by Tim Kreider
The first thing Margot did after she started on antidepressants was put her cat to sleep. “Any sane person would’ve had the cat killed long ago,” she said. She could now walk into her own kitchen to make coffee in the morning without steeling herself first. My own cat had died over the winter—she slunk out of the house with sudden wily alacrity one afternoon, and later that day I found her down on the beach, awaiting her death with bushido stoicism. I probably should’ve left her there, but I couldn’t let her drown or freeze to death or get eaten by coyotes, so I gathered her up and carried her back to the house. She felt bony and fragile, surprisingly light in my arms. She died late that night, and I buried her in the yard at dawn. In the days after the cat’s death I received an unexpected number of condolences from friends, ex-girlfriends, ex-girlfriends’ parents—even from women I hadn’t known were still speaking to me, who’d always been on terms of formal enmity with the cat, like the wreaths dropped by Allied pilots at the Red Baron’s funeral.
Margot had only been in treatment for a couple of weeks now, but already she’d noticed that people at work were treating her differently—having more intimate conversations with her, confiding in her, sending her links to poems. It made her wonder what she must’ve seemed like before. I could imagine that, if you didn’t know Margot, she might seem a little severe—intimidating, even. She didn’t seem like a different person to me now; she seemed very much Margot, but at one less remove—warmer, more unguarded, unabashedly happy to see me. Her demeanor was one of barely suppressed mirth, as though she were remembering a joke she knew I wouldn’t get.
One reason people cling so loyally to their maladaptive patterns is that, once you’ve recognized them, the narrative you’ve constructed to rationalize them unravels and suddenly your whole life can look like a sad stupid waste. Lately I wanted to write formal letters of apology to everyone I’d ever dated. I wished I could tell them all, without its sounding like complete bullshit, that all my hurtful feints and dodges had been symptoms of love, however well disguised, as telltale as dilated eyes or bad poetry. Mostly I wanted to travel back in time and punch myself in the face forever. But we only travel through time one way, and all you can do, as Margot pointed out, is try to ensure that five years from now you won’t want to come back and punch yourself in the present.
“If you really feel some need to atone to me,” she told me, “instead of apologizing, you can get involved in a lasting intimate relationship. That’s how you can make it up to me.” I’d been afraid she would say something like this. You’re just not living up to your full potential. It would be easier to travel back in time. The problem isn’t that change is impossible; it’s that it’s really hard. We do have free will blah blah blah; we just hardly ever use it.
Margot waved aside my worries that I might be somehow essentially damaged or lacking. “You do have intimate relationships,” she pointed out. “In fact, I would say you have more, and more intimate, relationships than anyone else I know.” I guess what I am, like Margot and you and everyone else, is complicated. We all get lopped up, scarred or obstructed, and grow into complexly knotted shapes—stunted or twisted, lopsided or split, sometimes improbably beautiful, like trees growing on around barbed wire. A friend of mine used to say, “Perfect people are boring.” And anyway, which would you rather be: securely attached, or delightful?
Margot assured me that she and I weren’t as different as I thought. “It’s not as if being with someone makes you any less alone,” she said. I gave her an easy-for-you-to-say look. “I mean, sure it’s nice to have someone care when you come home and complain about your day,” she said. “But in the big ways, like in facing death, we’re all on our own.” She’d lately been having vertiginous spells of awareness of her own mortality: while loading the dishwasher she’d suddenly know, as surely as she could tell she was standing upright with her eyes closed, that she was going to die. Her decluttering campaign, she explained, was a way of facing this head-on. “People think that by clinging to all this stuff they can hold on to the past, stop time, and ward off death,” she said. “I would like to do my part to smash that illusion. The past is gone. We’re here now.”
Margot thinks all my old letters to her are in a box upstairs at her parents’ house in Alabama; she intends to get them for me the next time she’s down there. That postcard she wrote the night she tried to call me, which used to convulse me with remorse, is in a slot in my desk in New York, an inert piece of cardboard. And the data on my infant self, my every telltale gesture transcribed one January day in 1968, is in some basement archive in Baltimore, or Akron, or Cambridge—or who knows, maybe it was sitting out in plain view on Silvia Bell’s desk like the Purloined Letter the whole time. The past is gone. But we’re here now, Margot and me, sitting together at this kitchen table tonight, talking hard about our problems, relationships, and therapy, while it keeps coming down outside. “The question is,” as Dr. Bell said, “what happens next?”
Onward,
Citations
1. Mary D. Salter Ainsworth and Silvia M. Bell, “Attachment, Exploration, and Separation: Illustrated by the Behavior of One-Year-Olds in a Strange Situation.” Child Development 41, no. 1 (March 1970): 53.
2. Mary D. Salter Ainsworth, Mary C. Blehar, Everett Walters, and Sally Wall, Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation (New York and London: Psychology Press and Taylor & Francis Group, 1978), 102: Fig. 10, “Contour Plot of Discriminant Scores.”
3. Everett Waters, Susan Merrick, Dominique Treboux, Judith Crowell, and Leah Albersheim, “Attachment Security in Infancy and Early Adulthood: A 20-Year Longitudinal Study.” Child Development 71, no. 3 (May/June 2000): 684–89.
4. B. Laschinger, C. Purnell, J. Schwartz, K. White, and R. Wingfield, “Sexuality and Attachment from a Clinical Point of View.” Attachment and Human Development 6, no. 2 (June 2004): 156.
5. Lee A. Kirkpatrick and Keith E. Davis, “Attachment Style, Gender, and Relationship Stability: A Longitudinal Analysis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66, no. 3 (March 1994): 502–12.
6. H. van IJzendoorn Marinus, “Adult Attachment Representations, Parental Responsiveness, and Infant Attachment: A Meta Analysis on the Predictive Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview.” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (May 1995): 387–403.
7. Ainsworth et al., Patterns of Attachment, 32.
8. Ibid., 31.
9. Manuela Veríssimo and Fernanda Salvaterra, “Maternal Secure-Base Scripts and Children’s Attachment Security in an Adopted Sample.” Attachment and Human Development 8, no. 3 (Sept. 2006): 262.
10. Mary Main, “Mary D. Salter Ainsworth: Tribute and Portrait.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 19 (1999): 682–776; see 696–97.
11. Mary D. S. Ainsworth and Robert S. Marvin, “On the Shaping of Attachment Theory and Research: An Interview with Mary D. Ainsworth.” (Fall 1994) Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 60. no. 2/3, Caregiving, Cultural and Cognitive Perspectives on Secure-Base Behavior and Working Models: New Growing Points of Attachment Theory and Research (1995): 11.
12. Yvonne Brackbill, “Extinction of the Smiling Response in Infants as a Function of Reinforcement Schedule.” Child Development 29, no. 1 (March 1958): 115–24.
13. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Penguin Books, 1983).
14. Marina Zelenko, Helena Kraemer, Lynne Huffman, Miriam Gschwendt, Natalie Pageler, and Hans Steiner, “Heart Rate Correlates of Attachment Status in Young Mothers and Their Infants.” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 44, no. 5 (May 2005): 470–76.
15. Main, “Mary D. Salter Ainsworth,” 702.
16. D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites (1963),” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 186.
* * *
I.
Ainsworth used the male pronoun to refer to infants in order to clearly distinguish them from their mothers, and I’m following the same convention for the same reason.
II. Although avoidant and anxious attachment are less-than-ideal adaptations, they’re still normal variations. (Only a rare fourth category later identified as “disorganized,” characteristic of children from very dysfunctional family backgrounds, is considered pathological.) Also, bear in mind that these classifications aren’t a rigid taxonomy but a spectrum: someone might be basically securely attached but have some avoidant or anxious tendencies.
III. Obviously researchers can’t run the strange situation on adults, few of whom still reliably cry when their mothers leave the room, so instead they ask them about their own childhoods and relationship histories using self-reporting techniques like the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). This isn’t a simple quiz like the ones in self-help books; subjects’ attachment classifications are based less on the content than on a linguistic analysis of their answers. (Avoidantly insecure people have a hard time recalling clear details about their childhoods or composing an intelligible narrative about it, and tend to minimize the importance of relationships; the anxiously insecure are still embroiled in the past, their accounts angry and incoherent.) The high correlation between strange situation and AAI classifications is obviously suggestive, although some killjoys like Margot want to know what makes us so sure these two different procedures are measuring the same thing.
IV. Holy cow! This passage is so florid and incoherent and bizarrely atypical of the clinical literature that it’s hard to read as anything other than some researcher’s thinly veiled seething over a cheating ex.
V. Someone’s even run the strange situation on dogs and cats, with unsurprising results: dogs actually do appear to be attached to human beings; cats are in it for the cat food.
VI. The strange situation was conducted in two separate phases: a home observation and the lab procedure.
VII. There is a slightly higher incidence of insecure attachment in transnational adoptions.
VIII. Margot disputes this memory; she says the first time we saw each other was in the lobby of an apartment building.
IX. Margot is not the first to charge the strange situation’s methodology with squishiness. There was a lot of initial skepticism about the study, much of it doubting that such a contrived artificial situation could fairly represent the normal interaction of a mother and child. The particular study in which I was a subject was taken to task because the same person (Silvia Bell) had determined both the object-permanence scores and strange situation classifications. Ainsworth herself always emphasized that the data collected in the controlled setting of the strange situation could only be understood in the context of much longer observations of infants and mothers interacting in their own homes.
On Smushing
I wield the power of life and death over thousands daily. I am absently smushing ants as I write this. It’s summer, so there are ants in my house, as there are every year, and I have put out ant traps, which have had no effect, as is also traditional, so I’m inefficiently smushing them one by one. I am inconsistent in my enforcement: I’ll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing one ant moping around on the counter, looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs. Dispensing death and clemency so capriciously—killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim—gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky, in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
Ants, as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals—I’m sure myrmecologist E. O. Wilson would correct me on this—but every time I smush one I am uncomfortably aware I am extinguishing one living being’s single chance to be alive for eternity. (Unless you believe in reincarnation: maybe next time I get to be the ant and he gets to smush me.) It’s hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automata; as I watch an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am. As an Andy Breckman lyric goes: Cockroach on the bathroom wall / asshole at the shopping mall . . . Do their best to not get killed.
In this, as in so many things, my sixteen-year-old self would be disappointed in me. At that age I thought maybe Jainism was the religion for me. All I really knew about the Jainists was that they carried little brooms with them everywhere to sweep insects out of their paths, lest they accidentally step on a single bug. I was a kid who used to spend most of my time at pools rescuing slowly flailing beetles from drowning, so this appealed to me. Though I note that Jainism originated in India, a country to which stinkbugs are not indigenous. The stinkbug, an invasive species, has taken over the mid-Atlantic region in the last few years as swiftly as the Martians conquered England. It was from stinkbugs that I learned that any animal in sufficient numbers, no matter how harmless, can be horrific. An effective stinkbug trap can be constructed out of a two-liter soda bottle and an LED light, but I find it more thorough and meditative to eradicate them through piecework using the nozzle attachment of my vacuum cleaner. They make a very satisfying thhhhhP! sound when you suck them up. They then get to live out the rest of their lives in the oubliette of the vacuum bag. Even funner is the handheld bug zapper my neighbor Gene gave me, a plastic tennis racket with an electrified mesh: mosquitoes explode like little TIE fighters when you swat them with it, with a dramatic SPAKK of blue-white light. So my compassion is not quite Buddha-like in its embrace.
Mice are a much stickier moral problem. Mice are mammals, and, it has to be admitted when you look at them in the light of day, cute—bright-eyed, wriggly little creatures. You can see why they make such endearing cartoon characters. In an ideal world I would be content to coexist with mice. But my Gandhian live-and-let-live attitude hardens into a more Fleming/McCartney-esque one when I go to enjoy my first cup of coffee of the day and find a tiny blackened turd in my mug. This seems like a deliberate insult, an outlaw’s insolent calling card. It is then that I set about carefully daubing the trigger of a mousetrap with peanut butter. So begins a wearisome cycle of vengeance and remorse.
A traditional mousetrap is designed to function like a guillotine, killing instantly and painlessly, but human technology is imperfect. Having to dispose of the limp corpse of a mouse is a depressing enough chore with which to begin the day, but what do you do when you find the mouse alive, maimed and crying on your kitchen counter? Mercy-smush the mouse with a rock? Put it outside and hope it’ll recover? It will not. It will die of sepsis under your porch, and smell. Whatever you do, you are condemned to feel like John Wayne Gacy for days. These days I prefer to use clever balance-activated traps that harmlessly capture the mouse. When I catch one I carry the trap out to the car, place it on the passenger seat, and drive it up the road to let it out near the house of my neighbor Gene, who likes animals. Except even these “humane” traps can have horrible unintended consequences: I’ve accidentally left one set when I was about to leave the house for weeks, and returned to find the pitiful corpse of a mouse inside who’d slowly thirsted to death in the dark.
I feel badly about all this killing to varying degrees, ranging from not one bit (mosquitoes, horseflies) to gut-clenching shame (the mice, the mice). The cartoonist Ruben Bolling once drew a handy chart explaining the ethical hierarchy of living things, from close relatives to plants, rating each YES/NO/SOMETIMES or IF YOU’RE IN THE MOOD in categories ranging from “Should You Help It?” to “Can You Eat It?” Some of these biases are based on help versus harm (cats and dogs are our pals and protectors, some snakes and mosquitoes can kill us), but some are irrational prejudice. (How come we think of hippos as amusing tutu-wearing buffoons when th
ey kill more people than tigers or rhinos, but fear the giant squid, who never bothered anybody?) It is my official policy never to kill spiders, even though occasionally a large hairy one drops out of the rafters right onto the back of my hand and I must walk swiftly to the door holding my hand as far away from me as it will get, reciting I must not fear, fear is the mind-killer, etc. My rationale is: spiders eat insects, and the enemy of my enemy should not be smushed. Yes this is a little like arming the mujahideen, but as far as I’m concerned, mosquitoes and stinkbugs are the Soviet Union, and there’s a war on. Plus, anyone who’s read Huck Finn knows that killing spiders is bad luck.
It’s impossible to live and move through this world without killing something. Right now the woolly caterpillars, those harbingers of winter, are undertaking their tragic annual mass migration to the other side of whatever road they’re near, and it is just about impossible to avoid running over a few of them while you’re out doing errands unless you’re willing to risk your own life by swerving last-second to spare them. Just driving the ten minutes to the library and back, I wince as I obliterate butterflies when I fail to brake in time to whip them into the slipstream over the car, or, worse, the occasional lightning bug, whose splattered magical guts leave a fluorescing greenish-gold smear of stars across my windshield that I then have to watch fade heartbreakingly away. Once I struck an indigo bunting who’d been sitting in the road: I just didn’t see him in time, and he couldn’t fly out of the way of my grille. I stopped and got out and stood watching him die in the grass, slowly spreading his wings, iridescent under the sun. Just one minute ago I stepped out in my lawn and felt something squish under my heel. Inside my slipper I found the body of a daddy longlegs, an animal of which I am rather fond, its attached legs still twitching. I helplessly kill dozens, if not hundreds, of animals daily with my big dumb blundering existence.