I Wrote This Book Because I Love You

by Tim Kreider

  I am managing the stress of the present situation with some medications that were prescribed, though not specifically for me, and by meticulously building a plastic model of a well-known fictional spacecraft, a behavior so obviously regressive there is no need to comment on it. I still catch myself saving up factoids and anecdotes to tell my ex-girlfriend—that this month’s full moon is called the Beaver Moon, that I got published in Dutch, that I ran into “Pappy” again—but in the short time since our breakup I’ve also been carrying on a torrid and voluble strangers-on-a-train correspondence with a doctoral candidate in philosophy, asked out a woman in a bar in Delaware whose last name I don’t know, gone on a date with a jaw-droppingly busty grad student in social work, spent a weekend in a hotel room doing the Times crossword naked with an Albertan chess player, and, throughout, have been lusting pathetically after a checkout girl at my local supermarket whose hair is a lustrous tangled Pre-Raphaelite mass of Celtic red and whose rump is full and jutting in her taut khaki Food King–issue pants. What is wrong with me? Am I an insane person? Is this—the sexuality of despair?

  One morning at my local library I realized that the sleeve of my jacket smelled like cat piss. “You should fix that as soon as possible,” my friend Kevin wrote me very seriously. “That is the kind of thing that can start to define you if it goes on for too long.”

  Methods

  A couple of my female friends once proposed that everyone should be required to wear a T-shirt printed with a slogan disclosing their problem (e.g., I AM AN EMOTIONAL ROBOT) so that you would be forewarned before disrobing with them. When I first read about attachment theory, I thought that here, for those who wanted it, was such a T-shirt. Think of the billions of dollars and countless hours that people have squandered on horoscopes and tarot cards, self-help books about Games and Rules, Martians versus Venusians, all in an effort to figure out what type of person they are, which type their partners are, whom they’re compatible with and whom to avoid. They would all have been better advised to read any pop-psychology book on attachment.

  There are plenty of such books now, complete with charts of the cognitive and behavioral habits characteristic of each attachment style and questionnaires to determine your own. I’ve watched my friends pass these around in bars like Internet quizzes to determine which character from Barney Miller you are. Some of them refuse to look at them, like cartoon Bushmen spooked by photos of themselves. It’s fun to armchair-classify your friends and exes. But the real question—especially if you happen to have been a subject of the experiment that established these classifications—is: Which one am I?

  Without access to the data, I can’t know how I was classified. But, based on my mother’s description of my behavior in the study, and my entire relationship history, I have my suspicions.

  “You were a very alert eight- and eleven-month-oldVI and loved playing with the toys they gave you,” Mom wrote me.

  At one point in testing I picked you up and walked around the room. You looked at all the toys that were there and then settled down to study the ball with the butterfly inside it. The researcher commented on how much you loved that toy and said I should get you one, but I never saw another toy like that. When I left the room while the strange person (Ainsworth herself) was there, you were playing with the ball and didn’t fuss. You entered into a baby talk conversation with her. When I returned to the room you started toward me, then looked at the ball and went back to it and continued playing with it. When it was time to go I picked you up and we left without a fuss on your part.

  It would be a low thing to use one’s own mother’s testimony against her, but I have to say that when Mom wrote this account for me, the line you started toward me, then looked at the ball and went back to it sounded like the classic behavior of an avoidantly insecure infant. But I am not remotely qualified to interpret this account, which isn’t even data but a personal recollection written decades after the fact. And that interpretation also jibes a little too neatly with my latest narrative about myself, confirming my fear that I’m somehow impaired in forming attachments. As with horoscopes or descriptions of rare medical disorders, it’s easy to project yourself into any of the attachment classifications. If I really wanted to know the answer, I’d need the original data.

  Margot and I learned right away that gaining access to that data was going to be a lot trickier than I’d anticipated. Mary Ainsworth had been something of a hardass about confidentiality, it turned out: she didn’t want to repay people who’d volunteered their children as subjects, allowed her into their homes, and offered up intimate details of their lives by labeling some of them as “insensitive” mothers or their children as “insecurely attached.” All subjects in the strange situation were informed that the data was “subject to anonymity of participants,” meaning that my mom would’ve signed a consent form waiving any future access to it. All names, addresses, and parents’ occupations were deleted in order to anonymize the data. “It’s actually pretty impressive, how many safeguards she took to ensure that her promise to the parents, that it would all be anonymous, would be kept,” wrote Margot, who is unrelenting at ferreting out information someone else has taken pains to conceal. “You have your work cut out for you.” All of which meant I would have to resort to subterfuge.

  “I figured that would be your response,” sighed Margot. She declined to enter, even in a spirit of harmless fun, into any hypothetical discussion of duplicity, ruses, Viennese pseudonyms, glue-on Vandykes, or any other such schemes to obtain the information illicitly. “It’s such anathema to my profession I don’t want to discuss it, no matter how jokingly,” she said. Basically, Margot is Commissioner Gordon and I am Batman: ultimately on the same team, but pursuing our ends through very different means.

  I was stymied until the day after Thanksgiving, when my mother stopped by my cabin while I happened to have Mary Ainsworth’s 1978 book, Patterns of Attachment, open in front of me. For the first time in my hearing, Mom recalled that the study we’d participated in had had something to do with object permanence, the phenomenon on which the game peekaboo is predicated: the recognition that things, and people, still exist when you can’t see them. As it happened, I had just been reading about the very first follow-up studies to Ainsworth’s original experiment, and there it was, right in front of me: sample 2 of the strange situation, “The development of the concept of the object as related to infant-mother attachment,” published in 1970. It had been conducted not by Mary Ainsworth (though, as Mom recalled, she had assisted, playing the role of the stranger) but by one of her graduate students, Silvia Bell. It was a strange feeling to come across a list of all the toys used in the initial studies and to see there, under samples 1 and 2, “plastic butterfly ball.”7 There it was—the toy that Mom says so entranced me at eleven months, like an object from a dream. Stranger still to read, in the “methods” section of Bell’s paper:

  The sample consisted of 33 subjects, 21 males and 12 females, of middle-class parents. . . . All were full-term babies, in good health, who had normal births. Two of the boys had been adopted by their present mothers when they were between 2 and 3 months of age.8

  That was me. I was one of those two adopted boys.

  Have I mentioned that I was adopted? I was: I was put up for adoption by my biological mother when I was a day or two old, and in foster care until my parents adopted me a couple of months later. Although Bell’s paper mentions adoption up front, she doesn’t consider it as a factor in attachment. The effect of adoption isn’t addressed in Ainsworth’s book, either, although she examines a lot of other potential factors in attachment: class, birth weight, Apgar scores, and whether or not the mothers worked. Maybe this was a function of the conventional wisdom of the time; my own parents didn’t make any big deal of my having been adopted, though they were always honest and matter-of-fact about it. For a long time I thought the only lingering symptom of having been given up at birth was the wrenching pity I felt for discarded objects an
d uneaten food, a pity that extends even to products I fear are likely to be unpopular or rejected. (Whenever I see a generic soft drink called Dr. Perky on the shelves of the Food King, I feel so sorry for it I can barely stand to live.) It wasn’t until I found myself still single in my forties, long after all my friends—even the most obvious misfits, womanizers, sots and misogynists—had successfully mated and reproduced, that I started to wonder whether it hadn’t had some more significant, lasting effect.

  Since I was a kid, the self-help/therapeutic/pharmaceutical industries have successfully pathologized every facet of the human condition, from being bored in school to hating winter. Adoptees are now described as suffering a sort of post-traumatic disorder. One of the books I read on the subject was called The Primal Wound and had a cover illustration of a swaddled infant enclosed in what looked like either the titular injury or a vulva pulled open with retractors. It wasn’t something you wanted to be seen reading on the subway. Another cover showed a toddler behind barbed wire. A lot of these books are written in a sort of hushed prose (“You might be feeling unsafe right now”), as if intended to soothe a hysteric. But their descriptions of the relationship troubles typical of adoptees were not unfamiliar: multiple relationships or marriages, brief but intense affairs, devastating breakups, attractions to emotionally unavailable partners, and the sabotage of stable relationships.

  Still, let’s not make too much of this factor: it would never occur to me to call my parents my “adoptive” parents. My own childhood was spent not behind barbed wire but on the sofa eating Pop-Tarts and watching Ultraman. About the worst thing that ever happened to me was Math. Although it would be a relief to be able to attribute my relationship problems to something that happened back when I was still blameless, the clinical literature doesn’t back me up; there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between adoption and insecure attachment unless there’s a previous history of neglect or abuse.VII9 I have several friends who were also adopted and are now, to all appearances, happily married.

  “Hey, I know you’ve focused on adoption,” wrote Margot, “but did you note, in that twenty-year long-term study, that one of the things that can make people switch to becoming insecurely attached is the death of a parent?” My father died of cancer when I was just a couple of years out of college, as Margot well knows. At the time I didn’t think I took this too hard; I was just angry and depressed and drank too much for a couple decades. “I imagine that watching a loved one die is the kind of experience that could give anyone pause about getting too close to someone else,” Margot wrote, “even if it’s someone they really want to be close to.”

  I wondered whether this line might not be an allusion to our own history: my father had died only a few weeks before Margot and I started dating. I should also have mentioned that Margot and I were once romantically involved. We went out for four years: we broke up once, forgot why we’d broken up, got back together and then remembered. I’d known her since she was twelve years old (though I stress for the record that our involvement did not begin at this time). We used to have a routine, back then, where I would try to keep a straight face while she said, looking steadily at me with her intelligent, grave little face: “Timothy, I’m afraid you’re just not living up to your full potential.” She would say the same words to me over a decade later, through tears, the day we broke up.

  I remember the first time I saw her as a young woman in college: I spotted her from the back seat of a car as she was crossing Baltimore’s Charles Street, her auburn hair shining copper in the sun against an azure sweater.VIII It was one of those moments old married couples enshrine in story, where the world goes still: I knew right then that she was the one. Whenever I hear people say things like Marrying that woman was the best decision I ever made or I don’t know where I’d be without her, I think: You’d be me. I’m the guy who didn’t make the best decision he ever made. Once, when a coworker of Margot’s said that if she were to learn her husband were a pedophile, it would be a “deal breaker” for her marriage, Margot said: “That’s funny—I don’t remember the words ‘deal breaker’ being in my wedding vows.” Hearing this, it occurred to me that a man would be very lucky to go through life with a woman like Margot at, and on, his side. But it turns out you can learn to live without anyone.

  Instead I ended up with this cat, whom I often call, in deference to her age and dowager status, Mrs. The Cat. I’ve now jerry-rigged various ramps and structures around the house to enable her, in her enfeebled condition, to get up on top of the sorts of things cats like to be on top of: the floor speakers, the pump organ, the woodstove. I’ve duct-taped a box to the top of the speaker, with raised sides like a hospital bed, so that she will not slide off of it in her sleep and plop onto the floor, which startles her and makes me sad. As a backup, I’ve padded the floor around the speaker with cushions. But these adaptations work for only a few days before her condition declines further and she no longer needs them. Mostly she now lies on the carpet by the sliding glass door in a neat loaf, asleep in a trapezoid of sun. Occasionally I check to make sure she’s still breathing. Late at night she prowls around the house yowling—a mournful yowl, a yowl of the soul. We are about to enter a new phase involving biweekly injections of subcutaneous fluid, which I do not expect to improve man-cat relations one bit.

  In an email titled “So I Can’t Stop Researching,” Margot told me that my study might’ve been part of Silvia Bell’s dissertation, which could be downloaded or ordered on microfilm for $38. She also informed me that that Silvia Bell was not only alive but still practicing, easily contactable through the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Although I’d embarked on this project determined to find the data on my infant self, now that I’d come unexpectedly close to the source, I found myself balking. Maybe some things ought to remain unquantified. I could easily have arranged to take the Adult Attachment Interview myself, but after a few cursory inquiries I’d dropped it. I’ve never wanted to know my IQ score or Myers-Briggs type, either. If I ever have a terminal illness, the way I’d prefer to learn about it is by dying. What if I were to find out I’d been classified as avoidant: How would that help? Do I really want to see a picture of myself with a knife in my eye?

  “It seems to me that your mom is the one who should be apprehensive,” wrote Margot. “Because isn’t any attachment problem supposedly firmly rooted, at least in part, in how the mother acts, or fails to act?” It’s true that the strange situation is an evaluation not just of the child but of the mother as well; the literature often refers to them jointly as a “dyad.” Margot, a mother of two, masochistically imagined some observer’s pitiless clinical transcription of her own parenting:

  1:03 P.M.:

  Baby tries to crawl, falls on face, begins to cry. Mother finishes pouring coffee, adds sugar, stirs, before speaking to baby.

  1:08 P.M.:

  Mother briefly plays peekaboo with baby, who loses interest and examines a shoe.

  1:11 P.M.:

  Baby holds out toy monkey and tries to engage mother. Mother is looking at Weather Channel to check the snow and the commute.

  “I can imagine all this vividly,” she shuddered.

  The security of an infant’s attachment to his mother doesn’t correlate with the traits you might assume it would; it has less to do with what we think of as “warmth” than with a subtler quality that Ainsworth called “sensitivity”—the mother’s ability to read her child’s signals, intuit his wants, and respond to them quickly and appropriately.10 (You can imagine a mother who’s demonstratively affectionate, cuddling and nuzzling and going O whooza little boozhy boozhy boo when what her kid obviously wants is to be let alone to play—the mother acting on her own needs instead of her child’s.) “There is a great difference between maternal warmth and maternal sensitivity,” Ainsworth said, “and it took me a long time to appreciate it.”11

  Essentially, what she called “sensitivity” involves empathy: paying attention
to the baby’s cues, letting him take the initiative, recognizing him as an autonomous individual. It may go without saying that people who are more reflective and self-aware themselves tend to be better at this. Researchers have traced the mechanism of cause and effect here to show how reciprocating an infant’s signals, or failing to, can reinforce or inhibit their responses. A rather mean-sounding study that involved getting mothers not to smile back at their babies when they smiled found that the infants not only stopped smiling but began “fussing” and actively avoiding eye contact with their mean unsmiling mothers—elegantly demonstrating how the desire for connection can be turned into its (apparent) opposite by a lack of reinforcement.12

  Yes, this is all unavoidably touchy stuff, smacking of yet more mom blaming when moms have already been blamed for everything from overachievement to schizophrenia and are happy just to get a freaking phone call on Mother’s Day. My own mom’s official policy re my research is that she supports me in answering whatever questions I may have and will be interested to hear about anything I learn. But since Mom’s official policy toward all things is 100% positivity and support, you never know with Mom. But I still feel a little guilty; wouldn’t it subtly poison your relationship with your mother to learn that her parenting had been second-guessed or found deficient by experts?