Was it luck? Am I making it all up? Maybe things weren’t as bad as I think they were? There has to be a reason for me to be this not messed up. Maybe it’s an attachment thing. After all, research shows that, yes, a secure attachment in childhood tends to protect us from all manner of risk and adverse experiences. But the real point here is that attachment security protects us. From whatever life presents us with, or what we choose to do.
Enter grit.
As Moretti and Peled write, “Parental attunement and appropriate responsiveness give rise to secure attachment, marked by a view of the self as worthy of care and competent in mastering the environment.” As Sroufe and his colleagues write:
In our view, the explanation for why some people thrive and others seriously falter during this challenging period [of adolescence] lies substantially in developmental history…A basic sense of inner worth, of connection with others, and of others as available and supportive remains critical.
In other words: Get Mom.
After all, I actually called out for my mom from the tub. I wanted her to help me, and I trusted she would come.
Was a secure attachment the miracle that kept me safe?
How could that be?
Was my relentless pursuit of connection—through drugs and sex and friendships—an indication that something was working, first between my mother and me, then between friends and me, and even between myself and me? Was my determination to feel connected, what Sroufe and his colleagues call a “developmental achievement,” due to my secure enough relationship with my mom? Was that “something” the miracle that saved me from drowning all those years as a lonely kid, a troubled teen, a sex and love addict, and a desperate mother?
Maybe it’s the very same thing that has protected Azalea from all my struggles as a mother, my moving in and out from the edge of my darkness, exploring the middle, checking out the deep end, working so hard to stay afloat, arms and legs splashing.
In a word—swimming.
chapter twenty-five
One night when Azalea was still sleeping in her crib, Thayer went to comfort her as she cried out. As I lay in bed listening over the monitor, I heard her cry, “Nooooo! Get Mommy!”
Which made me sit up. And wonder. About everything I thought I knew.
part vii
a thing to slip into
This woman won our unstinted admiration for the competence and serenity with which she dealt with her large and complicated household. She grew all of their food. She made many of her children’s clothes and had recently acquired a sewing machine to help with this task…she treated each child as a person important in his own right…she had time to talk to us in an unhurried way.
—Mary Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda
chapter twenty-six
The most important development in attachment research since Mary Ainsworth “came up with this thing,” the Strange Situation, in 1964 is an article published in 1985 by her student Mary Main and attachment researchers Nancy Kaplan and Jude Cassidy. The article is called “Security in Infancy, Childhood, and Adulthood: A Move to the Level of Representation,” and it was the world’s introduction to the Adult Attachment Interview. This groundbreaking article marks the turning point for modern attachment research and has been cited in the scientific attachment literature nearly seven thousand times.
Up until this point, insight about one’s attachment system—in itself an invisible, internal construct—could be inferred only from something observable on the outside—secure-base behavior, for instance, in the home, in the world, in the lab. With the advent of the Adult Attachment Interview (the AAI), the subject of Main’s article, researchers had a way to illuminate the inside, where our inner informant—excellent or otherwise—lives.
Mary Main was one of Mary Ainsworth’s graduate students at Johns Hopkins, and she, like her mentor, was gifted with language. At two years old, she “wrote down some especially interesting sentences.” Her parents had introduced her to philosophy by the age of ten, and she attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, an iconic school that teaches with primary texts. For graduate school,