffering from a wound that had nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with a lack of proximity to their attachment figures, or what Ainsworth would come to call “total amount of care,” because, as Bowlby would soon discover, we are imprinted by our caregivers and wired to stay close to them. Bowlby’s thieves were victims of traumatic separations from attachment figures, and no one had come to take these important people’s places. The boys were half of a unit, undone by grief.
“Studies of nonclinical samples [‘normal’ kids] show that securely attached adolescents are less likely to engage in excessive drinking, drug use and risky sexual behavior,” attachment researchers Marlene Moretti and Maya Peled write. Another shows that “insecure attachment is associated with suicidality, drug use, and aggressive and delinquent behavior.” As another attachment researcher, Joseph P. Allen, and his colleagues put it, “In adolescence, attachment security has been positively linked to outcomes ranging from peer popularity to higher self-esteem and inversely related to outcomes ranging from depression to delinquency.” I was not very popular, had pretty shitty self-esteem, and, while I wasn’t exactly depressed, I was pretty darn delinquent, right?
But I was not separated from my mom, not physically, anyway.
Alan Sroufe and his colleagues have refined Bowlby’s definition of the attachment system to include as its set goal not necessarily just a desire for physical proximity—think goslings trailing safely behind their mother—but a need for what they call “felt security.” In other words, it’s not enough to just be close. We have to feel it.
And so maybe my delinquency stemmed from an insecure attachment that resulted from a lack of “felt security”?
Maybe, but as I’ve learned, not all delinquency is created equal. “Antisocial” behavior is considered much more serious when it begins before adolescence than when it occurs later, as it did with me, as a teen. Young delinquents whose risk-taking ends in adolescence or just after, as mine did, are considered even less of a concern. And finally, late-blooming young delinquents are so benign that they’re considered almost normal. “It has been proposed that most antisocial females follow an adolescence-limited trajectory…[and] these females are hypothesized: a) to have no childhood risk factors, b) to be exposed to social risk factors, such as affiliation to deviant peers, and c) to desist from their antisocial lifestyle as they transition to adulthood.”
My delinquency, while certainly dangerous, falls firmly in the “just trying it on” type that stems from “no childhood risk factors.”
So what was going on with me?
While it’s true that on the outside I looked mighty insecure with all that delinquent behavior, it’s also worth asking how all that behavior was organized on the inside. What was I trying to accomplish with all my acting out? Yes, part of me was trying to go numb, be cool, and feel powerful, but another, core part of me was utterly devoted to creating a feeling of connection in my young life—a life that didn’t seem to offer much delight or connection at home. And, in fact, I was often pretty successful. As Joseph Allen and his co-writers noted, “the secure adolescent tends to create relationships characterized by a balance of autonomy and relatedness—to create their own secure bases from which to explore—and to do this across relationships.”
Some of the girls who bullied me, and whom I managed to distance myself from, became close friends of mine in high school. Though I did have a lot of dangerous sex as a teen, I lost my virginity to a boy I loved and who loved me. I did lots of drugs, but always with a mind toward self-discovery, taking long walks, reciting poetry, and exploring my own mind and this crazy, beautiful, totally trippy world. And I eventually stopped doing drugs because I hated the way they made me feel. I enjoyed experimenting with edges and darkness, but ultimately I valued my own pleasure so much that when I stopped enjoying things, I just let them go. Usually.
My addiction to Charles nearly killed me. But it didn’t.
When my brothers were mean, though I was powerless to do much in response, I knew they were wrong and that I was being mistreated. When people disappointed me, I pushed back, or at least I tried. I believed I deserved better.
Was something working?
It could all make a certain kind of sense. My not-happy childhood, my shit-show adolescence, my sex-and-love-addicted early adulthood, my struggles as a parent—all these things pointed to an insecure attachment when I was a baby. Even before I knew about attachment, this was the story I was telling myself—that there had to have been a reason for me to be this messed up, and it must have started in my childhood. Cue the bathtub memory. No. Get Mom. And then, when I learned about attachment, I thought, Maybe it’s not an abuse thing, but an attachment thing. Maybe I wasn’t securely attached, which maybe made me feel abused?
I have also wondered, looking around at my pretty amazing life, how I managed to make it through all that rejection and acting out as well as I did. Was it luck? Am I making it all up? Maybe things weren’t as bad as I think they were? There has to be a reason for me to be this not messed up. Maybe it’s an attachment thing. After all, research shows that, yes, a secure attachment in childhood tends to protect us from all manner of risk and adverse experiences. But the real point here is that attachment security protects us. From whatever life presents us with, or what we choose to do.
Enter grit.
As Moretti and Peled write, “Parental attunement and appropriate responsiveness give rise to secure attachment, marked by a view of the self as worthy of care and competent in mastering the environment.” As Sroufe and his colleagues write:
In our view, the explanation for why some people thrive and others seriously falter during this challenging period [of adolescence] lies substantially in developmental history…A basic sense of inner worth, of connection with others, and of others as available and supportive remains critical.
In other words: Get Mom.
After all, I actually called out for my mom from the tub. I wanted her to help me, and I trusted she would come.
Was a secure attachment the miracle that kept me safe?
How could that be?
Was my relentless pursuit of connection—through drugs and sex and friendships—an indication that something was working, first between my mother and me, then between friends and me, and even between myself and me? Was my determination to feel connected, what Sroufe and his colleagues call a “developmental achievement,” due to my secure enough relationship with my mom? Was that “something” the miracle that saved me from drowning all those years as a lonely kid, a troubled teen, a sex and love addict, and a desperate mother?
Maybe it’s the very same thing that has protected Azalea from all my struggles as a mother, my moving in and out from the edge of my darkness, exploring the middle, checking out the deep end, working so hard to stay afloat, arms and legs splashing.
In a word—swimming.
chapter twenty-five
One night when Azalea was still sleeping in her crib, Thayer went to comfort her as she cried out. As I lay in bed listening over the monitor, I heard her cry, “Nooooo! Get Mommy!”
Which made me sit up. And wonder. About everything I thought I knew.
part vii
a thing to slip into
This woman won our unstinted admiration for the competence and serenity with which she dealt with her large and complicated household. She grew all of their food. She made many of her children’s clothes and had recently acquired a sewing machine to help with this task…she treated each child as a person important in his own right…she had time to talk to us in an unhurried way.
—Mary Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda
chapter twenty-six
The most important development in attachment research since Mary Ainsworth “came up with this thing,” the Strange Situation, in 1964 is an article published in 1985 by her student Mary Main and attachment researchers Nancy Kaplan and Jude Cassidy. The article is called “Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A Move to the Level of Representation,” and it was the world’s introduction to the Adult Attachment Interview. This groundbreaking article marks the turning point for modern attachment research and has been cited in the scientific attachment literature nearly seven thousand times.
Up until this point, insight about one’s attachment system—in itself an invisible, internal construct—could be inferred only from something observable on the outside—secure-base behavior, for instance, in the home, in the world, in the lab. With the advent of the Adult Attachment Interview (the AAI), the subject of Main’s article, researchers had a way to illuminate the inside, where our inner informant—excellent or otherwise—lives.
Mary Main was one of Mary Ainsworth’s graduate students at Johns Hopkins, and she, like her mentor, was gifted with language. At two years old, she “wrote down some especially interesting sentences.” Her parents had introduced her to philosophy by the age of ten, and she attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, an iconic school that teaches with primary texts. For graduate school, Main considered attending conservatory for piano, but she was also interested in linguistics ever since she’d read the work of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, born in 1928, fifteen years after Mary Ainsworth, is known for many things, including searing political and cultural critique, but in academic circles he is most famous for his revolutionary theory of universal grammar, the breakthrough insight that all human speech is governed by rules unbeknownst to most of us, that indeed most of us can’t articulate—very much like patterns of attachment.
Main applied to the Johns Hopkins linguistics program, but since grades at St. John’s were based on participation in class discussions, and Main had rarely talked in class, she was not accepted. There was one professor in the psychology department, however, on leave at Stanford at the time, who was interested in this bright student with the terrible grades and willing to take a chance on her.
Mary Ainsworth offered Main a spot in her department if she would consider doing her dissertation on attachment. Main found this offer “singularly uninteresting,” but she accepted, taking the advice of her then husband, who suggested that she could approach the study of babies through any lens, including language. When Main met Ainsworth, she was unimpressed. “She was fifty-five, and reminded me of a high school principal.” Main became Mary’s second graduate student, Sylvia Bell being the first, and the two would become very close over the years.
Main’s dissertation, completed in 1973, looked at fifty toddlers who had been through the Strange Situation at twelve months and found that “infants secure with their mothers were the most intensely and lengthily engaged in exploration, and showed the most ‘game-like’ spirit,” a phrase Mary would throw back at Main when she became despondent in a marathon Scrabble game: “And may I ask whatever happened to your…your Game-like Spirit!” Ainsworth jabbed.
Fully committed by now to the study of attachment, after receiving her PhD at Johns Hopkins, Main accepted a position at UC Berkeley in the psychology department, where in 1979 she would begin what is known as the Berkeley Longitudinal Study. This study began by following a group of 189 Bay Area “low risk” families, beginning with infants in the Strange Situation. In the sixth year of the study, Main and her team took the six-year-olds into the playroom for an attachment assessment using stories about separations, and took their parents into a different room to ask them about their own childhoods. The way the parents talked about their early lives—distinct from what they reported happening to them—was then carefully coded, the researchers looking for things like the ability to tell a coherent story using freshness of speech and consistent, concrete details with just the right amount of juicy bits—not too many and not too few. Main also looked at parents’ ability to identify with their own parents in a balanced way without getting sucked into past anger or resentment or avoiding the topic altogether.
