I’ve often wondered why I was going to all the trouble. Why so much effort to understand something so foggy and elusive and complex?
It’s only now that I can see that it’s because I love Azalea so much that I’ve spent the past ten years of my life trying to get to the bottom of that love, only to see that it’s bottomless.
And though I had always felt broken, by studying attachment I’ve learned that we are all born with something utterly, totally, miraculously unbreakable, which is why my story of loneliness, of something being wrong, of the shame of feeling separate, has fallen apart.
This is the untelling.
part i
untelling
I had thought that she would be a very intellectual mother, but although her understanding of B [Baby] has been helped by her reading…she has learned quite a lot about the way her baby signals his states…She likes to touch B and does frequently. She kisses his head and shows all sorts of little gentle, affectionate signs. There is no indication whatsoever that she considers this baby a burden, but on the contrary I think she is surprised at how much she is enjoying him.
—Mary Ainsworth, Case 18
chapter one
In 2005, I lay in bed beneath the Christmas lights in the loft of our little house in the Catskills, The Baby Book propped against my giant round belly. This encyclopedic volume by Dr. William Sears and his wife, Martha, a nurse, is the seminal guide to what they call “attachment parenting,” the controversial approach to raising kids that encourages mothers to breastfeed, co-sleep, wear their babies in a sling, and engage in what they call the “Seven Baby B’s of Attachment Parenting,” all designed in response to an infant’s innate need to be close. That made good sense to me, though I knew that many people felt some resistance to this method, especially the fact that it seemed to ask an awful lot of parents and particularly women.
I, however, welcomed the Searses’ invitation to wholehearted—though some said over-the-top—parenting and their insistence that “when a hungry or an upset baby cries, he cries to be fed or comforted, not to control.” And they made it sound so simple: “All parents, especially mothers, have a built-in intuitive system with which they listen and respond to the cues of their baby.” What would it be like to listen to my baby’s cries? I wondered. Would I sink into this magic realm of knowing what to do? I had heard so many stories about colicky babies and tantruming toddlers and parents losing their shit. And I had seen that mom in the grocery store, the one who ignored her crying child. I thought, Just pick the kid up! How hard can it be?
While Dr. Sears says that attachment is an “intuitive system,” the technical term is a “set goal” behavioral system, and, as I have come to understand, we all have it, not “especially mothers.” Caregiving, attachment, sexuality, affiliation, fear—these are called set-goal behavioral systems. We are all equipped with these whole body/mind organizations that kick in when needed to work tirelessly until they reach their goal. When we lose track of our child in Target, there will never come a moment when we say, Oh well, now that my kid’s disappeared I get to sleep in on the weekends, and give up the search. Likewise, there will never come a time when our lost child settles in among the school supplies or wanders off with a stranger, never looking back. Attachment works like fear, which, once ignited, never stops until the threat is gone, or like a state of sexual arousal, which won’t rest just because we want it to.
When Azalea was seven years old, she and Thayer were riding the chairlift up a mountain at our local ski area. Lost in a daydream, Azalea missed the spot where she and Thayer had planned to get off, leaving her on the lift without her dad, who had skied off the chair, only to discover with a start that Azalea was not right behind him. Realizing that she was alone and her beloved father was gone, rather than wait until she got back to the bottom of the mountain, the next