DEBRA LOGUERICO DEANGELO
Before you go all “Oh no! All mothers love their babies!” on me, just hear me out. It’s not about pity. It’s about finally looking at the truth. Just looking. Without judgment. And this is the truth: My mother didn’t love me.
But don’t blame her. I was part of that equation. I wasn’t the gurgly, giggly baby every mother dreams of. Quite the opposite. I was serious and sullen. I didn’t make eye contact. Eye contact is a key factor in mother-child bonding. When Mom—or anyone else—would look at me, I’d just look away at cars going by or tree branches waving in the breeze. It would be three more years before my parents discovered that I was legally blind. Everything beyond about five inches from my face was a blurry kaleidoscope of color and motion. Make eye contact? I couldn’t see faces, let alone eyes.
No eye contact, and no smiles either. Returning smiles is another crucial step in parent-child bonding. I was a year old before I smiled. Developmentally, that’s about eight months late. I couldn’t return what I couldn’t see.
But wait, you say, that can’t be the whole story! Blind babies smile at the sound of their caregivers’ voices!
“Caregivers.” Plural.
Boom, there it is.
My mother became a physician in the 1950s, when women were supposed to become secretaries or teachers—if they became anything at all other than housewives. Maybe they could be nurses. But not doctors. My mother was a feminist decades before the first bra burned, and she didn’t even know it. But she did know she wasn’t going be a secretary. She worked her way through medical school as a waitress, one of only two women in her graduating class. That MD behind her name was hard-fought, and she wasn’t about to toss it all away on motherhood. She went back to work when I was two weeks old. And so began my lifetime of longing for “someone.” I was too young to know who.
As for my dad (also a physician), long hours meant that he wasn’t around much either, save for the weekends. In my early years, he was affectionate and loving, but I continued craving “something else.” Unfortunately, alcoholism and World War II PTSD eventually eroded his mind, but even in the thick of that, he was at least aware of me, even if marginally—which is more than I can say for my mother.
In 1959, there were no daycares. My parents relied on a rotating wheel of grandmothers and aunts to care for me. Each would stay for a couple weeks, then pass the baby baton to the next shift worker and go home. My needs were met by serial “mothers” who showered me in love and affection.
And then left.
Forever.
You see, “object permanence”—the realization that things still exist after they disappear—doesn’t develop for about twelve months. Prior to that, when something, or someone, goes away, they’re gone and never coming back.
Dead.
With death comes grief. I don’t remember people or incidents from my first year. But I vividly remember weeping myself into exhaustion, stuffy-nosed and gulping salty tears and mucous, an aching hollowness in my chest; the smell of a tear-soaked pillow. Each time one of my caretakers “died,” I grieved. Grieving people—even tiny ones—don’t smile much.
When “object permanence” developed, I realized my “mothers” didn’t die after all. They’d arrive, cuddle me, kiss me . . . and leave. I started to recognize the pattern. Some kids develop separation anxiety when they realize a caregiver is about to leave. I protected my tiny heart preemptively: I stopped attaching myself to anyone. Attachment brings abandonment. Abandonment hurts. The way to not hurt is to not attach in the first place.
Don’t trust anyone!
Because . . .
They.
Will.
LEAVE YOU.
I was Little Baby Poker Face. I offered nothing emotionally and gave nothing back. I didn’t exactly melt Mom’s heart. I looked at her like I would any stranger: I don’t know you. Surely, this made it easy for Mom to leave me and focus on her career. I’m sure she figured it was no big deal—clearly I didn’t even like her.
She was so wrong about that. Yearning for her love is a thread stringing through my entire life, but I kept that precious secret locked inside. I didn’t let it show. I didn’t cry when she left. But I knew she was gone. She told me that whenever she came home from work, no matter how late, I’d be standing up in my crib, silently grasping the rails, waiting to see her. And just stare.
Mom eventually exhausted her relatives and turned to a parade of babysitters, none of whom I cared about. After losing so many “mothers,” I’d learned the “don’t attach” lesson well. I was attached to myself, though. I was my own best company. All I needed were some books or my little red record player, or the swings in our big backyard or neighborhood cats to call through the fence. I started protecting my inner child while I still was that child.
By my twenties, I’d weathered several bad relationships and a disastrous marriage. I went for counseling to talk about my emotionally abusive husband. I ended up talking about my mother. In one session, I spread out photos of me from birth until present. The therapist studied my photographic timeline and made an observation: “You’ve always been sad.”
Sad?
What does that even mean? This is how I’ve always felt. I can’t comprehend any other way to feel. If you’re colorblind, you don’t imagine colors you can’t see. It’s impossible. You just accept that this is how the world looks, and that’s that. What the hell are “red,” “green,” or “happy”? My therapist labeled my lifelong sadness “infantile depression.” At least it gave my chronic, low-grade longing a context. Every “mother” I ever had, including my actual parent, abandoned me. No wonder I was so wary of getting attached to anyone. I was still protecting myself.
Flash forward to now. I’ve discovered that infantile depression is actually a symptom of something larger: Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), which results from having multiple caretakers and no stable attachments during infancy. The infant never learns to bond. Usually, you must be raised in a Romanian orphanage or bounced from foster home to foster home to develop RAD. But I developed it while being passed from the loving arms of one grandmother to the next, and aunts and babysitters, and on and on and on.
An infant with RAD is withdrawn, sad, and listless: irritable for no obvious reason. She neither seeks comfort, nor responds to it. She doesn’t smile. She watches others closely but doesn’t engage with them. She doesn’t reach out to be picked up and is disinterested in playing peek-a-boo or other interactive games.
That’s Baby Me.
Add to this my gazing past faces I couldn’t see, and nowadays I’d be whisked off for early autism intervention. Back then, my parents just called me “serious” and handed me to whichever caretaker was on duty. I was The Serious One. My bubbly, bouncy sister, born four years later, was The Smiley One. But she also had serial caretakers. What was different?
She had me.
I was a constant presence in Susie’s life from day one. Caretakers came, caretakers went, but Susie smiled and made eye contact anyway. Mom finally had her dream baby. There’s a photo of us that says it all. Mom is holding Susie in her lap, joyfully beaming down at her. They’re gazing at each other in mutual adoration. I’m scooted right next to Mom, but her free arm isn’t around me. It’s tucked under her leg, and her shoulder is slightly turned, creating a protective barrier: against me.
Once Susie was born, I ceased to exist. Was I crazy jealous? Did I hate Susie with ever fiber of my being? No. Susie was my constant presence too. She was the first person who didn’t leave me. Besides, she was amusing—a big doll that moved, drooled, and babbled. And when she smiled at me, I finally smiled back.
That said, I wasn’t spontaneously cured. I didn’t become an animated, cheerful child like Susie. I remained serious and solitary, more comfortable with books and animals than other kids by the time I started school, which is when my parents planted some glittery, cat-eye, coke-bottle glasses on my face. I could see! But I was teased mercilessly for wearing them. I was the weird little goggle-eyed fatty they avoided at recess.
And then came puberty.
Fatty stretched into curvy.
Contact lenses replaced glasses.
I started making friends, and eventually boyfriends.
Lots of them.
In high school, I became one of the “popular” girls.
Go fucking figure, right?
I discovered two things in high school. One, that alcohol, lots of friends, and partying like a rock star dull your aching, longing hollowness—for awhile anyway. Two, that after you have sex with boys, they hold you and kiss you. In exchange for spreading my legs and putting up with a boy pumping away at me for a couple minutes, I’d feel loved, even if just for a little while. In my mind, that was a totally fair trade.
They say girls become promiscuous because of troubled relationships with their fathers. They aren’t always right. Sometimes it’s the other parent that’s the issue. Promiscuous girls may not be burning with desire for male attention. They may be burning with desire for love—mother love—and they’ll do anything to get it.
Ironically, in my desperation to find the unconditional mother love I craved, I married precisely the person who couldn’t give it to me. I longed endlessly for love and got nothing but emotional abuse and scorn in return. Broken people tend to marry other broken people. We recognize the cracks.
You know what else broken people do when they marry each other? Have babies.
Thank God for parenting books, because I was winging it every step of the way (I owe you big time, Penelope Leach). Not only was I lacking any mothering template to follow, my mother didn’t have the chance to redeem herself when she had her first grandchild. She died of a brain aneurysm when my firstborn was 2. That was the only time she said “I love you” to me in my whole life—when she was in the hospital, just before she died. She was on morphine. I suspect it was the drugs talking.
To be fair, that was the only time I said “I love you” to her too. I didn’t have any drugs to blame.
Ironically, although my relationship with my mother was strained, her death was a torpedo through my soul. I grieved myself into a stupor. Not only did I lose her, for real this time, I also lost my lifelong dream of a relationship with her. My father was severely disabled from a stroke nine years earlier, so he was essentially gone too. I felt orphaned. There wasn’t much left but my dysfunctional marriage.
So, now what?
How about have another kid? That always helps everything, right?
My daughter was born two years later. By then, my marriage had become exponentially worse, but our children were—are—bright and beautiful, charming and charismatic, despite growing up in a minefield. Any random little thing could explode in your face at any moment. Did I mention my raging husband was an alcoholic? No? Oh, that’s always a fun embellishment.
I had to get out, but I didn’t know how.
Yes. Therapy again—and an abundance of support from friends—and over the next decade, I managed to patch up my self-esteem enough to extract myself from that marriage and go it alone. Baby Me had taught me well: being alone is better than being hurt. When I emerged from that train wreck of a marriage, I was astounded, and rather pleased, to discover that I was relatively intact. I managed to get my life, relationships, and career back on track, but I still had ISSUES. I was anxious about everything, imagining perils and horrors other people wouldn’t even dream of. I hovered over my kids like a lunatic dirigible. Chronic anxiety is one facet of untreated RAD. Others include depression and negative thoughts, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which in turn can cause emotional detachment, hyper-vigilance (compulsively scanning one’s surroundings for danger—real or imagined), anxiety, and insomnia.
Bingo.
And, there’s a peak inside the head of someone who raised two children without benefit of a role model. No clue at all about mothering. I was winging it the whole time, but I had to. My “don’t attach” strategy failed me. When I held my newborns for the first time, I fell wildly, completely, crazy in love. My warm feelings careened out of control down an unfamiliar path. Love? That’s like that red and green that I can’t see! But there it was, gushing through my heart.
It scared the living shit out of me.
Because they might leave me too.
The “what ifs” started galloping in my mind: What if they get sick? What if they’re injured? What if they’re kidnapped? What if? Whatifwhatifwhatifwhatifwhatifwhatifwhatif!
Instead of enjoying my children as they grew, I was obsessed with protecting them. I compulsively hovered over them, guarding them from any and every potential harm. I filled them with unnecessary fear. But the terror of losing them was utterly overwhelming, and still can be. If my negative thinking gets loose, I’ll be right back on the hamster wheel of anxiety, running like mad. The thought of losing one of them catapults me into full-blown panic, so I try not to “go there.” Consciously, anyway.
Anxiety is the constant white noise in my head.
Over time, I’ve learned to ignore it, but any random negative thought can catch me by surprise and crank up the volume. I’ll have to talk myself down from the window ledge of terror: “Right now, we are all just fine; Right now, we are all safe . . . ”
Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat . . . until I can exhale.
Although parenting was a learned skill for me, and a C- one at that, I’m satisfied with one thing: My children know I love them. I may have fumbled things in myriad ways, but if you peer closely at my motivation, it was always love. I made a point of saying “I love you” to my kids because I know how it feels when your mother never says it.
We’re all adults now, and little by little my kids seem to be forgiving me for my shortcomings and neuroses. We’re all slowly healing. I can still topple into the chasm of obsessive worry and drive them nuts with my highly creative fears. I still ache whenever they leave and can’t relax until I get that text that they’re home safe, but I don’t dissolve into a pool of despair anymore. I’ve finally convinced myself that they’ll continue to exist, even if I can’t see them.
So, I’ve learned to let go of them, sort of.
But not their stuff. Crayon scribbles, swim team ribbons, nasty, ratty teddy bears—I still have them. Even now, I don’t like washing their empty coffee cups after they leave because letting go of anything that reminds me of them is letting go of them.
I still have all my son’s baby clothes.
My son is thirty-one.
I have every ribbon from every gift my daughter ever gave me. I can’t throw those away—that would be like throwing her away!
I’m not a hoarder, dammit! I’m over-attached!
My reluctance to let go of anything that reminds me of my kids doesn’t end there. When I started dating a man on the opposite side of the country, one who periodically came for visits and then left, my “collecting” rose to the next level. Every card he ever sent me, every dried rose, sure. But also store receipts, napkins, wine corks, beer caps.
Hair.
HAIR, people.
If I found a hair on his pillow, I’d keep it in a little box. A quite full little box.
Once he splashed a drop of tomato sauce on the counter while cooking dinner. I cleaned around it for months. I was lovingly showing “Joe’s spot” to my sister one day, and she said, “You mean this one?” and wiped it away.
I was crushed! She wiped Joe himself away! Had she not, it would probably still be there, even though Joe and I are now married. I don’t really need that spot anymore. But I still kinda wish it was there.
Just in case.