Part of the reason I love what I do for a living is that it gives me opportunities to continue learning. If one is going to train other people, one must be trained. As I learn more and more about quality early childhood experiences, I reflect and learn more about how my childhood made me who I am, for better or for worse.
Obviously I’ve heard of attachment theory before, and I thought I knew a fair bit about it. Babies need to have a reliable adult they can depend upon to meet their needs. Trust vs. mistrust, Erikson, blah, blah. But it took eight weeks of HighScope curriculum training, thanks to my current job, for me to finally get it.
During one of our final weeks, our trainer explained that attachment to the mother happens almost instantly. This makes sense, because the baby has spent nine months hearing Mom, smelling Mom, and so on. Plus, biologically infants need Mom to survive. Got it. Nothing new to see here.
But did you know that the second attachment an infant forms is with the next most important female in their life? I didn’t. And who was that for me? Probably one of my grandmas. Maybe an aunt. I need to dig more into that.
What really hit me though is this: attachment to the father happens at about three months. Wait. What? I had this vague idea that my dad went to Vietnam when I was a baby and was gone about a year, but that’s all it was. A vague idea. Now bells were going off in my head.
I came home and dug out one of my mom’s journals and turned to that period in her life in hopes of learning more about my own. Guess how old little Janet was when Daddy went to Vietnam? Four months.
I went back to class the next day and asked the instructor (as innocently and politely as possible), “So…you mentioned yesterday this attachment to the father thing…What if that doesn’t happen?”
And she said, “Well, you’re screwed. Ha ha ha! But seriously. You spend your whole life looking for it, generally in all the wrong places.”
Just like that, my whole life made sense.
Well, kind of. I mean, it made a lot of sense. But I wasn’t buying entirely into this being screwed thing. Like, this has to be an issue that a lot of people experience, and it has to be something people have researched, and there has to be information out there about it and about how to fix it.
I considered going to therapy to try to get to the bottom of it. I mentioned this to an attachment-savvy friend (who is also rather Janet-savvy), and she said, “No. You don’t need therapy. You can figure this out on your own.” So I googled, and I libraried, and I found books and articles and read and studied up on how attachment impacts adult relationships. That might have to be a whole post in itself, because it’s a lot.
So, all this is going on in my life about the time the current season of This is Us started airing. I watched that episode where Kevin is asked all kinds of questions about his father’s experiences in Vietnam, and he kept answering, “I don’t know,” and my heart broke. Because, you know, Kevin can’t ask Jack now. But also because it had never even occurred to me to ask my own dad the same questions.
Fortunately, my own dad is still alive. So I asked. And his answers came in the form of a long weekend spent here with me, talking, looking at photo albums, sharing stories, watching DVD’s, and shedding a few tears. For the most part, I just let him share what he wanted me to know. I did ask a few specific questions I was curious about, both in terms of his life, and in terms of how it all affected mine.
So, time frame…yeah, Dad’s recollection was about the same as Mom’s. Maybe a little quicker. I was born in late October, and Dad left in February. So, I was three to four months old. Right when that attachment thing should have been happening. He came back nine months later, right after my first birthday.
As to what he experienced, most of it is his story to tell, not mine. But I’ll share some of my own take-aways from the weekend.
Whenever people asked me what my dad did in Vietnam, my answer was always, “You know that scene in Top Gun when they string the cord across the aircraft carrier and catch the plane? That’s what my dad did. Only on land.” And people say, “Cool.” And that’s that.
I suppose it is kind of cool, but this was war, not a Tom Cruise movie. Somewhere about Saturday evening it hit me (duh), that the reason my dad had to “catch” these planes is that they couldn’t land. They were damaged, or they were out of fuel, or the pilot was hurt. This was life or death. And these planes were out there shooting and being shot at. Not so much, “Playing with the Boys.”
My dad explained how there were three cables on their short runway, and most of the planes missed the first one, so the goal was to catch the middle one, and if they missed that, they had one more chance to catch the last one. I asked what happened if they missed the third cable. Dad said, “They went in the rice paddy.” Oh, okay, into the rice paddy. That sounds all right. Like, rice is nice.
Wait.
If they go “into the rice paddy,” do they come out of the rice paddy? “Sometimes,” was his answer.
Gut punch.
So I’ve spent 46 years thinking, “Well, my dad was in Vietnam, but he didn’t see combat.” Okay, no, he wasn’t trudging through the jungle with a rifle on his back. He wasn’t on the front line face-to-face with the enemy. But that weekend made it clear to me that my father, and anyone else who was involved in the Vietnam War “saw combat.”
He saw people die. He wore a flack jacket and a helmet every day, because he could have been shot at any moment. He hit the dirt many times because in fact he was shot at. He directly saved one man’s life by dragging him into the ditch as they were being shot at, and he saved countless other lives by catching those planes that couldn’t have landed any other way.
And, I suppose, the flip side of that is, he caught those planes so they could be repaired or refueled and sent back out to shoot at more enemies. Which is heavy for me to realize, and has to have been heavy for him to live with for 46 years.
I also knew, in a vague sort of way, that Vietnam Vets were not welcomed home the way veterans of other wars were in our country. But until I heard my dad tell me that he was told to wear civilian clothes on the plane home because of the repercussions he would face if he came home in uniform, I didn’t get that either.
I mean, my ex-husband was so proud to fly in his Navy uniform. He was treated with such respect and admiration when he came home for visits. Those Vietnam veterans faced the exact opposite. Protesters waited outside airports and called them “baby killers.” They were yelled at, spit upon, and assaulted. It was the very definition of “adding insult to injury.”
In the ’70’s, nobody had heard of PTSD. Nobody talked about mental health. Nobody had any idea what these soldiers had seen and experienced, and nobody really cared. There was no ticker tape parade celebrating victory at the end of the war.
So, there was baby Janet, neurons firing and connections being made. Mom was all, “I am woman, hear me roar!” Dad was all, “I’ve been to hell and back, and now I’m not sure what my own country thinks of me.” Mom didn’t want to deal with it. Dad didn’t really know there was anything to deal with. Janet was too young to deal with anything except learning how to climb out of her crib and get back downstairs where the fun was.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Except last weekend we made it the present. I learned so much about my dad and what made him the man he is today from hearing his stories. It also allowed me to understand a bit about why I am the way I am and why events in my life happened as they did.
I know now 100% that I was born out of love and into love. I’d spent most of my life feeling guilty for not being a good enough daughter, or being angry at people who prevented my dad from being the best dad he could be. (My mom personally blamed Nixon, according to her journals.) The truth is, I now realize, it was nobody’s fault. And, it was everybody’s fault, that my dad and I didn’t have the perfect father/daughter relationship during my first year of life.
Last weekend I felt like we made a huge leap into having a better father/daughter relationship now. I feel like it was the first time in 40 some years that my father and I were real with each other. As Sunday came and Dad headed home, I was sad to see him go, but I was filled with so much joy and hope and love. I truly feel it was one of the best experiences of my life, and one of the most important.
So, on this Veteran’s Day, I understand more about what the men and women in our armed forces endure and sacrifice to keep our country safe. I’m grateful to live in this country where I had a right to vote on Tuesday, and I’m thankful for all the many veterans in my life.
But especially for my dad.