“Are you a psychologist?” people ask me all the time.
“No,” I say.
“A social worker? Therapist?”
“Nope,” I tell them. “Just a writer. And a mother. And a daughter, trying to understand how attachment works.”
Just a woman knocking on the door of Mary Ainsworth’s lineage.
* * *
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AT THE HEART of Mary Ainsworth’s impressive legacy is something deceptively simple, and charmingly unscientific:
It is interaction that seems to be most important, not mere care, and particularly conspicuous in mother-child pairs who have achieved good interaction is the quality of mutual delight which characterizes their exchanges.
It is this quiet but revolutionary notion of delight that has changed everything for me. Delight, as an aspect of attachment, took me years to understand and absorb, and even longer to experience. Today I approach my entire life through the question of delight. Do I delight in Azalea? Do we delight in each other? Do I delight in my life the way Mary delighted in her own, and in those wonderful babies and their imperfect mothers? Do I delight in myself? Even a little?
I do. Not all the time, but every day some flash of delight comes over and through me. Azalea laughs. I laugh. Delight. Butter sizzles in the pan. Delightful. My new shoes fit perfectly. Someone watches someone else as they tell a story from their day. I yell, I recover. A book I’m excited to read comes in the mail. Azalea kicks her first goal in a soccer practice I happen to be watching. I sleep. I awaken. We all do. The sun falls behind the trees. My heart moves along with it. To be truly delighted is to let it all in, even the end of a day. I hear Thayer drive up to our house in the cold winter dusk and I know we have an evening together to look forward to.
What I’ve learned by loving Mary Ainsworth is that I don’t have to work so hard to love. I’ve learned that love, when working well, is automatic, intrinsic to who we are, almost imperceptible, stitched into our very being like digestion or respiration. If only loving were as simple as breathing.
But it’s not simple. In fact, love is so nuanced, it’s taken me almost fifty years and an expert spirit guide to find it; at the same time, it’s so a part of my very being that it’s taken me almost fifty years to see it. In fact, what I used to consider my anguish is my love, because of the way it reaches toward love. It’s like that optical illusion I used to stare at in the backs of magazines when I was a little girl hiding out from my family in the privacy of my room. One moment it’s two faces staring at each other in profile, a mirror image. The next, the outline between them becomes a lamp. Then two faces again.
Anguish turns to love. Separation becomes connection. Without the pain of aloneness, I never would have discovered the depth of my relatedness.
* * *
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OVER THIS PAST decade of studying the science of attachment, I’ve come to understand that, though it is one of the most important schools of thought to come out of the twentieth century, at its core is a mystical insight: Attachment is not something we do, but a state of mind. The securely attached “autonomous” adult is simply of the mind to value attachment. That’s it. And as the Vietnamese Zen master Thuong Chieu said, “When we understand how our mind works, the practice becomes easy.” So while what follows is about me, my hope is that it will be read like a proof, clarifying an important theory of mind that will make the practice of love easier, as it has for me.
Which is not to say that the journey’s been easy, or direct; far from it. My path these past many years has often felt more like a dreamscape than a straight line. As I’ve held the jewel of attachment up like a prism through which I could see the world—my world—in its shimmering, always changing light, I’ve questioned and requestioned my understandings and assumptions. And