A Plea for Eros

they may take out their anger elsewhere—on a safer object. I knew a little boy who, while his father was away, repeatedly called his beloved uncle “Stupid.” All dads were suspect. When his father returned, the boy beat the parent he had missed with his small fists, before giving way to a passionate embrace and tears.
    The normal pains of love and anger most children suffer when separated from a parent are usually repaired when the parent returns. Some separations can’t be helped. A child or parent has to be hospitalized for sickness or an injury, for example. In his book
Thinking About Children,
D.W. Winnicott, the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, tells the story of a four-year-old girl whom he treated in the hospital for possible tuberculosis. “She is a solemn little girl,” he writes, “and the joy of life is not in her.” Winnicott then discovered that when she was two years old the child had been hospitalized for diphtheria. She had been taken to the hospital while she was
asleep
and woke up in strange surroundings with strange people in the room, and then her mother was forbidden to visit her for three months! One can only imagine that child’s despair at finding herself once again in a hospital bed. Winnicott adds, “Possibly her removal from home will be found to have been a great trauma to emotional development. I cannot say.”
    Winnicott is typically honest. We can only tell a story backward, not forward, but at the very least we must understand that as parents our comings and goings, our presences and absences, are a fragile business. It is well known that children who are repeatedly abandoned or lobbed from one caretaker to another often suffer developmental problems, both cognitive and behavioral, and sometimes what might have been love becomes rage. In the second volume of his classic work,
Attachment and Loss,
John Bowlby quotes from two case studies of teenage boys who killed their mothers. One boy said, “I couldn’t stand to have her leave me.” Another, who put a bomb in his mother’s suitcase as she boarded a plane, said simply, “I decided that she would never leave me again.”
    The four-year-old who punches his dad for leaving him and the teenagers who commit matricide may appear to be creatures from different planets, but the difference may well be one of degree, not quality. Traumatic separations from parents have long been connected to delinquency, and if physical separation is reinforced by a parent’s emotional distance or rejection, the damage to a child may be irreversible.
    As I sat and listened to those girls at my daughter’s camp bemoan the belated appearance of their mothers, I remembered how long childhood is, how a summer can feel like a year, and a year like a decade. I remembered the trip to Chicago, the hundred-dollar bill, the magical arrival of my mother, and the fact that on the train to Chicago, Liv and I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear when we saw those baggage robbers rush past us, but the sight of that empty bathtub, without a mother to fill it, caused us considerable alarm. In short, I remembered myself as a child. Looking at my daughter, who is now on the brink of adolescence, I couldn’t help feeling that I should keep my memories alive, that if I remember the sometimes bitter trials of being a teenager, both she and I will better negotiate our inevitable separation, the one that will initiate the adventure of her own life, a life she will make alone.
    1999

Living with Strangers

    IN RURAL MINNESOTA WHERE I GREW UP, IT WAS THE CUSTOM to greet everyone you met on the road, whether you knew the person or not, with a “hi.” A dull, muttered, uninflected “hi” was entirely acceptable, but the word had to be spoken. Passing someone in silence wasn’t only rude; it could lead to accusations of snobbery—the worst possible sin in my small corner of the egalitarian state.
    When I moved to New York City in 1978, I quickly discovered what it meant to live among hordes of strangers and how impractical and unsound it would be to greet all of them. In my two-room apartment on West 109th Street, I heard the ceiling creak as my upstairs neighbor paced his floor. I listened to the howling battles of the couple that lived below me, their raging voices punctuated by thuds, bangs, and the sound of breaking glass. My single view took in the back wall of a building that stood perhaps ten yards away. Lying in my bed at night, I sometimes