Strange Situation - Bethany Saltman

prologue

It was a Friday when the home pregnancy test told me the time had come. My husband, Thayer, drove home early from his job as a hospice social worker to receive the news and saw me sitting on the big rock that was our front stoop, holding the pink stick in my hand like a magic wand poised to change our lives forever.

I had not spent my life longing for a baby. Instead, my considerable passions—as a writer, as a person, and as a Zen student—had always been directed at being born as myself. And then, at thirty-six years old, I came to believe that becoming a mother would teach me something necessary about being alive.

I was right.

When my daughter, Azalea, was born in 2006, I was relieved to see that even though I had approached motherhood with a bit of distant curiosity, I absolutely, unreservedly loved her with a squishy-hearted, swooning love: Those perfect human ears; those dark blue, deep-set eyes; her sweet, milky breath; those miniature fingernails!

But it wasn’t long before I also started to sense that something was missing. When she cried, I resented the interruption. When she wouldn’t settle down, the heat of my frustration unnerved me. One time, when she was six months old, she was supposed to be taking a nap but instead was trying to pull herself up in her crib, nonstop crying. I was frazzled, running on fumes. I sat on the floor in her room and seethed, yelling at her to just go…to…sleep!

I thought back to all the difficulty I’d had with relationships—starting with family, with friends, with boyfriends, with myself—and wasn’t surprised to find that this was hard, too. I had always feared I was a damaged person, the victim of an unloving and maybe even dangerous childhood, crippled by something I couldn’t name. I believed I was broken, unable to truly give or receive love. It was no surprise, I told myself, that I was a terrible mother, especially since my own mother was so cold and rejecting. She and my dad threw me to the wolves—my two older brothers—who never loved me. Then, when I was thirteen—Azalea’s age as I write this—my parents divorced and my dad moved across the country, which didn’t bother me at all. Because I had always felt alone.

That was my story.

And then I discovered the science of attachment. As I began to immerse myself in the decades of rigorous research that lie far beneath the popular “attachment parenting” movement—and in fact, in many ways, contradict it—I started to wonder if the thing I was missing was in my understanding of who I was rather than in my DNA.

* * *

AT THE HEART of attachment theory is an evolution-based explanation for the sometimes unbearably up-close identification we feel with our children. All newborn mammals attach to their caregivers in order to be fed and kept safe from predators—to stay alive. For human infants, born incapable of everything but the most basic bodily functions, our early dependency on a loving caregiver is so total that parent and child must operate, in a sense, as a unit for many years. And yet, as my Italian American, Jersey-born-and-bred Zen teacher used to say, “You and I are the same thing, but I am not you, and you are not me.”

How painful that reality became when Azalea was born. Our indisputable one-thingness—when she was in utero we shared everything, including food and oxygen—crashed into the rough physicality of being, in fact, two things: me over here, feeling angry that she, over there, was a bundle of need demanding something of me that I didn’t think I had or wanted to give.

What kind of mother am I? What kind of person? These were the questions that plagued me.

When I stumbled onto the science of attachment, something called to me, the shadow of a question not yet formed. In my reading, I began to see mentions of a laboratory procedure called the Strange Situation that was used in clinical research to observe and assess attachment patterns between caregivers—mothers, mostly, in the beginning—and their one-year-old babies. A mother and her baby enter a room with two chairs and some blocks on the floor. The mother