Because our mothers are our first loves, because it is through them that we begin to find ourselves as separate beings in a new world, they have, for better or for worse, immense power. Liv and I were kindly treated by our relatives, and yet the visit remains in both of our minds as our first venture into a strange environment. I remember the alien bed-covers and the odd cereal bowls. I even remember the yellowing grass in the yard, as though it, too, had been touched by another reality. Through experience most adults lose that intense feeling of the unfamiliar — of being not home. Of course, had our mother been with us, Liv and I would not have felt the change so strongly. The truth is that the idea of home and the idea of our mother and father were inseparable.
At seven I was more than old enough to have a grip on the real, to feel certain that I would see my parents again, and yet I longed for them. My parents were like the ground under my feet. Without them, I felt suspended and unsure of my steps. Anyone who has ever had a baby knows that an eight-month-old, for example, is not sure you will return, that leaving the room is enough to set off a wild protest. I remember that when my daughter had just learned to walk and I talked on the phone, she would suddenly become demanding. You don’t have to leave the room to leave a child. My desire to talk to somebody else was enough to create anxiety and irritation in her. When I was off the phone and completely available to her, she would often wander off, suddenly very busy and seemingly unaware of my presence. There’s the rub. A child’s true independence is the product of a strong, reassuring parental presence, and it is that presence that we take with us when we walk out the door for good.
Although I work at home, I have left my daughter more often over the years than my mother left me. When Sophie was four, I went on a book tour in Germany for two and a half weeks. She stayed at home with her father and my mother, both of whom adore her, and they took very good care of her. When I returned, she clung to me but was decidedly cool to my mother. It doesn’t take a brilliant psychologist to know that it wasn’t my mother she was angry at but me for leaving her, and yet the replacement mother took the rap. Many stepparents have found themselves in the same position — as the targets of displaced anger. For two years after that, whenever I traveled, my daughter would look up at me and say, “You’re not going to Germany, are you, Mommy?” Germany, a country she would never have been able to find on a map, became the sign for her of missing me, and while I am glad I went away for my work, the unhappiness of my own child who was left in the care of people she loved and who loved her suggests that even what might be regarded as an ideal separation leaves a trace. When Sophie was nine, I traveled to Germany again for my second novel. By then the name of the country had lost its mournful connotations and she was only delighted to be with her grandmother during my absence and afterward. The nine-year-old was far better equipped emotionally to understand my departure than the four-year-old had been.
It is well known that small children often take a parental absence personally, that they feel somehow responsible for a beloved parent being gone. All little children love their parents and at the same time resent their omnipotence, and if the parent disappears, they can’t help assuming that their aggressive feelings might have had something to do with it. And if they are feeling vulnerable about their greatest love, they may take out their anger elsewhere — on a safer object. I knew a little boy who, while his father was away, repeatedly called his beloved uncle “Stupid.” All dads were suspect. When his father returned, the boy beat the parent he had missed with his small fists, before giving way to a passionate embrace and tears.
The normal pains of love and anger most children suffer when separated from a parent are usually repaired when the parent returns. Some separations can’t be helped. A child or parent has to be hospitalized for sickness or an injury, for example. In his book Thinking About Children, D.W. Winnicott, the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, tells the story of a four-year-old girl whom he treated in the hospital for possible tuberculosis. “She is a solemn little girl,” he writes, “and the joy of life is not in her.” Winnicott then discovered that when she was two years old the child had been hospitalized for diphtheria. She had been taken to the hospital while she was asleep and woke up in strange surroundings with strange people in the room, and then her mother was forbidden to visit her for three months! One can only imagine that child’s despair at finding herself once again in a hospital bed. Winnicott adds, “Possibly her removal from home will be found to have been a great trauma to emotional development. I cannot say.”
Winnicott is typically honest. We can only tell a story backward, not forward, but at the very least we must understand that as parents our comings and goings, our presences and absences, are a fragile business. It is well known that children who are repeatedly abandoned or lobbed from one caretaker to another often suffer developmental problems, both cognitive and behavioral, and sometimes what might have been love becomes rage. In the second volume of his classic work, Attachment and Loss, John Bowlby quotes from two case studies of teenage boys who killed their mothers. One boy said, “I couldn’t stand to have her leave me.” Another, who put a bomb in his mother’s suitcase as she boarded a plane, said simply, “I decided that she would never leave me again.”
The four-year-old who punches his dad for leaving him and the teenagers who commit matricide may appear to be creatures from different planets, but the difference may well be one of degree, not quality. Traumatic separations from parents have long been connected to delinquency, and if physical separation is reinforced by a parent’s emotional distance or rejection, the damage to a child may be irreversible.
As I sat and listened to those girls at my daughter’s camp bemoan the belated appearance of their mothers, I remembered how long childhood is, how a summer can feel like a year, and a year like a decade. I remembered the trip to Chicago, the hundred-dollar bill, the magical arrival of my mother, and the fact that on the train to Chicago, Liv and I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear when we saw those baggage robbers rush past us, but the sight of that empty bathtub, without a mother to fill it, caused us considerable alarm. In short, I remembered myself as a child. Looking at my daughter, who is now on the brink of adolescence, I couldn’t help feeling that I should keep my memories alive, that if I remember the sometimes bitter trials of being a teenager, both she and I will better negotiate our inevitable separation, the one that will initiate the adventure of her own life, a life she will make alone.
1999
Living with Strangers
IN RURAL MINNESOTA WHERE I GREW UP, IT WAS THE CUSTOM to greet everyone you met on the road, whether you knew the person or not, with a “hi.” A dull, muttered, uninflected “hi” was entirely acceptable, but the word had to be spoken. Passing someone in silence wasn’t only rude; it could lead to accusations of snobbery — the worst possible sin in my small corner of the egalitarian state.
When I moved to New York City in 1978, I quickly discovered what it meant to live among hordes of strangers and how impractical and unsound it would be to greet all of them. In my two-room apartment on West 109th Street, I heard the ceiling creak as my upstairs neighbor paced his floor. I listened to the howling battles of the couple that lived below me, their raging voices punctuated by thuds, bangs, and the sound of breaking glass. My single view took in the back wall of a building that stood perhaps ten yards away. Lying in my bed at night, I sometimes watched the two young men who lived across the air shaft as they lounged in the light of their window dressed only in their underwear. On the sidewalk, I was jostled, bumped, and elbowed as I negotiated the crowds. On the subway, I found myself in intimate contact with people I didn’t know, my body pressed so tightly against them, I couid smell their hair oils, perfumes, and sweat. In my former life, such closeness belonged exclusively to boyfriends and family. It didn’t take long for me to absorb the unwritten code of survival in this town — a convention communicated silently but forcefully. This simple law, one nearly every New Yorker subscribes to whenever possible, is: PRETEND IT ISN’T HAPPENING.