sidelines of her anguish, noting each and every subtle variation of her birdsong. When Mary listened to babies cry, she wasn’t the one who was supposed to swoop in with a pickup, so I imagine that, though it was painful, she bore it for the greater good, for science. And in her listening she found, interestingly, that secure babies had the most varied cries and used the most distinct chirps and caws to communicate to their parents, who were able—for whatever reason—to listen and respond.
By 6:23 P.M. on Tuesday, day nine, it was “quiet.” And at the bottom of the page is a random phone number. My sacred log had become scrap paper.
Sometimes I see a picture of Azalea at that age, with her wispy hair and toothless smile, her adorable, uncoordinated little fingers clumsily holding a toy, or I see a baby in a stroller or being buckled into a car seat, so helpless, and my heart sinks, thinking of those nights of onesie-soaking goat cries. I can’t believe we did that, but I’m glad we did. A few nights of tears, I trusted, paled in comparison with what I knew Azalea was up against, and what she’d be up against even more if she and I were both exhausted: My impatience. My anger. Me.
After that first night of sleep training, I called my mom in the morning, crying, afraid I had damaged Azalea for life. She assured me it just could not be so, not in one, two, even three, four, or five nights. I asked her how she did it—how did she get me and Sam and Matt to sleep? She claimed not to remember. “That was a long time ago, honey,” she said.
Years later, upon reflection, my mom remembered. Per Dr. Spock’s suggestion, she let us cry for twenty minutes. And it worked.
chapter seventeen
On my last night in Akron, I woke up to the sound of a crying baby. I had been up late, reading and writing in bed, the air almost fogged with humidity. I was hot and tired from my walks to and from the bus that took me to the archive, but I had been planning this trip for months and was determined to squeeze in as much as possible before heading back to the Catskills. Eventually I did fall asleep in the thick, summery silence, the bed covered in academic papers, my own early motherhood journals, and notes from the past few days.
That day I had been scanning Mary’s letters to and from Sylvia onto my hard drive. They were in the midst of analyzing the voluminous data they were collecting, trying to see the big picture of attachment forming through the very fiber of these mothers’ and babies’ daily lives.
Mary writes:
The newborn baby is not attached to his mother or anyone else. He may be taken from her and given to a foster mother without any apparent distress or disturbance. But in the course of the first year of life he forms an attachment to his mother, and after this attachment had developed he is distressed if he is separated from her and he protests the breach of ties. How does this attachment develop? What factors facilitate this development or delay or prevent it? What are the criteria which enable us to judge that an attachment has been formed?
As Bowlby puts it, “on this foundation, it seems, the rest of his emotional life is built.”
Sylvia and Mary’s letters involved a very detailed discussion about the babies’ crying. They were searching for a method of statistical analysis that would make sense in the context of what they were seeing in the homes—that babies who cried the most had mothers who were less “responsive,” and vice versa. Mary had first noticed this in Uganda in 1955, and so both B’s tears and M’s responses were being closely tallied as they watched for threads and themes. Eventually they found that more sensitive responsiveness to crying in the first six months of life actually led to less crying in the second six months. And while I was nervous for the mothers being watched, I was also touched by the way these gifted researchers, neither of whom had children, paid such close, professional,