Attachment Theory and a Letter

During our last Human Growth and Development class, some students shared a bit about how the class (which focused on Attachment Theory) had impacted them.  One woman made a video about the guilt, agony, and hope she felt as a mother studying Attachment.  It was heart-wrenching.  My brilliant friend Jari read a story about sponges, and you wouldn’t expect this, but it was totally heart-wrenching too.  I chose to write a letter to my sister-in-law and her son (my nephew), and read it out loud in class tonight.  Even the parts that say ass and shit.  Here it is:

Dear Carine and Joris,

I’ve pretty much had your two faces in front of me for this entire semester. For my class on Human Growth and Development, I’ve been reading all about attachment… “attachment” being a way to describe the bond between any two people, but primarily between mother and child.  Attachment theorists would call you two a “dyad.”  Turns out, none of us is born able to do anything for ourselves, surprise!  All of our functioning, including our thoughts and emotions, begins as a two-person system, until we eventually incorporate that second person into our own psyche.  Carine, when you talk about “channeling your mother,” that’s (for better or worse) because you internalized her as part of yourself before you could even speak.

I’m sad to not be addressing this letter to Jacob at all, as if fathers don’t matter in our psychological development.  Jacob, you totally matter.  The budding feminist in me wants to throttle all these attachment researchers and scream, “Can’t all of you people give Mom a break?!”  The last thing the moms of this world need is to worry about dyadic affect regulation on top of everything else.  I do hope my generation of researchers starts including Dad in attachment theory, because deep down I’m convinced that dads do matter before the age of 2.  They must.  Surely the emotional health of humanity is not (another) burden that women must carry alone.

Early in the semester, when I began reading the opening chapters of my textbook on attachment, I realized that I had had the privilege of watching you two attach to each other in the months after Joris was born.  When I lived a block away and was able to stop in daily, I saw your dyadic emotional regulation, mirroring, missattunement, and repair.  As I read in my textbook about what both secure and insecure attachment looks like in a baby of 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 year, I felt my shoulders tense and fall, tense and fall.  Joris, it felt as if I was reliving your infancy, worrying if you would make it through each stage with a secure attachment.  As I remembered you at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 year I felt wave upon wave of relief to recognize you in the description of the securely attached infant.

Sweetie, part of the reason I see your face when I think of attachment is because I also bonded with you in that first year of your life.  Not as much as your Mama, of course, but I was at your house much more often then than I am now.  I made goofy surprised faces at you and watched as you reacted, probably about .42 seconds later, with a huge toothy smile (you had teeth at 4 months, you know).  Sometimes I tried to make you laugh but instead I frightened you, and I had to pick you up and hug you and try to teach you that ruptures can always be repaired.  If you grow up knowing in your deepest self that people can fight and still love each other, well… you have mostly your parents to thank for that, but if you wanted to give Auntie Chris just a bit of credit, I wouldn’t complain.

Joris, I see in you the marks of a secure attachment.  You seem to have access to all your emotions (although some of them still feel overwhelming), you’re able to say what you want, you feel free to explore your world, and you’re cascading beautifully into the stage where you try to destroy your maternal object.  From what I hear, a few more rounds of “NO!” and you may well come close.  I’m not sure if Winnicott (the psychologist who wrote about the aforementioned object destruction) ever cared for a two-year-old 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  If he had, he may not have wrote with such ease about the importance of the mother “not retaliating.”

Which kind of brings me to my next point: none of us are completely secure.  Your Mama has issues, Daddy has issues, Uncle Jack, Auntie Chris, HOLY SHIT, does Auntie Chris ever have issues.  Everyone who has ever held your warm little body and wished with every fiber of their being that they would never do anything to harm you, has harmed you.  It’s the most painful truth in all of existence: we harm each other, and even when we reconcile, the harm will always be part of the story.

So, despite your seemingly secure attachment (and in 20 years you can tell me if you think I’m right about that), you won’t live your life feeling secure all the time.  And when you don’t understand why you’re feeling depressed, or when you’re overwhelmed with the pain of being teased by other kids, or when you just want to live differently but don’t know any other way to be … just know that your crazy-ass therapist Auntie will always be there to muddle through it with you.  Free of charge.

Carine, I’ve seen how sometimes the stuff I talk about raises your anxiety.  The thing is, I don’t have kids, and so my bias is against the parent.  For that, I’m so sorry.  When I see Joris, sometimes I see myself as a toddler, and I’m convinced that somehow I can heal my own hurts through him.  This does not help any of us.

Part of my pathology (that means my crazy) is seeing the world in terms of right and wrong.  Learning about secure and insecure attachments has made me think that “right” parenting leads to security, and “wrong” parenting leads to insecurity.  This right-and-wrong construct has not served me well in adulthood, but man, it is a tough piece of my psyche to dismantle.

A few months after Joris was born you gave me a card.  In it, you thanked me for being there for Joris’ birth and for being a big part of his life, and you said you would always be there for me too.  I’ll definitely continue to need your support as I finish school and (hopefully) start some sort of career … but I think you’ve also been helping me in ways I didn’t even know how to ask for.  You’ve stumbled through this parenting thing with courage and honesty, and as I’ve watched you, my rigid right-and-wrong construct has started to break down.  You give yourself freedom to be human, to make mistakes, to be angry and irritated, and even to (gasp!) ask for help.  I know that in granting yourself this freedom, you’re also giving Joris—and me—the  same permissions.  Watching you parent has given me a bit more room to breathe. Thank you.

You three have a wonderful Christmas in Holland.  I can’t wait to hang out when you get back.

Love,

(Auntie) Chris

Comparing Notes

Every once in a while my brother Jacob will call me just to say, “Your pizza really smells bad,” and hang up.

Don’t you love inside sibling jokes?  That one refers to my first prank phone call, which Jacob lovingly guided me through when I was 4 and he was 8.  He didn’t do too many things lovingly back then, so that memory is particularly sweet.

I get revenge sometimes by calling him and singing the entire “Inspector Gadget” theme song on his answering machine.

This past week Jacob and I somehow managed to behave like grownups over the phone for five minutes.  I found myself saying, “Jacob, we need to compare notes.”

What I meant was: Jacob, who the hell are we?  There must be some overlap (and also a great divide) in our perceptions of the world.  What did we think was normal as kids?  How did the world surprise us when we left our parents’ home?  What are the aching questions that we live with?

I’m visiting my older sister in January, and I have a similar list of questions for her.  What were you proud of growing up?  When did you feel shame?  What did it mean to be feminine?  When was anger okay, and when was it not?

If there isn’t already a book of questions for brothers and sisters, I might need to publish one.  I would call it:

If Mom could hear this she would shit herself: 50 questions for your siblings.

or

Two-buck Chuck and a shit-load of kleenex: 50 questions for your siblings.

Either way, the word “shit” would definitely be a part of it.  Hi, Mom and Dad!

What questions would you add to my book?

Maybe this will convince Jack to let me get a kitty.

One of my MHGS cohorts is putting her dog down this weekend.  I’ve been thinking about her, wondering how their last remaining hours together feel.  The last days I had with Nosey were heavy and sad.  After we found out she was dying, death colored everything.

My Dad had the sad job of taking Nosey in for her euthanization eight years ago.  We assumed he was the only one who could “handle it.”  I will probably never ask him what that lonely morning was like, because even nearly a decade later I don’t think I could handle it.  I imagine he drove home from the airport after dropping Mom and me off, made some coffee, and did the crossword puzzle.  After the sun came up he would have had to coax Nosey out from under the bed, wrestle her into her carrier, listen to her last sad little yowls in the car, and finally, hold her still under the needle until she went limp.  I hope she somehow felt the years of our family’s gratitude in his touch.

Mom and I left for a trip early that day.  My last memory is of Nosey chasing down a moth.  I wondered if she knew she was sick.  If, given a few more weeks, she would have meowed to be let out, and gone away to die, thinking to spare us the grief.

One time, after Jacob and I ignored her pleas to go outside for an hour because we were too busy playing Mario Brothers, she peed all over our jackets.  It was the first and last time I’d ever heard of a female cat spraying.

Another time, after Jacob had moved away to college and I was the only kid left at home, she fell asleep in the crook of my arm, with her head resting on my palm.

On the fourth of July she hid in the basement during the fireworks, and when I came looking for her she trotted right past me up the stairs, as if saying, I wasn’t scared, I was just resting.

She often sat on my lap while I cried.  She would bounce up and down with my sobs, clinging to me with claws she didn’t have, and purr.  Not having any dates broke my fragile adolescent heart.  On the rare times I stopped pretending otherwise, Nosey was there.

Today I cried over my lunch.  I felt like my kitty had died yesterday and not eight years ago.  If only I could have one more day with her.  I would open a hundred cans of tuna, then put on a movie for us.  She was so good to me, and I didn’t thank her nearly enough.

Something my Grandma said…

in response to my last post…  Well, okay, not in response to the post.  I’m pretty sure my grandma will finish her life on this earth without reading a single word on the Internet.  But we were having the telephone- conversation version of my last post about my nephew, whom she will see next week.

“Christine, I tell you… the older you get, the more you long to see the world through just one more pair of young eyes.”

Creation, Incarnation, and my 1-year-old Nephew

I’m watching my nephew for an afternoon this week.  The email I sent to my brother said something like, “Out of the generosity of my heart I am offering to babysit for you on Friday.”  But what I meant was, “Can I hang out with your kid?  I need that time with him, I really do.”  The deeper I go into my work at Mars Hill (3 weeks now), the more I miss Joris.

This week we read twenty pages of a 15-volume work by Karl Barth called Church Dogmatics.  The chapter was titled “The Spirit as Basis of Soul and Body.” And through this great work, I discovered what may be the cornerstone of every seminary education… I can now join in the chorus of Divinity students past and present.  May we all confess together that

German Theologians are fucking hard.

I underlined a lot of things in the Barth article.  One of his shorter sentences was “God is the living and active basis of man.”  God sustains our lives by giving us his spirit, not just once but constantly, every second of every minute. In him we live, and move, and have our being.

See, we’ve been reading different theologies of creation, and our professor has been offering us this new perspective: creation is incarnation.  God creates so that he can live within this world.  He re-creates it, day after day.  He is constantly sustaining and creating, and he calls us as co-creators and participants.

Our professor made the outlandish statement that God needs us.  Later he modified it and said, “Okay, need isn’t the right word, but the relationship is murky.  God created us to create with him.  What if, for example, we all just stopped having sex?”

Eighteen months ago I watched Joris take his first breath in this world; a shivering, screaming new co-creation of God and his parents.

Now, I see his delight in the world.  He shrieks when he sees a dog.  He studies faces, and memorizes the regular ones (he even came up with a sign for Obama).  He wants to know how everything feels to the touch— dirt, sand, Auntie Chris’ teeth… I don’t think “childhood curiosity” is an inaccurate term.  But I’m beginning to think it’s more than that.  God is calling Joris to co-creation.  Joris loves the world because of God’s creative spirit in him.

And as I’ve been reading these articles and obsessing over lofty ideas about Spirit and Matter, creation and incarnation, sin and Imago Dei, I have this sense that I will understand this more if I watch Joris play.

I’m looking forward to Friday.

Associations

Here is a sentence that I have now memorized, thanks to our 10-day visit to Jack’s Nana and Grandpa:

“Bless us O Lord, for these thy gifts which we were about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.”

For 55 years, all the Canty kids (and later, grandkids) waited for Grandpa to give this blessing before dinner.  And every time we visit Nana and Grandpa, Jack wonders how his life would have been different if he had grown up sitting at that table and saying that prayer.

The short back story: Jack was born in Manchester, MA, and lived there for the first few months of his life.  His parents divorced when he was still a baby.  His mom raised him, and Jack met his dad (and grandparents) at age 23.

Jack imagines he would have ended up like the guys who came to his non-Christian Bible Study in college.  The ones who were raised Catholic seemed to have neutral (or bad) associations with church and religion.  Like our  10-year-old cousin who, when asked if he wanted to go to church, responded, “Will there be donuts?”  Donuts make an okay god until about age 12.

Not that I expect a 10-year-old to ask, “Will the burden of failure and shame be taken from me?  Will the vague emptiness in me somehow be filled?  Will I be known and accepted?”  Especially not a 10-year-old who tells Helen Keller jokes without knowing who Helen Keller is.

Once I came across a blog written by a Catholic dad.  He had two young kids (under age 4), and he wrote that he makes a point of holding and cuddling his kids during mass.  He said that he wants them to grow up associating church (and, I assume, God), with warmth, love, and safety.

When I read that I thought about the Canty family, thanking God for his blessings every night for 55 years; and all that the Canty kids associate with that prayer: anticipation of Nana’s cooking, a sense of shared activity, parents and grandparents being proud (as they all were when 4-year-old Jillian crossed herself correctly), and mostly, family stability.  No matter what fights went on that day, you could count on sitting with your family and saying that prayer in the evening.

If you care to comment, what do you remember about your religious upbringing say, before age 5 (before you learned the Bible stories and started to evaluate what was true and what wasn’t)?  What feelings do remember having about church and God?  In what ways did that shape you as an adult?  Do you think any of those associations are still with you?

I started going to church around age 5, after a wedding.  The minister called for prayer and when everyone bowed their heads I said, “MOM, WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?”  Mom decided it was time to start my religious education.  I’m curious, though, what did I miss before then?