by Nancy Friday
Seeing how her smile brings forth his, how her love creates love, the good mother’s reward is that her baby gives back to her an awareness of her own goodness and beauty. In time the infant imitates her smile, is the initiator, and now she responds. Back and forth they go, with each smile and look soldering the attachment between them. The Baby Watchers have found that the more “visual regard” there is, the more smiling. Smiles, looks, these “are the stuff of being-with-another-person that constitute the ties of attachment.”
It is easy to see how some mothers cannot bear to let go of the child, ever. Someone, her own flesh and blood, is seeing her in a way that perhaps no one else ever has. Around the sixth week of life, when the baby is capable of visually fixating on mother’s eyes and holding her gaze, she feels for the first time that the infant is really looking at her. It is a different kind of gaze than that in which she indulges with her husband. This divine creature, this baby, is totally dependent on her, which can be read to mean, “This baby is my very own.” She may begin to feel Madonnaesque, totally good, generous, and, yes, for the first time in her life, even beautiful.
Until now, she has never been able to elicit from men the feeling that they have seen and loved her for who she is. Many times she has wanted to take hold of a man’s chin with her fingers and gently turn his eyes to her. “You are looking at me, but you don’t really see me. You don’t understand what I am like, and it is driving me crazy.” She has wanted so badly to say it, but couldn’t. And it was not just her lovely hair and sensual mouth she wanted recorded, but the total acceptance that she is finally getting, not from a man but from an infant.
Then something happens. For the first time, the infant can choose not to see mother. By the end of the third month, his focal distance has a range almost as extensive as that of an adult. The infant can track the mother as she leaves, approaches, and moves around the room. Toward the end of the sixth month, his visual focus turns from exclusive interest in the human face to a consuming curiosity about objects. Mother has lost her sovereignty as the focal point of her child’s universe. Does her hand reach out when she holds her baby, to turn the little head back to her, or does she delight in his interest in others as, one hopes, she will delight in his later crawling, walking away from her to find himself? His chances at finding love and a good enough image of himself all rest in this delicate balance of togetherness and separation.
Obviously, there are countless variations on the theme of this first love, the primal gaze. When a mother, for instance, is disappointed in her baby’s appearance because he reminds her of someone in the family she doesn’t like, or because he isn’t beautiful enough, her own narcissism is injured. She doesn’t meet his gaze as often as she might, and the quality of her attachment to the child may be affected.
Perfection isn’t required of the mother. The word I would choose is generosity, the good mother giving enough of her self so that the child is filled, so nourished by her vision of him that he must exercise his new self, experiment, try out his beauty and lovable qualities on others. It is the best gift in life; it is life. Only a year old, less, and she has packed his bags with an internalized picture of her unwavering love. Why would questions of being beautiful enough, lovable enough, enter his mind? Why should he later feel unable to return love when this was how life began?
It is the bedrock of oneness and separation in the first years of life that subsequently make us capable as adults of loving without possessing and of being loved without losing our identity. Embedded in this process of falling in love, patterned on our earliest years in the nursery, will be our ability to retain our loved one’s image of us, to have it locked inside so that when he is away, or looks at someone else, we don’t fall apart.
After twenty-five years of writing about the mother/child relationship, jealousy, envy, and sex, I’ve not a doubt in the world that the misery expended over beauty is, like everything else, wound up in that first relationship. It doesn’t mean we cannot change it, but it is much, much harder after the first years of life. When women describe what makes them jealous, at the top of the list is “when he looks at another woman.” He is just looking; nothing has been said or done. Why do we interpret that look to mean that she is lovelier than we, that he prefers her to us, that he will now leave us? Until he looked at her, we felt beautiful. We say men are cads, that they only want one thing, that they can’t control their sexual appetites, that having “looked,” they will now pounce on the other beautiful woman, leave us. We are projecting. We give men too much power.
We would not concentrate so much today on looks/beauty, pay so much, die so much, seeing our “beauty power” coming and going, never owned, never ours, if our look, our sense of self were owned. The sureness of our beauty comes with the package of unconditional love internalized in the first years of life. “Fine, yes, look at the beautiful face across the room,” we would say to our beloved, allowing him to admire whomever he finds attractive because we know why he loves us, and what he loves in us. He sees what mother saw, what father saw when we were held and came to know our image reflected in their eyes, again and again. We never question it. It is there, planted deeply inside, a given, a known. That woman at whom our lover is looking is indeed beautiful but doesn’t affect what he feels for us. Here come his eyes now, back to us, as we knew they would. We know we are not easily replaceable, a promise given to us long ago when our parents saw us as the sun and the moon and the stars. “Basic trust” is what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called this gift.
Now, today, because we women can afford to pay our own rents and don’t need a man to play mirror-mirror as our own mothers did with men, we turn our backs on faithless men who were never good at making us feel lovely, which, salary or no salary, is still a woman’s birthright. Women today look for mirrors everywhere, changing our clothes, our style, the color of our hair more frequently than the seasons, desperate for an inner picture of ourselves that we can live with.
Here we are, more women in the workplace and fewer in the nursery than ever before. The great upheaval of the past twenty-five years has made Baby Watching more intense than ever. The revolutionary changes in women’s lives—which have in turn triggered changes in men’s lives—have left the door to the nursery wide open. Please, someone enter! There is no Madonna in the nursery. There never was, of course, but so long as women had no other role, and no economic power, this one had to be idealized to keep women satisfactorily in their place.
I would never have written My Mother/My Self, nor would so many women have read it, if the need hadn’t been there to look honestly at this relationship that forms our lives and sets up how we will love men and, in turn, raise our own children. It was my fascination with women’s guilt about our sexuality that prodded me into the mother/daughter research; I had just finished My Secret Garden, a book on women’s sexual fantasies that in its turn had been born out of The Sexual Revolution, a time in the late sixties and early seventies when women were taking off our clothes, lying down with men, and opening our minds to thoughts that would have been unthinkable for Nice Girls just a few years earlier.
There we were, openly breaking mother’s rules, having sex, but when women tried to tell me their erotic fantasies, the doors in their minds slammed shut. The guilt was overwhelming. It was a time of enormous contradiction, those years, nowhere as dramatic as in all matters sexual. We were going against generations of sexual repression; how ironic that it was easier to “do it” than to accept the forbidden scenarios in our imaginations, most of which had plot lines that unconsciously had the mother of the nursery as the adversary of sexual freedom. Of course women were guilty. We still are.
Timing. It all comes down to timing, the ideas that come to writers and scientists that begin perhaps unconsciously, moving us toward a theme that resonates, then takes root in the conscious intellect, eventually producing the wealth of books and scientific research we’ve had access to in recent years. In order to see the plight of th
e baby, we’ve had to come to this, to women’s moving out of the nursery. The infant’s needs that influence his life had always been there, but the idealization of mother obscured our vision. We gave women too much power of one sort and not enough of another; we did the same with men, forking over to them all the economic power but cutting them off from their humanity.
Now we have the opportunity to outfit a finer nursery than we’ve ever enjoyed, one in which, finally, there could be a full genetic team representing both male and female sides of the infant, two people to gaze on him and infuse him with a picture of himself that will shine back at him throughout life whenever he passes a reflecting surface.
No one has taught me more about all of the prickly subjects to which I am drawn than the man I call my mentor, psychiatrist Richard Robertiello, whose moody office with its African masks and sculptures of one-legged women was my haunt during the writing of My Mother/My Self. No one is wiser than he on the subject that is the darling topic of our times, self-esteem. The Gaze, as interpreted by Robertiello, is crucial to the development of self-esteem, which in simplest terms means a good opinion of oneself. Why should something as obvious as a good opinion of ourselves today be so mysteriously unattainable?
Without that good opinion, we either soar to the heights of grandiosity, wearing our outlandish, exhibitionistic clothes, or we plummet to the depths of self-denigration, slogging about in running shoes and a long face. There is no middle ground, no self-esteem, no inner beauty. Visibility becomes everything: I am seen, therefore I exist. We diet, we buy clothes, we work out, spend more on beauty than ever before and believe in it less. That this happened at a moment in history when we have less time than ever to stare adoringly into the eyes of an infant is not without meaning.
The Beauty of Separation: A Second Birth
If there were a gift I could give to every child at birth, one of those certificates not to a day but to a life of beauty, I would wish them a mother and father who accepted Margaret Mahler’s theory of separation and individuation. I would pray that they had been held close, in a state of symbiotic bliss if you like, and then—and here is the hard part—the good parents would release the child and encourage his moving out into the world with all of their best wishes and love internalized. This child would be a secure and independent little person with an ability to love himself and others too, a child whose ease in self and openness to love would be so appealing that others would see him as he sees himself. The truth is, the world is starved for people who are at ease in their skins.
When I fell into writing about the mother/daughter relationship—and the verb couldn’t be more appropriate—I had never heard of Margaret Mahler’s theories. The words “symbiosis” and “separation” weren’t in the outline I’d submitted to my publishers, but once discovered, Mahler’s thinking became exactly what my book was about. For three years we swam underwater together while I fought the denials that protected me from the relationship I honestly had with my mother. Up until then I had convinced myself that our relationship was perfect. Wasn’t I independent, successful, my life totally different from hers? When I came up for air, the book completed, I felt safe in my life for the first time. The last draft was finished, lying on the floor, my back in spasm, but the lie was gone, and lo and behold, there were two people, my mother and myself, and some real love. Yes, some anger too, but that is the inevitable other side of love.
Mahler’s theories apply to sons as well as daughters. We are all born of woman, most of us raised by a woman who dominates our lives when we are dependent and she the only source of everything, including the mirroring eyes that will determine how we see ourselves. Oh, yes, men are very much a part of Mahler’s theories, and now that they are entering the nursery, God bless them, their involvement will enrich their children’s lives. If I use the “she” to cover the caretakers, it is because women still predominate, though I would urge you to read in “father” as well.
There are endless variations on the theme of attachment and separation, but being held too close for too long or not being held at all can lead to a particular face that all of us recognize: the woman who grows up to hate what she sees in the mirror. We love our mothers; why then do we hate this face, these expressions of ours/hers? When we cannot face our anger at her (inevitable in the best of relationships, no one being perfect), we build a fortress around the rage that still feels at age thirty that it will destroy Mommy as it did when we were three. “Who, me, angry? See, Mommy, I don’t hate you, I have become you. I love you. I look just like you!”
The grim monument of our denial is that we imitate not the qualities of hers that we loved—which would be obvious and easy—but instead those looks and mannerisms that we hated most: her anxiety, rigidity, fastidiousness, asexuality, her wounded look. We keep these despised parts alive in ourselves because, like the two-year-old who can’t afford to see Mommy whole, good and bad, we think she will kill us, or we her, if she knew that we didn’t love her perfectly. Whether they are physical, emotional, or temperamental characteristics, the person who never emotionally separated from mother ends up with them in the manner in which she carries herself, round-shouldered, rigid, lines of tension in the forehead, lips as thin as a pencil. This is our look, the glimpsed reflection in the store window as we pass and the one we want to be rid of more than anything, to paint out with makeup or alter with surgery. All this because—at least in my book—we could never let go of mother.
Need I add what father, another face to mirror, another model of bravery to encourage our moving out into our own separate identities, what he would bring to this legacy of confused love and rage?
If we don’t become our selves, we miss us all our lives. Like the amputee who has lost his leg, we will itch for the person we should have been. What happened? We look in the mirror and neither recognize nor like what we see. It isn’t how we think of ourselves, isn’t really who we are.
We are each designed uniquely. All we require—actually, it is quite a lot—is an initial period of love in a warm climate, where we feel as one with the person who is dear to us, who is us and we she, so close it is impossible to know where we begin and she leaves off. Totally dependent, this symbiosis is heaven. Nourished by the body which so recently contained us, precious egg, and fueled by the image of our selves in mother’s eyes, we thrive. And yet, and yet, perfect as this heaven is—in part because it has been so perfect—before the first year of life is over, we are sated. Enough oneness! Time to push off. Why else would we leave symbiotic bliss if life’s plot wasn’t to discover ourselves, including the unique look of who we are? Safety only lies in knowing one’s perimeters; if we do not feel our boundaries, we will go through life secure only in tight relationships, terrified at the thought of being left, alone.
Separation. I often think it is the word itself that is the problem, what I call the Semantic Jungle, wherein one word is so overloaded that we get entangled in the meanings. Just the sound of separation conjures up a cruel and cutting division, like that grim period before “the divorce,” which marks the end of love. But when Mahler speaks of separation she means it as the beginning of a new life, wherein a new individual who is capable of love emerges. Until we have a self separate from Mommy, we are more dependent than loving. A tiny child doesn’t so much love mother as need her. Love, Melanie Klein tells us, is born out of gratitude and can only be felt when we are no longer dependent on the good mother with all the power. We want some power of our very own, which is our due, our birthright; if she doesn’t let us go, with all her love on board, our voyage is aborted. I think of separation as a second birth.
The first year of life is not yet over before symbiotic closeness with mother has served its purpose. Mother’s arms now feel as restrictive as life within the womb at nine months. There is an energetic pull to discover what is in the next room. Off the baby goes on all fours—No, no, don’t hold me back!—and there it is, a space that is new because we have found and claimed it as
our own, by ourselves. Suddenly panic grips the baby—Whoa, where’s Mom? I am alone!—and back the baby goes to her, home base, where loving arms, kisses that say “I’m still here” await. The next journey is a few yards farther, and then back to her again for what Mahler calls “refueling,” a word I love. And so it goes, each voyage out into the sea of life a practicing step into independent security. Practice, practice, practice.
Eventually the move is out into the yard, then down the street, farther and farther as we extend our trusted self. Every fear conquered is a new territory of the self. Anxiety at beginning school, the new job in the new town will also be lessened with practice, making it exciting, an accomplishment, another stage in belief in our separate identity, the picture of an admirable person whom we will one day see in our passport, permitting us entry and exit throughout a manageable world. What a generous gift from parents to child. What is more noble than a mother filling a child with courage, belief in self to the point when the child says, “Yes, you are right, I am this beloved person whose quest is to establish my own life where I will know how to love others as you have loved me. But I will never be far, for I carry you inside, and your gift to me will grow into the unique life you gave me. It will be your legacy that I will pass on to my child.”
If, however, leaving mother in our earliest efforts was fraught with fear—her fear, which we learned from her—we will not separate emotionally. Oh, we will go physically, but we will simply be stretching an invisible umbilical cord that keeps us dependent on her approval, an anxiety we couldn’t specifically name but which is a baby’s fear of the loss of Mommy’s love.
