formal attention to the wails and whines of babies. This line of thinking, like all of Mary’s work, transformed the private world of a caregiver (mostly women at that time) attending to (or not attending to) a baby’s middle-of-the-night tears into something worthy of scientific understanding.
Crying is particularly important as a human phenomenon because of the way it is so intrinsic to attachment. Through our tears, we present an important opportunity to be soothed, or not. It was this tension between upset and stability that Dr. Steele was warning me about as I prepared to contemplate my own potentially disturbed attachment system and write about it at the same time, which requires a certain groundedness. In other words, as Mary writes, “in general, distress behavior is incompatible with exploratory behavior.”
One of my favorite metaphors for these behavioral systems at work is Mary’s description of a bird at a birdfeeder being suddenly surprised by the appearance of a person in the window. In that moment, fluttering its wings, with seeds in its beak, the bird must decide whether to feed or flee, because it can’t have two primary systems working at once. And neither can we. If we’re scrambling for safety, we can’t be creative. I can only imagine that by creatively studying the way this safety-seeking mechanism works, Mary herself was strengthening her own secure base. As have I, in studying her work.
The article that Sylvia and Mary eventually published—“Infant Crying and Maternal Responsiveness”—was a correction to what they saw as a stubborn behaviorist-informed misconception that picking up crying babies led to “spoiling.” Their data clearly indicated the opposite—that is, how much better off everyone is when parents attune to a baby’s requests for soothing, which actually leads to less crying, which is good news for babies and parents. And they described the evolutionary purpose of crying from an attachment point of view. As Bowlby puts it, “it is fortunate for their survival that babies are so designed by Nature that they beguile and enslave” parents. Indeed, unlike other primates, we humans are born so helpless we can’t even cling to our mothers for dear life, so we have our work cut out for us, enticing our parents instead to cling to us. And how do we do it?
Mary and Sylvia write, “Because it is disagreeable to adults…crying is generally considered a changeworthy behavior.” Or as Bowlby writes, “As a rule, crying leads a mother to take steps to arrest it.”
Which is why I thought for sure I must be dreaming when I woke up that last night in Akron to the terrible sound of an infant’s cries, then screams, then more cries, in a house down the street. I sat up in bed, turned on the light, and saw that it was 1:30 A.M. I opened the curtain and looked out at the darkened homes on the block, but I couldn’t tell which house the sound was coming from. I waited for the wailing to stop. It didn’t. I wanted to put my hands over my ears. But I couldn’t.
Was this baby alone? Maybe her parents were in the other room, catching up on the news; maybe it only sounded treacherous from a distance. Maybe the baby was colicky and they had been soothing her all night long and were spent. Maybe they were drunk, passed out? Didn’t care? Shooting up? Making love? Were they even in the house? Was the baby ill? Or just desperate?
The baby’s cries shifted back and forth from anguish to rage, from throaty sadness to screeching. The only pauses were for some phlegmy coughing. At least that’s how it sounded to me.
Maybe this was what our neighbors heard on the warm spring nights Thayer and I sleep-trained Azalea, my tiny diaper-wearing baby sending cries into the abyss that, could she have formed words, would have spelled my name—Ma-ma!
Listening to the baby down the street cry, I thought of all the times I had been unable to turn toward Azalea’s tears because I was too busy or too nervous, or just couldn’t muster the patience.
Sitting up in my bed, reviewing the past years with Azalea, I asked myself with no small amount of trepidation: Where does a baby’s unshared heartbreak go?
And then I heard