infant as a separate, active, autonomous person, whose wishes and activity have validity of their own.” While a “highly interfering” parent “seems to assume that the infant is hers and that she has a perfect right to do with him what she wishes.”
In the third, availability vs. ignoring, the “highly accessible” parent “is very alert to his [B’s] whereabouts…Even when he is napping in his room she has a selective filter tuned in to any sounds he might make. She is capable of distributing her attention,” whereas the “highly inaccessible, ignoring or neglecting” parent is “so preoccupied with her own thoughts and activities for most of the time that she simply does not notice B.”
And finally, in the fourth scale, acceptance vs. rejection, the “highly accepting” parent “values the fact that infant has a will of his own, even when it opposes hers…at the same time she accepts the responsibility for caring for him.” And the “highly rejecting” parent may say “she is sorry that she ever had him.”
On the surface, these scales appear harsh. When I first encountered them, I was haunted by my own history with Azalea—my selfishness, my tempestuous outbursts, my longing to be left alone—but I also could see that I was pretty attentive. In the accessibility vs. ignoring and neglecting scale (even the names!), I was pretty sure I had aspects of being a 9 (highly accessible): “M arranges things so that she can be accessible to B and B to her.” After all, I wore Azalea in a sling, then a backpack, till she was five years old. But I was also pretty 5-ish (inconsistently accessible): “M is inconsistent in her accessibility to B. Fairly long periods of close attention alternate with periods of seeming obliviousness to B.” And I feared I had a good dose of 1, too (highly inaccessible, ignoring or neglecting): “This mother only responds to B when she deliberately turns her attention to do something to or for B—making a project of it.” Oh, Mary—“making a project of it”! This very book?! How true, how painful, how fascinating—if I can stomach it—to see it laid out so plainly.
It took me a lot of reading and digesting to appreciate that Mary was not, as it seemed to me at first, holding mothers to some impossible standard. Because Mary spent so much time around mothers, she knew that anger was just part of the deal. But she also knew that because as a culture we find maternal anger so unacceptable, mothers might repress or avoid these feelings and express a certain kind of warmth on the surface that isn’t authentic, which isn’t wrong, since of course we want to present our best self to our children. But as a researcher, Mary saw this false face as so pervasive in her Baltimore Study that she cautioned her coders against getting fooled by “pseudo-accepting” mothers who responded to their babies in a “long-suffering manner.” In fact, “Ainsworth had noted that emotional warmth (which can be shown without sensitivity) did not distinguish mothers of secure-attached from those of insecure-attached infants.” The first time I read this, I thought of my mother, and her “honey-this” and “sweetie-that.” I felt as if her kind words contradicted her emotional distance. I have since come to hear my mom’s Midwestern niceties very differently—as the chirps and calls of a loving mother whose warmth is both superficial and deep.
As challenging as these scales are, as I have studied them over the past many years, I have come to marvel at Mary’s subtle wisdom, and to agree wholeheartedly with what she saw before her. These scales are not about mothers and babies; what Mary is describing here is nothing less than an outline of what it means to love someone—anyone—including ourselves. And it’s a guide—a step-by-step walk through the human mind of identifying with the self, then with the other, then with the self, then with the other. Back and forth, back and forth.
The highly sensitive mother “?‘reads’ B’s signals and communications skillfully, and knows what the meaning is of even his subtle, minimal and understated cues…When she feels that it is best not to comply with his demands—for example, when he is too excited, over-imperious, or wants something he should not have—she is tactful in acknowledging