one in which “the children over two years of age (or thereabouts) sit politely with their feet tucked under them out of sight, listening to the talk of their elders.” Mary seemed especially pleased by the way babies were considered such a blessing in this culture, and treated so tenderly. She writes, “The ladies sit chatting on mats on the floor. The youngest babies are held on laps and are passed around from one lap to another, for it is considered a pleasure and an honor to be given someone else’s baby to hold for a while.”
But these mothers were far from perfect, especially from a contemporary Western perspective, where we have some big assumptions about what it means to be a good mother. Some of Mary’s favorite mothers did things like “beat” (that was the mothers’ word; it was more like a little thump) their babies with a cupped hand for misbehaving. Not all of the mothers breastfed or slept with their babies. They potty-trained their young infants by holding them up and teaching them to squat over a hole, and, in the process, had to deal with a lot of accidents. Mary watched a baby or two have a bowel movement on their mother’s lap or on the floor, which the mother cleaned up “without fuss.”
Mary was completely taken with the Ganda women and their “dignified and graceful carriage,” and it appears that the feeling was mutual. One family was so convinced that their beloved Paulo would have a better life with Mary in Canada that they asked her to take him home with her.
Because she was a particularly strange stranger—most of her subjects had never seen a white person—entering these babies’ homes every couple of weeks or more and sitting down in the family’s one chair to chat with their mothers for an hour or two, Mary repeatedly had the experience of watching babies who were shy and fearful sit gazing and smiling from their mothers’ laps as they worked up the courage to walk across the room to her for a sweet or a cuddle. This back-and-forth between mother and her reminded her of what she had learned when she wrote her dissertation, which was about the way young adults use their parents as a “secure base” as they grow and differentiate from their families. She began to see the way these babies did this through what she and John Bowlby would later refer to as “attachment behaviors” like crying, following, climbing up the mother’s body, or smiling in order to signal to their mother their need for comfort or attention. Some babies were able to get adequately reassured by the secure base of their mother to make it all the way to the other side of the room, where Mary sat invitingly. Others were more shy or hesitant, or just unable to settle. It became clear to Mary that what she was watching was more than just two people negotiating space and boundaries. It was a relationship. The idea that these babies cared about their mothers only because their mothers fed them was ridiculous. These babies and their mothers were connected.
Mary also began to see that the children who were very attentive to their mothers and who, in return, had attentive mothers were nearly giddy with delight much of the time, clapping their hands, returning to their mothers even when they weren’t hungry, smiling from across the room for no good reason. They seemed to have a mutually pleasing, special relationship.
Through the home visits, clinic observations, and sharing of such cozy, intimate time with these twenty-six women and their children, Mary began to see Bowlby’s budding theory of attachment come to life before her very eyes. Something was going on between these pairs that made them so tuned in to each other, and it was something much deeper and more subtle than physical hunger; it was more like an invisible force that made them move in tandem, as if reflections in a mirror. “It was,” she says, “a sudden, total, and permanent change in perspective.”
chapter five
When the Ainsworths left Uganda in 1955, Len got a job in the Baltimore area and Mary was eventually offered a position at Johns Hopkins, teaching psychology. In addition to settling into a new routine, she had another very big task ahead of her. Her visits in Uganda