The Myth of Normal 109

her baby within the constraints of cultural norms, including medical advice that ran counter to her parenting instincts. According to accepted practice of the time, the doctor prescribed that I be fed on a strict schedule. Being a physician’s dutiful daughter, my mom feared to disobey. Still in the hospital, with me a couple of weeks old, my mother writes: Now you are really giving me what for. For a change, you howled from half past midnight until 2:00 A.M. when the nurse came in and suggested I suckle you at least a little, so you finally slept. My greedy son, I definitely must warn you that we cannot make this a habit. In fact, soon we’ll have to give up the 7:00 A.M. feeding. Believe me, my precious little son, my heart is rent in two as I hear you whimper your bitter complaints, but you are old enough of a fellow by now to realize that, pardon me, nighttime is for sleeping, not for eating. There was my mom, following doctor’s orders and so, for ninety long minutes, enduring my desperate vocalizations and her own emotional distress, coping as best she could via the dry wit that would be her signature until her death in 2001. Revisiting this material now, versed in the neurobiology of parent-child attachment, I see a young woman in whose brain the instinctual CARE system described by Panksepp is at odds with the cultural mindset. Succumbing to the unnatural dictates of medical authority, her mother’s heart aches. And what of the infant in these now yellowed pages? What does he experience? Some three decades later, in 1975, Jean Liedloff warned her readers in The Continuum Concept about “the current fashion to let the baby cry until its heart is broken and it gives up, goes numb, and becomes a ‘good baby.’” And indeed, I became a very good baby. Even as a four- or five-yearold I would lie in my bed before dawn, stoically enduring the stabbing pain of a middle-ear infection, whimpering quietly to myself so as not to disturb my sleeping parents.