Our last visit took place when Kasozi was sixty-four weeks old. He was wearing a scarlet sunsuit and had bells around his ankles. He sat close to his mother. When I held out a piece of candy to him he started across the room for it, then stopped in his tracks and looked at me as though wondering whether it was safe to come closer. Mrs. Kibuka took the candy and offered it to him; he came for it and got very sticky eating it, sucking it, taking it out of his mouth to look at it, making it last a long time. His mother rose and went out of the house for a moment. Kasozi broke into a howl, scrambled to his feet, and followed her. When we took photographs Kasozi was quiet with his mother close to him. Back in the house he leaned against his mother and made contented noises. He spent most of our visit lolling back against her.
What a truly excellent informant Mary Ainsworth was. And what an incredible mother she would have been.
She certainly mothered me.
* * *
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THE NEXT WEEKEND, Thayer and Azalea went to his parents’ house and I stayed home to work. After a long day at the computer, I watched the film Lady Bird as my evening reward. It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who named herself Lady Bird and who, though she has a spectacularly difficult relationship with her mother, spectacularly doesn’t hate herself. Or her mother.
One of my favorite parts of the movie is a conversation between the head of Lady Bird’s Catholic school, Sister Sarah Joan, and Lady Bird after she has written her college essay about Sacramento, the city she lives in and claims to hate.
SISTER SARAH JOAN: You clearly love Sacramento.
LADY BIRD: I do?
SISTER SARAH JOAN: You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.
LADY BIRD: I was just describing it.
SISTER SARAH JOAN: Well, it comes across as love.
LADY BIRD: Sure, I guess I pay attention.
SISTER SARAH JOAN: Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?
As I lay in bed that night listening to the quiet of our house, and CC breathing on her bed on the floor, I thought of the movie and of Mary. I thought of how much fun it would have been to watch Lady Bird with her and then discuss it with her until late in the night. We’d talk about mothers and daughters, and maybe we’d even talk about the daughters and sons she longed for but never had. We’d definitely talk about the daughters and sons she did have—her students, her legacy. We could even gossip about them, because now I know them, too. I lay there alone, thinking of the power of paying attention, which was, after all, her genius, her brilliance, like a jewel that lived inside of her, and, as she taught me, inside all of us.
Mary spoke of being childless as “one of the great sorrows” of her life. Struck by this, I have searched through her papers and work over the past decade, looking for some language to describe this desire of hers to be a mother—what did she think motherhood promised? What was she looking for? What did she feel was missing?
All I have found is the very briefest of mentions—as quick as the time it takes for a drop of water on a hot pan to ball up and evaporate. The babies she never had are, simply, the “children for whom I vainly longed.” The children Mary never had are like ghosts, a negative space.
As sad as I am for her, I must confess that I’m grateful, too. Had she been a mother herself, I doubt she would have had the heart to look so closely into the workings of maternal love. She would have, like the rest of us, wanted to turn away. Not necessarily because we’re avoidant, exactly, but because the love we have for our children, passed down through a beginningless line of imperfect human beings, feels delicate. But it’s not. We think