The High Cost of Separation - from 'Necessary Losses' by Judith Viorst.
"Then there is the matter of my mother's abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and sooner or later they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise" - Marilynne Robinson.
We begin life with loss. We are cast from the womb without an apartment, a charge plate, a job or a car. We are sucking, sobbing, clinging, helpless babies. Our mother interposes herself between us and the world, protecting us from the overwhelming anxiety. We shall have no greater need than this need for our mother.
Babies need mothers. Sometimes lawyers, housewives, pilots, writers and electricians also need mothers. In the early years of life we embark on the process of giving up what we have to give up to be separate human beings. But until we can learn to tolerate our physical and psychological separateness, our need for our mother's presence - our mother's literal, actual presence - is absolute.
For it's hard to become a separate self, to separate both literally and emotionally, to be able to outwardly stand alone and to inwardly feel ourselves to be distinct. There are losses we'll have to sustain, though they may be balanced by our gains, as we move away from the body and being of our mother. But if our mother leaves us - when we are too young, too unprepared, too scared, too helpless - the cost of this leaving, the cost of this loss, the cost of this separation may be too high.
There is a time to separate from our mother.
But unless we are ready to separate - unless we are ready to leave her and be left - anything is better than separation.
A young boy lies in a hospital bed. He is frightened and in pain. Burns cover 40 percent of his small body. Someone has doused him with alcohol and then, unimaginably, has set him on fire. He cries for his mother. His mother has set him on fire.
It does seem to matter what kind of mother a child has lost, or how perilous it may be to dwell in her presence. It doesn't matter whether she hurts or hugs. Separation from mother is worse than being in her arms when the bombs are exploding. Separation from mother is sometimes worse than being with her when she is the bomb.
For the presence of mother - our mother - stands for safety. Fear of her loss is the earliest terror we know. "There is no such thing as a baby," writes psychoanalyst-paediatrician D. W. Winnicott, observing that babies in fact can't exist without mothers. Separation anxiety dervices from the literal truth that without a caretaking presence we would die.
Yet all of us are abandoned by our mother. She leaves us before we can know that she will return. She abandons us to work, to market, to go on vacation, to have another baby - or simply by not being there when we have need of her. She abandons us by having a separate life, a life of her own - and we will have to learn to have one too. But meanwhile, what do we do when we need our mother - we need our mother! - and she is not there.
What we doubtless do is survive. We surely survive the brief and temporary absences. But they teach us a fear that may set its mark on our life. And if, in early childhood, most especially within the first six years, we are too deprived of the mother we need and long for, we may sustain an injury emotionally equivalent to being doused with oil and set on fire. Indeed, such deprivation in the first few years of life has been compared to a massive burn or wound. The pain is unimaginable. The healing is hard and slow. The damage, although not fatal, may be permanent.
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