Attachment Style

 My mother was seventeen when I was born and twenty-one when my parents divorced four years later. By sixteen, she was already working as a bookkeeper and office worker for a local cotton gin/fertilizer plant. I was not planed, was an only child and everything I have learned or experienced since leads me to believe that when my mother looked forward to her future at sixteen she was looking forward to a career rather than to having children and making a home. My strong impression is that if my mother had “decided” when to have children rather than having a child inconveniently thrust upon when she was busy making other plans, she would never have decided the time was right to do so and, eventually, biology would have made the decision for her to remain childless.

My mother returned to work full-time at the cotton gin shortly after my birth. My father was a farmer and this was all happening in Alabama in the nineteen-fifties. It was extremely rare for a farm wife to return to work before her children were old enough to attend school. My mother’s determination to do so was the main factor in my parents’ divorce. This decision was not driven by economic necessity. Both of my grandfathers were relatively affluent by the standards of this community and my mother’s decision to work full time with a baby at home was atypical to say the least. My father’s perception that she had little interest in being a wife or a mother was much more grounded in the common assumptions of that community. In my first years, my father dropped me off at my maternal grand-parents’ home in the morning and either he or my mother picked me up at night except for the occasional nights when I sleep over. 

After the divorce, my mother and I moved in with her parents and, later, moved to a house in Ashford, Alabama across the street from the cotton gin. Various black women were hired over the years to keep house and watch after me. Oddly enough, this continued until I was in my early teens. These caretakers were hired to cook, clean and keep me out of trouble. They had no special training and were never lead to believe that part of their job was teaching me skills either academic or social. They were kindly women who were poorly paid, barely educated and surprisingly good for me and to me all things considered.

The most striking thing about the child care I received is how little interaction I had with my mother that was more than superficial. I spent a lot of time in my room at night and my mom often came home late or left again shortly after coming home. I became an avid reader early on. I can never remember seeing my mother read a book. I can never remember her taking much of an interest in anything beyond local gossip, her work or what was for supper. 

I’ve always suffered from a loneliness that I would describe as constitutional rather than situational, as not being a matter of not having enough people around or even having the right people around. The right people to have around and to grow close with me have always been those who could understand and accept privacy and a distance in me that is there even with the people I love best and trust must. I’ve come to believe that this constitutional loneliness is the structuring into my personality of a lesson I learned all the way down in my first relationship, the relationship that was the prototype and model for all the relationships that will ever come after. 

I’m one of a small group of people who learned very early on not to expect to be loved unconditionally or even understood completely by even the people we love as deeply as we can love. For me, love is two solitudes that grieve together for the distance between them that will, finally, always make them two and not one, each unique and precious but also both separate and not the same. In love, this distance between two closes to only the distance that makes two and not one and leaves both standing alone staring across infinite night at one shining and unreachable star, feeling an emptiness that this one shining and unreachable star and only this one shining and unreachable star could ever fill.