secure babies is shared publicly, though by no means did all the babies I saw look secure to me.
In one, a little girl named Caroline wears overalls. Her tall, gentle mother leaves her in the Strange Situation alone, and the girl cries her head off, going to the door, standing, waiting, weeping. Then the mom returns and picks Caroline up, shushing her, which calms her daughter down instantly.
“This baby appears secure,” the researcher states. I didn’t understand what he was seeing. Why would a “secure” baby wail when her mother left? I thought a “secure” baby was secure enough not to care about its mother’s whereabouts? I was very taken by this real-time back-and-forth, but I think I was so preoccupied—a technical term, I would later learn—with worry about Azalea and myself that I could barely follow along. And I could not, for the life of me, imagine my mother and myself in a so-called Strange Situation.
Would I have cried when my mom left the room? Would she have noticed my tears when she returned, or would she tell me to “just ignore them”? Would she have picked me up? Dutifully, or with real affection? Would I care? Would she? What kind of pair were we?
* * *
—
ONE VIDEO IN particular really grabbed me, and I watched it a lot. It was called “Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation: Attachment and the Growth of Love.” It opens with the sound of pat, pat, pat—a hand against a baby’s back, then images of babies, little kids, parents and teens, adults—people in relationships. Then some sweet, simple guitar music begins and a man says, “Nothing in life is more precious than the intimate relationships we have with loved ones. Healthy love relationships delight us, give us confidence to take on challenges, and support us in difficult times. These emotional bonds, what we call love, were the focus of Mary Ainsworth’s work, [which] can be described as the scientific study of love and how it develops.”
This was a super-simple production. And I couldn’t get enough of it. The “science of love”? While it seemed a little cheesy, I trusted this man and the images of the late Mary Ainsworth that flashed on the screen: her broad, open face, her 1950s formality. And for some reason, just watching the video again and again was helping me in my efforts to be kinder to Azalea.
My favorite scenes in the video were of this man, the narrator, in a family’s home, watching and taking notes on a clipboard as the baby and its mother went about their day-to-day business. They said goodbye to Daddy, the baby was fed, the mother tidied up, the baby cried and got picked up. I wasn’t sure what the narrator was looking for, what he was writing down, or what it had to do with attachment, but the way he watched these babies and their mothers with a kind but neutral smile on his face was soothing to me. As if by just observing these people in this unobtrusive but attentive way, he was loving them. And as I watched, I felt strangely loved as well.
* * *
—
IN 2016, WHEN Azalea was ten, I flew to Charlottesville, Virginia, and was met at the airport by Bob Marvin, the narrator with the clipboard and also Mary Ainsworth’s protégé, dear friend, and executor. He is now white-haired. He drove me to my hotel in his tidy BMW, eager to share stories with me about his beloved Mary and to tell me about his many years of experience “at the foot of the master.”
In the morning, I walked through beautiful old Charlottesville to the Ainsworth Attachment Clinic, founded and run by Marvin. He took me to the utility closet and we carried down twenty boxes filled with notes and papers from Ainsworth’s study in Baltimore, including the hundreds of hours of meticulous home observation that she and her team, which included young Marvin, conducted, as well as onionskin coding sheets from the original Strange Situations and handwritten and typed-up research notes from Uganda.
I was the first to ever see the boxes. Because I was the first to ask.
That evening, he took me to his house and introduced me to his lovely wife,