safe place to get off, Azalea jumped! Falling ten feet through the air, luckily she landed safely on her skis. That’s the kind of commitment attachment inspires. That’s the kind of danger love incites.
Once we get riled up, like Azalea alone on the chairlift, the only thing that slows the caregiving and attachment systems’ primordial effort is reaching its set goal—of togetherness, of safety, of intimate connection, of what researchers so tenderly call “felt security.” And when that goal isn’t reached, we keep searching for it. Forever.
Felt security. It’s not up to anyone but us to say when we get there.
* * *
—
LYING PREGNANT IN the winter sun with our cats, the snowy mountain outside our bedroom window, I didn’t know any of that. It just felt good to imagine devoting myself to the needs of my unborn baby. It felt healing. After all, I knew the pain of feeling unloved. And something really resonated with me when I read from The Baby Book, “Studies have shown that infants who develop a secure attachment with their mothers during the first year are better able to tolerate separation from them when they are older.” A “secure attachment” sounded like something worth having, and I wondered if I had one. Thinking back to my own childhood, and with a quick scan of all the trouble I’d been in and caused, I figured probably not.
One of my earliest memories is of being in the kitchen with my mother and asking her a question. She was busy. I was not. It’s a posture that defines my childhood—her back to me, her motion; my stillness. Her just going about my business stance; my something’s missing longing to be rescued from the pain of feeling alone in the house, unseen by my parents and shut out by my older brothers. My mom always said that being a mother was her true calling, which I found odd, since she really didn’t seem all that into it. Regardless of the insults or violence that rose up between my brothers and me—their taunts sometimes led to physical aggression—she watched from the sidelines, choosing to stay moving and focused on taking care of things instead of me. Even as a little girl climbing onto her lap, I often felt disappointed. Her distracted, stiff cuddle just didn’t satisfy me, and I would get down, still searching for something. As adults, my two brothers and I don’t see one another much, and we see eye to eye on even less, but one thing we can all agree on is that my mom was obsessed with housework, particularly vacuuming, and especially in the morning, when her house of teenagers was asleep. And we can even—sometimes—chuckle about how she once told my brothers to go “clean up” the woods surrounding our house.
When I was pregnant, I was determined to be a warmer, more present, and more loving mom than mine had been. I had a feeling it might be tricky, since I also knew how much we tend to be just like our own parents. And in fact Azalea wouldn’t dream of eating in my new car, and she scrambles for the paper towels whenever she spills something. But there’s so much more to our relationship than cleaning up, I tell myself. And she doesn’t need protection, I tell myself. Not like I did.
* * *
—
“HEY, BETH, YOU’RE UGLY,” Sam, my oldest brother, reminded me one typical Saturday morning from his seat on the couch, wrapped in Grandma Beryl’s afghan, our cat Tasha curled in his lap. I was eight years old, though even today, at forty-eight, I can hear his voice when I look in the mirror. I had just walked in from my room down the hall, looking for a place to sit, to settle, to be. No such luck. Matt, my middle brother, sat on the floor as they watched Abbott and Costello, the comedy duo. He hissed a laugh, like a balloon letting out air. We were all in our pajamas, our parents still asleep. Two empty cereal bowls sat on the coffee table, bathed in snow-light.
I went to the kitchen and poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat at the snack bar alone, my throat tingling, tears starting to well up, yet again