I am no longer writing, but I do still read, and sometimes something I read makes me think, and then I reflect on it…
So it is with psychotherapist Catherine Gildiner and “transitional attachment objects,” via her book, Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery.
We all know about blankies and binkies that little ones hold on to. But it doesn’t have to be a blanket or a stuffed animal. When a child discovers it is not actually a part of its mother, that it is an individual and has to live in the cold, cruel world on its own, it grabs onto anything that will provide company and comfort, the way mother did, in the transition from total dependence to growing independence. In psychspeak, that is a “transitional attachment object.”
We all need emotional attachment. It starts with the mother. If that attachment is interrupted unnaturally, we have emotional attachment troubles all our lives, with spouses, children, parents, relatives, friends…
All of which made me think
of Sadie, my 4H pig.
I was about twelve. Uncle Ted, my mother’s oldest brother, took me cross-county to buy me a pig for 4H. It was a cute little Hampshire. I think we interrupted Sadie’s attachment to her mother. Consequently, she was always wary of attachment, even to me, especially when I tried to “show” her at the 4H fair. She was very uncooperative.
I was never really a farm boy, even though I lived on the farm for eight years, and did farm boy things. I wasn’t interested in cows and pigs and making hay and shucking corn. I did them. I worked hard. I was an efficient and persistent farm laborer. But I had no interest in furrows and vegetables. I was migrant labor. We had lived in the big city until I was ten. I liked radio shows and Saturday afternoon matinees and comic books and libraries.
Sadie was special, though, because she was a gift from Uncle Ted. I held her on my lap in a cardboard box while Uncle Ted drove me home.
Her attachment problem to
me was minor, though, to her attachment problems to her own piglets. She was
not the slightest bit interested in being a mother. First she got her back end
up against the barn wall so they couldn’t come out. I had to drag her away from
the wall. Then she refused to feed them, all nine of them. She had milk; that
was no problem. She just didn’t want to share it with those little piglets. She
was a modern, independent sow.
When she saw the piggies coming, she would take off running, away from the barn yard, into the pond lot. She was fat, and they were fast, so they always managed to catch up to her. Then she would splay her cloven hooves and brace herself. It didn’t take them long—pigs are smarter than we think—to work out the geometry, and realize that if they all got on the same side and pushed on her, they could tip her over. That accomplished, they became nursing machines, as Sadie cursed at them in pig grunt language.
I’ve often wondered about Sadie as a piglet…what happened then to make her such a bad mother? And those little piggies…how did they fare in later life, knowing their mother didn’t really want them? I think the problem was that pigs have no way of getting a transitional attachment object.
Anyway, if you know someone with an attachment problem, maybe give them a blankie or a binkie. Or if they’re too old for that, maybe a friend. Just not a pig.
John Robert McFarland
No comments:
Post a Comment