Attached

My mother left me once.

I was about six months old, and she was gone for about six weeks. She did not want to be gone. She left because she had to: she had severe, intractable postpartum depression, and getting treatment was the most important, the most vital thing she could possibly do for both of us. It was the only responsible choice.

You don’t put your children on a boat unless the water is safer than the land. The land was not safe, and so she left.

My entire life, when I have told therapists why I am in their offices and explained that destabilization in attachments reigned in my childhood, they have, universally, nodded. It has suddenly made sense to them.

The recent stories of the children being ripped away from their parents at the border have hit me hard. They should. They should hit every single one of us hard.

Before I go on, I want to be clear: what happened with me is nothing, nothing at all, compared to what these children are going through. They are being tortured by the United States government, and the government is doing this deliberately and callously, and it is unconscionable. Not a single moral person could support this policy . Every single American who does not denounce the ICE agent who yanks a breastfeeding child out of her mother’s arms,the press secretary who says it is Biblical to enforce the law, the AG who mistakes white supremacy for Christianity, should be deeply ashamed and should no longer be allowed in public life. Wrenching children away from their families is not a policy decision that can ever be forgiven, and regardless of how things have changed with Executive Order and other decisions, the fact remains that our government has done this horrific thing. It’s unlikely at best that all these kids will be reunited with their parents.

I have a tiny glimpse into what it is like to live with attachment trauma. Let me tell you about it.

I spent my childhood unsure that my parents were stable. I looked everywhere for another mother, just in case. I screamed as loudly as I could. Only, I was a child, so instead of walking into the nurse’s office and saying “I have an attachment disorder and I need help,” I scratched scabs off my knees until I bled, let bees sting me so I could prove something hurt, dropped bikes on my ankles to try and break them. I did everything that I could. It was never enough, because something deep inside me had been emptied and I could never, ever fill it. I know that now, but you cannot tell a child that. You cannot tell a little girl who just wants to call her aunt to come get her that what we have snapped inside her cannot be put back together.

My skin has hungered my entire life. And people were not legally obligated not to hug me.

I’m a grown up now, with at least some of the trappings. I’ve been in treatment for a long time.

Here is what it is like for me when someone I care about leaves. I cry so hard that I hyperventilate. I have to use my inhaler to get my breath back. I stop eating. Everything turns to dust in my mouth. I am so nauseated that I dry-heave. I feel so shattered that I am utterly convinced that nothing will ever be okay again. Nothing in me trusts that someone leaving will not destroy me, completely and totally.

Attachment trauma is the core of what is wrong with me. It is the reason my skin is a labyrinth of scars. It is the reason I have been constantly afraid, my entire life. It is why I was the weird kid in elementary school, almost feral, as if I gave out a scent the other children could smell. It is why, even now, reasonably healthy, more than able to work and write and pay rent and all that good stuff, I know that the second I think someone is leaving I will spiral into that reaction. It will pass, because after many years of expensive, specialized, and time consuming therapy with highly educated and trained professionals, I know more or less how to handle it.

It will never, ever go away. Every single day for the rest of my life, the chaos that surrounded my earliest attachments will haunt me. As McAdams writes in his book about personal narrative: “in their first relationships of love and trust, infants develop unconscious attitudes about hope and despair….every personal myth has a pervasive narrative tone…about hope and trust and about how the world works and how stories are supposed to turn out” (The Stories We Live By, p. 35, 40).

I know what the pervasive narrative tone of my personal myth is. And I know what it will be for these children. I think of the life that we are consigning them to: a life in which they will never be able to trust that the most important thing in the world is stable. This will be with them every single day for the rest of their lives. We are creating chasms inside them, and nothing we will ever be able to do will fill those chasms.

Louise Gluck wrote “birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.”

I left a skin there, too. These children — CHILDREN, let us not forget that they are CHILDREN — that we are, on American soil, locking in cages, do not have a voice. So here is mine, telling you that this is doing immeasurable harm. Imagine the harm so big it can no longer be measured.

Imagine.

Here is a round up of ways to help. And for the love of all that is holy, VOTE.