days, when we visit, Azalea asks me why I can’t be more like my mom.
Like a gong bringing me back from my reverie to the present moment, preschool Azalea strolled into the kitchen carrying her breakfast of miso soup and leaned against the fridge, staring up at me. “Mommy,” she said, “I wish I could be just like you.” Awwww, I thought. My efforts are paying off! Look at me! And then I asked, in an almost rhetorical way, “Why’s that, honey?” To which Azalea replied, “Because then I could be angry all the time.”
I was stunned.
“Do you really think I’m angry a lot?” I asked. I mean, still?
“Um-hmm,” she answered, nodding confidently.
I asked, “What do I look like when I’m angry?”
“A mean animal.”
“And what does the mean animal look like?”
She made a face. And there before me stood a perfect mirror.
* * *
—
THIS KIND OF thing happened all the time; just when I thought I had something more or less buttoned up, Azalea exposed the truth. It was kind of horrible when it happened, but I was fortunate enough to have a venue for writing about these moments and sharing them with people in a regular column on being a Buddhist mother that I had been invited to write for a regional magazine. I called it “Flowers Fall: Field Notes from a Buddhist Mother’s Experimental Life.” From midway through Azalea’s first year until she was eight, I sat down every month to reckon with the conflicts I felt about my difficulties as her mother in the context of my Zen practice.
While my years of practicing Zen had taught me that the way to relieve myself of my anguish was always by directing myself to my own mind, I was afraid that this practice was selfish. As a parent, was it wrong to focus on myself? Wasn’t I supposed to be paying attention to her? Was I lying to myself by believing that I was becoming a better mother by studying myself in meditation? How did the awareness I was developing matter to her? Was it just an escape? I knew that the softening of my heart was a good thing all around, but I worried—as I am wont to do—and needed reassurance from trusted sources that I was on the right track.
So as Azalea grew up, I began interviewing all kinds of people for my work—not necessarily Buddhists, but writers, anthropologists, pediatricians, nutritionists, anyone who would talk to me. And I would ask them my burning questions about what it means to be a parent, and a person. How do you do it?
At the same time, I kept watching Azalea, like a barometer of my own heart, and she seemed to indicate reasonable levels of okayness. Which was a huge relief. She didn’t seem totally messed up. Yet. She certainly never seemed so scared of me that she wouldn’t speak her truth, which surely was a good thing.
In all my casting about to write my column and find some answers to my questions about parenting, about love, about myself as a mother, I started to notice the word “attachment” in articles, books, and interviews. This attachment business, however, seemed to be something distinct from Dr. Sears’s lists and rules that I had read about as a young mother. And this was when I began seeing references to the Strange Situation, the odd experiment-type thing that involved babies and mothers and various kinds of attachment. Looking online, I saw pictures of babies with toys, of mothers in a chair, and pictures of an old-fashioned, grandmotherly-looking woman with cute teeth. Her name was Mary Ainsworth. She looked so serious and tickled at the same time that I wanted to know what she was thinking.
The Strange Situation seemed to me like half science, half dangerous parlor game for anxious, nerdy parents who wanted to find out if their kid was “secure” or “insecure,” or “avoidant,” or “ambivalent.” How fun! How terrifying.
I started to watch all the videos of Strange Situations available online—babies and their mothers coming and going in the lab, babies crying, getting picked up, calming down. I would later learn that only footage of