and moved from the house with the bathroom at the end of the hall. My parents divorced when I was thirteen, and he moved to Phoenix to start over. After he moved, he gave me a toll-free phone card to call him whenever I wanted, so when I had nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, sometimes I called him and we chatted awkwardly. “Hey, Boop,” he’d say, using the name he called me when I was little. “What’s goin’ on?” He’d ask me about school and friends and try to explain his decision to leave us.
“I just had to get out of Michigan, Beth. And start over. Can you understand that?”
To which my adult self answers, Well, yes and no.
A few years later, he remarried. And then, many years later, after a straightforward, apparently minor car accident, blood spilled over onto his brain. Which ultimately killed him.
Back in the day, my dad was pretty cool. Posing in front of his MG in Germany, where he was stationed in the army, he looks like an Instagram star, all filtered out, wearing skinny chinos and dark-rimmed glasses. But when he died, he was living in a nursing home, paralyzed on the right side, easily frustrated and crying “Anxious, anxious, anxious” into the phone. And though he’d been a lifelong Beatles fanatic, he couldn’t name a single one of their songs. He couldn’t even smoke.
His ashes were scattered at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where he had started racing vintage Porsches. On a chilly spring day, Daido officiated a small funeral for him at the monastery. I stood there with my coat over my meditation robe, chanting along with the other residents, tears rolling down my face, crying over the loss of an idea.
Now I’ll never have a dad, I thought.
* * *
—
AZALEA LOVES TO hear stories about my childhood. And she can listen to the same ones again and again, like the one about the time I was three years old and got “lost” on my tricycle at my cousins’ house, even though I was just down the block. My mom’s sister Aunt Jo loves to harass my mom about this, saying, “Lib, what were you thinking? Letting a three-year-old out of your sight?”
“I don’t know, Jo,” my mom snorts. “I guess I wasn’t thinking!”
They both laugh and shake their heads and reach for another cigarette.
When Azalea asks me about my childhood, I’m always careful to edit so that I don’t appear too glum or harassed or misbehaving. Just the other day, during a slow summer lunch, she said, “I wish I could go back in time and know you when you were my age.”
“That’s sweet, honey,” I said.
“You were a lot shier than me, right?” she asked, looking into my eyes.
“Kind of.” I nodded, keeping it simple.
“I’d be nice to you,” she said.
And I’m sure she would. Just like Missy.
If there were a Venn diagram of overlapping circles showing Missy, Azalea, and me, where would we converge? What would the gray spot represent?
Sroufe writes, “Children with secure histories seem to believe that, as was true in infancy, they can get their needs met and achieve their goals through their own efforts and bids.” These days we call this trait “grit,” as defined by Angela Duckworth in her important book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. In an article looking at the connection between grit and attachment, Jaclyn Levy and Howard Steele define this trait as being “responsible for the presence of [the] individual’s long-term drive and determination.” So-called gritty individuals “view achievement as a long-term process; their lead is endurance, determination and stamina.” Levy and Steele continue, summarizing Duckworth: “Disappointment and/or boredom may indicate to many that it is time to modify one’s trajectory, whereas gritty persons continue on track.” And while grit is usually understood to be the result of certain personality traits, after a study of the relationship between grit and attachment, “it was found that high grit scores were significantly linked to high past mother and father care…attachment anxiety and avoidance were negatively correlated” with grit.
Whether trying to get picked