!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Over the next three months, I had no time to dream about the future, or worry over the past. I spent many days at the CDU endlessly viewing and re-viewing tapes of the 12 mother-infant pairs as they performed in front of our dual-camera setup. I got to know each of them intimately, not only from the 3-minute controlled sessions, but also before and after, chatting with them each time they came in, helping them relax and prepare. Ed had told me to remain “clinically detached” from the subjects, to remain objective in the descriptions I wrote. Looking back on them now, I remember the dissonance of cramming the joy and love I saw into the dry prose of a research study. A typical report of the first few seconds of the interaction might go like this:
“… As his mother comes in, saying, ‘Hello’ in a high-pitched but gentle voice, he follows her with his head and eyes as she approaches him. His body builds up with tension, his face and eyes open up with a real greeting which ends with a smile. His mouth opens wide and his whole body orients towards her. He subsides, mouths his tongue twice, his smile dies and he looks down briefly, while she continues to talk in an increasingly eliciting voice. During this, his voice and face are still but all parts of his body point toward her. After he looks down, she reaches for and begins to move his hips and legs in a gentle, containing movement…”
During Spring and early Summer, I watched 50 tapes, producing a novella of 60,000 words for Ed and Barry to read and turn into a clinical description of the process they saw mothers and their infants going through: “initiation, mutual orientation, greetings, cyclical exchange of affective information in dialogue and games, disengagement.”
“Why do we have to make it all sound detached?” I asked Barry at the end of one particularly tiring day. “I don’t understand why we have to do it this way.”
“How would you rather do it, Sarah?” he asked. He offered the chair in his cluttered office. “Oh, just put those on the floor,” he said, indicating the papers piled on the one other place to sit in his cramped quarters.
“The moms – and the babies, too – they’re obviously feeling something. The smiles, the laughs, the coos, and the touching. Especially the touching. That affective sub-text seems to me the core of the interaction. Everything else flows from that, right?”
With an avuncular tilt of his head, he smiled and said, “I know what you must be feeling as you watch them. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s what we all want for every child. But if we’re to help families, mothers, who are having problems with their babies, help them give their kids a better start, then we have to know what it’s like when it’s working well. Nobody has really defined what is ‘normal’ for a warm and caring maternal-infant relationship. You’re doing the sort of field work that scientists did 100, 200 years ago, when they started describing and categorizing the natural world. All those observations about geology, plants, and animals, all that had to be done before someone like Darwin could come up with evolution. You are doing important work here, Sarah, important basic science.”
I thought about that, and said, “Hmm. Maybe it would be good if we got beyond the speculations of Freud, and could understand what’s really going on between them, mothers and babies.” I frowned, and said, “But What am I supposed to do with all the feelings I’m getting from this? It’s impossible to suppress, to ignore them. Sometimes, all I can think about is sitting with, holding a baby myself, my own baby, and how I would act with her…”
He looked out the window, then back at me, saying, “Don’t ever lose that, Sarah. That’s exactly what I’d like to see happening from this research, but for thousands, millions of mothers.”
At the end of July, I flew out to Seattle, where Linda had promised me I could have her car, a 1970 VW Beetle. The evening before I left, she treated me to a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.
“Watch out when you step across here,” the hostess said as we moved from the solid center core to the rotating platform where diners slowly revolved through a 360-degree view of then entire Puget Sound and Cascade range. While the Olympics faded behind us, and Mt. Rainier glowed white and blue in the setting summer sun, Linda decided I might need some sisterly advice.
“Howard’s gone for good? How does that feel?”
I’d already rehearsed this many time with my therapist, and felt little while as I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I can hold onto a man.”
“What you ought to wonder is, if it’s worth it.” This seemed a little odd coming from her, as she claimed to be madly in love, looking forward to a wedding date the coming June.
“What’s hard, what might not be worth it, is…I don’t seem to be someone who can have, who wants, a casual relationship. I was lucky, I think, I fell into one or two good ones. Most men , I’m finding are either too rushed, or too distant. And I don’t want one just to have a warm body, you know.”
She nodded, poking at her crab salad.
I went on, “I’m so wrapped up in these studies I’m doing at B’s lab, along with trying to keep up at BU, I don’t have the time, the mental or emotional energy to get involved with anyone new.”
“Maybe you need to get clear?” she suggested.
“Don’t start, Linda. Don’t start. My engrams are just fine.” I winced, then added, “I’m sorry.”
She sighed, them smiled. “Your loss…”
“For now, I’m thinking I may end up like Howard’s aunt, Jane, the one who got married, then found out he was really gay, a closet homosexual. They got divorced when she was in her early 30’s, she must have soured on men, she’s lived like a spinster ever since.”
“How’s that work for her?”
I said, “She seems fine with it, she says she gets to create, to have her own life. But to me, it seems a little sad, like she’s missing something.”
“What?”
I was surprised when I said, “Kids. She doesn’t have any kids. That just feels…wrong.”
Linda smirked. “I thought you were a feminist, sister. Never knew you wanted to be a suburban housewife.”
I frowned, shook my head, and picked the bones out of my salmon filet.
I left the next day for British Columbia, spending a night there at the farm Howard and I had visited on our on a epic road trip two years earlier. I had planned to spend a few days there, but the memories were still too poignant, too confusing, to hang out for long, so I pushed the chattering, quivering little Beetle on through the Canadian Rockies and into the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The mountains looked different than in Colorado or Idaho or Montana, great walls of granite without the curves and peaks further south. After spending the night in Banff, I rushed past Calgary and on through wheat fields and past endless lakes. Since leaving Linda, I had not seen a newspaper nor heard an American radio station, I felt myself encysting, enclosed in the little car, responsible to no one for anything. Finally, I thought, a road trip for myself. Somewhere past Regina, the local station came through with a static-marred “Me and Bobby McGee”, by Janis Joplin. Listening to the power of her scratchy singing, I was oddly reminded of the Barbra Streisand of my teen-age years. Though totally different in their styles and sound, they each poured a crescendo of pure emotion into their music. That led me to the tragedy of her death, and the sadness of that particular song. I could barely see the road through the tears.
Just as I pulled off, an announcer intoned, “CBC interrupts this program with a special bulletin from Washington, DC, already in progress.”
A man was saying a sonorous, somber tone, “…And now, President Nixon is walking towards the helicopter. He steps up the ladder. Now, he turns around, smiles and waves one arm over his head. He enters the helicopter, ducking his head while he places his arm around Pat. Down on the South Lawn, President Ford is heading to the podium…”
My head exploded. Why are they interrupting my music with a routine departure from the White House? And what is this about “President Ford?”
By the time I got to Niagara Falls, I had read enough to realize that, as some were saying, “Our great national nightmare is over.” I was too much Eddie Stein’s sister to believe that for a second.
Over the next three months, I had no time to dream about the future, or worry over the past. I spent many days at the CDU endlessly viewing and re-viewing tapes of the 12 mother-infant pairs as they performed in front of our dual-camera setup. I got to know each of them intimately, not only from the 3-minute controlled sessions, but also before and after, chatting with them each time they came in, helping them relax and prepare. Ed had told me to remain “clinically detached” from the subjects, to remain objective in the descriptions I wrote. Looking back on them now, I remember the dissonance of cramming the joy and love I saw into the dry prose of a research study. A typical report of the first few seconds of the interaction might go like this:
“… As his mother comes in, saying, ‘Hello’ in a high-pitched but gentle voice, he follows her with his head and eyes as she approaches him. His body builds up with tension, his face and eyes open up with a real greeting which ends with a smile. His mouth opens wide and his whole body orients towards her. He subsides, mouths his tongue twice, his smile dies and he looks down briefly, while she continues to talk in an increasingly eliciting voice. During this, his voice and face are still but all parts of his body point toward her. After he looks down, she reaches for and begins to move his hips and legs in a gentle, containing movement…”
During Spring and early Summer, I watched 50 tapes, producing a novella of 60,000 words for Ed and Barry to read and turn into a clinical description of the process they saw mothers and their infants going through: “initiation, mutual orientation, greetings, cyclical exchange of affective information in dialogue and games, disengagement.”
“Why do we have to make it all sound detached?” I asked Barry at the end of one particularly tiring day. “I don’t understand why we have to do it this way.”
“How would you rather do it, Sarah?” he asked. He offered the chair in his cluttered office. “Oh, just put those on the floor,” he said, indicating the papers piled on the one other place to sit in his cramped quarters.
“The moms – and the babies, too – they’re obviously feeling something. The smiles, the laughs, the coos, and the touching. Especially the touching. That affective sub-text seems to me the core of the interaction. Everything else flows from that, right?”
With an avuncular tilt of his head, he smiled and said, “I know what you must be feeling as you watch them. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s what we all want for every child. But if we’re to help families, mothers, who are having problems with their babies, help them give their kids a better start, then we have to know what it’s like when it’s working well. Nobody has really defined what is ‘normal’ for a warm and caring maternal-infant relationship. You’re doing the sort of field work that scientists did 100, 200 years ago, when they started describing and categorizing the natural world. All those observations about geology, plants, and animals, all that had to be done before someone like Darwin could come up with evolution. You are doing important work here, Sarah, important basic science.”
I thought about that, and said, “Hmm. Maybe it would be good if we got beyond the speculations of Freud, and could understand what’s really going on between them, mothers and babies.” I frowned, and said, “But What am I supposed to do with all the feelings I’m getting from this? It’s impossible to suppress, to ignore them. Sometimes, all I can think about is sitting with, holding a baby myself, my own baby, and how I would act with her…”
He looked out the window, then back at me, saying, “Don’t ever lose that, Sarah. That’s exactly what I’d like to see happening from this research, but for thousands, millions of mothers.”
At the end of July, I flew out to Seattle, where Linda had promised me I could have her car, a 1970 VW Beetle. The evening before I left, she treated me to a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.
“Watch out when you step across here,” the hostess said as we moved from the solid center core to the rotating platform where diners slowly revolved through a 360-degree view of then entire Puget Sound and Cascade range. While the Olympics faded behind us, and Mt. Rainier glowed white and blue in the setting summer sun, Linda decided I might need some sisterly advice.
“Howard’s gone for good? How does that feel?”
I’d already rehearsed this many time with my therapist, and felt little while as I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I can hold onto a man.”
“What you ought to wonder is, if it’s worth it.” This seemed a little odd coming from her, as she claimed to be madly in love, looking forward to a wedding date the coming June.
“What’s hard, what might not be worth it, is…I don’t seem to be someone who can have, who wants, a casual relationship. I was lucky, I think, I fell into one or two good ones. Most men , I’m finding are either too rushed, or too distant. And I don’t want one just to have a warm body, you know.”
She nodded, poking at her crab salad.
I went on, “I’m so wrapped up in these studies I’m doing at B’s lab, along with trying to keep up at BU, I don’t have the time, the mental or emotional energy to get involved with anyone new.”
“Maybe you need to get clear?” she suggested.
“Don’t start, Linda. Don’t start. My engrams are just fine.” I winced, then added, “I’m sorry.”
She sighed, them smiled. “Your loss…”
“For now, I’m thinking I may end up like Howard’s aunt, Jane, the one who got married, then found out he was really gay, a closet homosexual. They got divorced when she was in her early 30’s, she must have soured on men, she’s lived like a spinster ever since.”
“How’s that work for her?”
I said, “She seems fine with it, she says she gets to create, to have her own life. But to me, it seems a little sad, like she’s missing something.”
“What?”
I was surprised when I said, “Kids. She doesn’t have any kids. That just feels…wrong.”
Linda smirked. “I thought you were a feminist, sister. Never knew you wanted to be a suburban housewife.”
I frowned, shook my head, and picked the bones out of my salmon filet.
I left the next day for British Columbia, spending a night there at the farm Howard and I had visited on our on a epic road trip two years earlier. I had planned to spend a few days there, but the memories were still too poignant, too confusing, to hang out for long, so I pushed the chattering, quivering little Beetle on through the Canadian Rockies and into the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The mountains looked different than in Colorado or Idaho or Montana, great walls of granite without the curves and peaks further south. After spending the night in Banff, I rushed past Calgary and on through wheat fields and past endless lakes. Since leaving Linda, I had not seen a newspaper nor heard an American radio station, I felt myself encysting, enclosed in the little car, responsible to no one for anything. Finally, I thought, a road trip for myself. Somewhere past Regina, the local station came through with a static-marred “Me and Bobby McGee”, by Janis Joplin. Listening to the power of her scratchy singing, I was oddly reminded of the Barbra Streisand of my teen-age years. Though totally different in their styles and sound, they each poured a crescendo of pure emotion into their music. That led me to the tragedy of her death, and the sadness of that particular song. I could barely see the road through the tears.
Just as I pulled off, an announcer intoned, “CBC interrupts this program with a special bulletin from Washington, DC, already in progress.”
A man was saying a sonorous, somber tone, “…And now, President Nixon is walking towards the helicopter. He steps up the ladder. Now, he turns around, smiles and waves one arm over his head. He enters the helicopter, ducking his head while he places his arm around Pat. Down on the South Lawn, President Ford is heading to the podium…”
My head exploded. Why are they interrupting my music with a routine departure from the White House? And what is this about “President Ford?”
By the time I got to Niagara Falls, I had read enough to realize that, as some were saying, “Our great national nightmare is over.” I was too much Eddie Stein’s sister to believe that for a second.
Over the next three months, I had no time to dream about the future, or worry over the past. I spent many days at the CDU endlessly viewing and re-viewing tapes of the 12 mother-infant pairs as they performed in front of our dual-camera setup. I got to know each of them intimately, not only from the 3-minute controlled sessions, but also before and after, chatting with them each time they came in, helping them relax and prepare. Ed had told me to remain “clinically detached” from the subjects, to remain objective in the descriptions I wrote. Looking back on them now, I remember the dissonance of cramming the joy and love I saw into the dry prose of a research study. A typical report of the first few seconds of the interaction might go like this:
“… As his mother comes in, saying, ‘Hello’ in a high-pitched but gentle voice, he follows her with his head and eyes as she approaches him. His body builds up with tension, his face and eyes open up with a real greeting which ends with a smile. His mouth opens wide and his whole body orients towards her. He subsides, mouths his tongue twice, his smile dies and he looks down briefly, while she continues to talk in an increasingly eliciting voice. During this, his voice and face are still but all parts of his body point toward her. After he looks down, she reaches for and begins to move his hips and legs in a gentle, containing movement…”
During Spring and early Summer, I watched 50 tapes, producing a novella of 60,000 words for Ed and Barry to read and turn into a clinical description of the process they saw mothers and their infants going through: “initiation, mutual orientation, greetings, cyclical exchange of affective information in dialogue and games, disengagement.”
“Why do we have to make it all sound detached?” I asked Barry at the end of one particularly tiring day. “I don’t understand why we have to do it this way.”
“How would you rather do it, Sarah?” he asked. He offered the chair in his cluttered office. “Oh, just put those on the floor,” he said, indicating the papers piled on the one other place to sit in his cramped quarters.
“The moms – and the babies, too – they’re obviously feeling something. The smiles, the laughs, the coos, and the touching. Especially the touching. That affective sub-text seems to me the core of the interaction. Everything else flows from that, right?”
With an avuncular tilt of his head, he smiled and said, “I know what you must be feeling as you watch them. It is beautiful, isn’t it? It’s what we all want for every child. But if we’re to help families, mothers, who are having problems with their babies, help them give their kids a better start, then we have to know what it’s like when it’s working well. Nobody has really defined what is ‘normal’ for a warm and caring maternal-infant relationship. You’re doing the sort of field work that scientists did 100, 200 years ago, when they started describing and categorizing the natural world. All those observations about geology, plants, and animals, all that had to be done before someone like Darwin could come up with evolution. You are doing important work here, Sarah, important basic science.”
I thought about that, and said, “Hmm. Maybe it would be good if we got beyond the speculations of Freud, and could understand what’s really going on between them, mothers and babies.” I frowned, and said, “But What am I supposed to do with all the feelings I’m getting from this? It’s impossible to suppress, to ignore them. Sometimes, all I can think about is sitting with, holding a baby myself, my own baby, and how I would act with her…”
He looked out the window, then back at me, saying, “Don’t ever lose that, Sarah. That’s exactly what I’d like to see happening from this research, but for thousands, millions of mothers.”
At the end of July, I flew out to Seattle, where Linda had promised me I could have her car, a 1970 VW Beetle. The evening before I left, she treated me to a dinner at the top of the Space Needle.
“Watch out when you step across here,” the hostess said as we moved from the solid center core to the rotating platform where diners slowly revolved through a 360-degree view of then entire Puget Sound and Cascade range. While the Olympics faded behind us, and Mt. Rainier glowed white and blue in the setting summer sun, Linda decided I might need some sisterly advice.
“Howard’s gone for good? How does that feel?”
I’d already rehearsed this many time with my therapist, and felt little while as I said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I can hold onto a man.”
“What you ought to wonder is, if it’s worth it.” This seemed a little odd coming from her, as she claimed to be madly in love, looking forward to a wedding date the coming June.
“What’s hard, what might not be worth it, is…I don’t seem to be someone who can have, who wants, a casual relationship. I was lucky, I think, I fell into one or two good ones. Most men , I’m finding are either too rushed, or too distant. And I don’t want one just to have a warm body, you know.”
She nodded, poking at her crab salad.
I went on, “I’m so wrapped up in these studies I’m doing at B’s lab, along with trying to keep up at BU, I don’t have the time, the mental or emotional energy to get involved with anyone new.”
“Maybe you need to get clear?” she suggested.
“Don’t start, Linda. Don’t start. My engrams are just fine.” I winced, then added, “I’m sorry.”
She sighed, them smiled. “Your loss…”
“For now, I’m thinking I may end up like Howard’s aunt, Jane, the one who got married, then found out he was really gay, a closet homosexual. They got divorced when she was in her early 30’s, she must have soured on men, she’s lived like a spinster ever since.”
“How’s that work for her?”
I said, “She seems fine with it, she says she gets to create, to have her own life. But to me, it seems a little sad, like she’s missing something.”
“What?”
I was surprised when I said, “Kids. She doesn’t have any kids. That just feels…wrong.”
Linda smirked. “I thought you were a feminist, sister. Never knew you wanted to be a suburban housewife.”
I frowned, shook my head, and picked the bones out of my salmon filet.
I left the next day for British Columbia, spending a night there at the farm Howard and I had visited on our on a epic road trip two years earlier. I had planned to spend a few days there, but the memories were still too poignant, too confusing, to hang out for long, so I pushed the chattering, quivering little Beetle on through the Canadian Rockies and into the plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The mountains looked different than in Colorado or Idaho or Montana, great walls of granite without the curves and peaks further south. After spending the night in Banff, I rushed past Calgary and on through wheat fields and past endless lakes. Since leaving Linda, I had not seen a newspaper nor heard an American radio station, I felt myself encysting, enclosed in the little car, responsible to no one for anything. Finally, I thought, a road trip for myself. Somewhere past Regina, the local station came through with a static-marred “Me and Bobby McGee”, by Janis Joplin. Listening to the power of her scratchy singing, I was oddly reminded of the Barbra Streisand of my teen-age years. Though totally different in their styles and sound, they each poured a crescendo of pure emotion into their music. That led me to the tragedy of her death, and the sadness of that particular song. I could barely see the road through the tears.
Just as I pulled off, an announcer intoned, “CBC interrupts this program with a special bulletin from Washington, DC, already in progress.”
A man was saying a sonorous, somber tone, “…And now, President Nixon is walking towards the helicopter. He steps up the ladder. Now, he turns around, smiles and waves one arm over his head. He enters the helicopter, ducking his head while he places his arm around Pat. Down on the South Lawn, President Ford is heading to the podium…”
My head exploded. Why are they interrupting my music with a routine departure from the White House? And what is this about “President Ford?”
By the time I got to Niagara Falls, I had read enough to realize that, as some were saying, “Our great national nightmare is over.” I was too much Eddie Stein’s sister to believe that for a second.
********