As passionate as I was about my goings-on, I always felt bad about being dishonest with my mom and living a double life, especially since I knew she was working so hard to make ends meet and to support us all, and to make a nice home for my brothers and me.
When I was sixteen, I got caught stealing a carton of cigarettes. I walked through the aisles of a big-box store, grabbed the long carton, and put it in my coat. As I exited, a man in a blazer who had followed me out said, “Come with me, miss.” From the office, where I cried fake tears, I called my mom’s friend, who would know how to get in touch with my mom, who was at her favorite patio bar, where she loved to dance to the oldies. On the drive home, she mostly fumed silently, worried but at a loss, I could tell. Then she yelled, “You have to quit smoking!” We were both silent after that, which felt a little bit like we were laughing.
But she wasn’t laughing when I was up all night throwing up from drinking a pint of peppermint schnapps. Instead, she was sitting with me, putting a cold washcloth on my forehead and not asking questions.
I felt particularly horrible about her taking care of me because not only had I drunk too much, but I’d lied through my teeth about where we got the alcohol. I was so brazen as a sixteen-year-old and…developed, shall we say, both physically and in the fine art of deception, that I used to be able to strut into a liquor store, take a couple of bottles to the register—or ask for something behind the counter—and pay up. The cashier may have had some doubt that I was twenty-one, but I never got carded, even though I moved around to different stores to keep it interesting.
But when my mom came home early one night when she was supposed to be out dancing, my friends and I got busted because we reeked of alcohol. My mom demanded to know where we’d gotten it; I didn’t miss a beat. I told her a sob story about someone’s older sister, and how we felt so much peer pressure to drink, even though we hated it. I cried, peppered in enough detail to make it all sound true, and my mom actually felt bad for me.
At least she convinced me that she did.
In January 2018, The New York Times published an article about a researcher who studies deception in children. She found that kids who are good liars score higher in “theory of mind,” an ability to know oneself and read the feelings of others. Theory of mind is closely linked to mentalization. And it’s a trait that is almost entirely associated with secure attachment.
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THE REASON BOWLBY’S early forty-four-thieves paper is considered so historically significant is that it draws a straight line between a child’s behavior and a parent’s affection, pointing out that most of his delinquents had suffered from significant child-mother separations. In other words, even before Bowlby or Ainsworth or anyone else could say why, he saw that a substitute parent who merely fed these boys wasn’t enough to raise them to be emotionally and mentally healthy. They were suffering from a wound that had nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with a lack of proximity to their attachment figures, or what Ainsworth would come to call “total amount of care,” because, as Bowlby would soon discover, we are imprinted by our caregivers and wired to stay close to them. Bowlby’s thieves were victims of traumatic separations from attachment figures, and no one had come to take these important people’s places. The boys were half of a unit, undone by grief.
“Studies of nonclinical samples [‘normal’ kids] show that securely attached adolescents are less likely to engage in excessive drinking, drug use and risky sexual behavior,” attachment researchers Marlene Moretti and Maya Peled write. Another shows that “insecure attachment is associated with suicidality, drug use, and aggressive and delinquent behavior.” As another attachment researcher, Joseph P. Allen, and his colleagues put it, “In adolescence, attachment security has been positively linked to outcomes