back in that tub, and I wondered if the reason I had called out for my mom was because I’d been abused. I didn’t have anything but awkward discomfort with my dad to suggest he’d done anything like that, but the mysteriousness of our relationship, coupled with my own wildness, made me curious.
I thought maybe there was more to the distance between my father and me than the fact that we had so little in common—he being an auto-parts salesman, me a little girl. And maybe my mom was in denial, and that was why she vacuumed all the time.
Maybe that was why I loved my daughter like there was no tomorrow but still acted like a mean animal.
As I moved through my life, that bathtub memory kept rising up like a watery message from the Magic 8 Ball: Outlook not so good.
chapter twenty-three
Six years before he met Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby published an article called “Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home Life,” based on the troubled kids he was working with at the London Child Guidance Clinic. Some say this was the very first empirical study of attachment.
This historic study was, admittedly, flawed. Bowlby writes, “The research presented here was very limited by lack of resources; it was very unplanned, the number of cases are few, the data was collected quite unsystematically and several practical issues arose from working in a busy clinic.” And yet one simple observation from this messy study inspired the work that would follow and lead to Bowlby’s groundbreaking work on attachment: “40% of the thieves had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers…compared with only 5% of the control subjects, a significant difference.”
It was clear that there was something different about these boys. As Bowlby writes, “There can be no doubt that they are essentially delinquent characters.”
And yet he also writes, “It can be concluded that, had it not been for certain factors inhibiting the development of the ability to form relationships, it is possible that these children would not have become offenders.” If and how those “certain factors” are related to “maternal separation”—which would obviously have a profound effect on secure versus insecure attachment—was the question he would spend the rest of his life answering.
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I’VE BEEN THINKING a lot about Bowlby’s thieves. Especially the ones he called “affectionless,” the “children who lack normal affection, shame, or sense of responsibility.” I think about all the oh well moments of my adolescence, how relaxed I was in the face of serious risk and potential life-altering consequences.
Was I affectionless?
Actually, quite the opposite. I was nothing if not filled with feeling.
Azalea talks about the eighties being “old-fashioned.” And I know what she means. It was 1982 when everything changed for my family. My dad lost his business and had to declare bankruptcy. He had also had a heart attack. We moved that summer to a rented duplex on the edge of the “bad” part of a new town. And then, near the end of August, over a family dinner—such a cozy name for such a consistently unpleasant meal—my parents announced their separation, though it would take some time for my dad to move. He was on his way out of our lives, bereft without his beloved Jaguar, though my mom got to keep the red Caprice Classic station wagon. And I began mourning my chances of ever getting a pair of Calvin Klein jeans.
During the summer leading up to the big announcement, my mom, who never went to college or worked much when we were little, began transforming herself into a modern woman, preparing, I suppose, to be the main breadwinner and parent of three kids, two of whom were big, unwieldy boy-men, the other a soon-to-be-spooky teenage girl. My parents and I each had our own room upstairs. Matt slept in the basement, in a bed next to the washer and dryer, where Sam joined him when he came back from college.
My mom had it rough back then, trying to keep it all together in the midst of her marriage falling apart and her lifestyle dissolving, while attempting to tame two teenage boys with little to no support from my