fierce attachments

a mother-daughter blog about the fierce attachments in our lives… title inspired by Vivian Gornick's wonderful memoir
November 7, 2011

mother-daughter relationships: then and now

by nikki meredith

Image via Couture Allure

Easter Sunday. I’m 10 years old.  While other families are attending Easter sunrise services at the Hollywood Bowl, my family is in my father’s Buick heading to Rand’s Roundup in Hollywood – a restaurant billed as an urban chuck wagon.    I’m clutching my Easter basket – my brother is 14 and too old for Easter baskets — but we are each holding a cellophane bag of foil-covered Sees chocolate eggs that my mother’s Jewish friend Rose gives us every Easter to celebrate our secular L.A. urban holiday.

My mother and I are wearing Easter bonnets —  plain straw hats to which she has attached fresh gardenias — and matching dresses. I love the dresses — delicate Swiss cotton in pale yellow with tiny pearl buttons down the front. I like being twins with my mother. I like my mother. That will change but I don’t know it yet. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 27, 2011

fierce attachments: difficult mothers and the daughters who love them

by nikki meredith

A few years ago I was at an all women dinner party and we started talking about our mothers. Because it’s Marin County — an area saturated with shrinks of all stripes —  there was a lot of shrinkish  vocabulary circulating the room.  At one point when I talked about my mother and my complicated relationship with her, one of the women said,  “She must have been a narcissist.” No, I said, she was not a narcissist and I tried to back up my claim with examples of her non-narcissistic behavior. Another woman opined that my mother must have had boundary issues. Yet another, diagnosed her as borderline. I changed the subject. These terms, as applied to someone I cared about, were not only off the mark, they were offensive.  Where, I thought, is a novelist when you need one?

And this brings me to Vivian Gornick and her book, Fierce Attachments, a memoir structured around her walks with her aged mother in New York City and after which we named this web site. Gornick is not a novelist and it is not a work of fiction – I’ll get to that issue in a minute — but if you’ve read it, try to imagine someone affixing Gornick’s mother – an exasperating woman who could be petty and narrow-minded but who was also smart, courageous, and funny – with a label from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.  Imagine how much of the power and the intensity would be lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 18, 2011

did not disconnect: the permanence of an ex-spouse

by nikki meredith

Uncle Danny

I had an uncle Danny that I never met. He died before I was born but I saw photos of him in his Navy uniform. He was boyish and handsome and, to the extent that a child can mourn someone she never met, I mourned him. Or, to be precise, I mourned the idea of an uncle Danny. I decided that if I ever had a boy I would name him Danny.

Fast-forward 15 years: I’m pregnant and my then-husband and I are making lists of names for boys and girls. Actually, I didn’t have a list. I had only one name on my boy list. But my then-husband said he hated the name Daniel. Hated it.  Even if it’s after your dead uncle, you can’t lobby to saddle a boy with a name his father hates. Mildly objects to, maybe, but not hate.  I gave birth to a wonderful little boy and in the spirit of compromise that would augur a more promising marital future than we, in fact, had, we came up with a name we both liked. Read the rest of this entry »

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October 7, 2011

it’s true, all men are bastards: when your dog falls in love with a fickle partner

by nikki meredith

Alice is in love. The object of her affection is Jasper, a hefty Labradoodle who looks more like a bear than a dog. They are both shaggy but otherwise they are a picture of contrasts. She’s a creamy 25 pounder; he’s chocolate and weighs 75 pounds. Every day when we pass Jasper’s house on our walk, if he isn’t home or if I don’t have time to stop, I have a mutiny on my hands. Alice emits a doleful cry and like a stubborn donkey in a cartoon, she puts the brakes on and no amount of cajoling will get her to move. Since I don’t want to drag her little butt along the sidewalk, the only way to keep going is to pick her up and carry her far enough away that she loses his scent. According to Jasper’s owner, Fran, when we have a scheduled play date and she announces it to Jasper, he posts himself at their front window and waits. As soon as he sees her, he literally jumps for joy and the two of them fall into each other’s forelegs.

They jump, they run, they twirl. They lick each other, they play tug-of-war, but even with all the rough and tumble, the boy is gentle with her and has been since she was a tiny puppy. It’s like watching Gérard Depardieu make chaste love to little Gidget. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 30, 2011

unleashed aggression: how leash laws protect mother nature

by nikki meredith

Six months ago, after a no-dog hiatus of more than ten years, my husband and I got a puppy – a half golden retriever, half poodle. (Yes, I’m trying to avoid writing Goldendoodle. Owning any kind of doodle in our location (Southern Marin) and in our demographic (empty nesters) is an ubercliché.) Cliché or no, we are both amazed at how much we adore this little creature. I don’t know if it’s because of her qualities – sweet, funny, easygoing and easy on the eyes – or because the last time around we had children sopping up our parental love but something is different this time around. Every time I look at her she makes me happy and she touches me in such a deep way it almost scares me. I tell you this to demonstrate that my dog-adoring credentials are solid. But….

I recently discovered that I part company with some, perhaps most, of my dog-adoring brothers and sisters when it comes to The Leash. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 26, 2011

the botoxed heart

by nikki meredith

My husband wouldn’t smile at me. To be fair, he, more accurately, couldn’t smile at me. He was hit in the mouth with a hockey stick and required stitches both inside and outside. He’s a long time hockey player so over the years he’s had many injuries – this wasn’t even close to the worst (black eyes, cracked ribs, broken teeth) — but this one was the most painful for me. I had to get through each day without that particular physical manifestation of love and approval from him and it was as effective as an anti-Prozac. I realized that given the choice: no sex for a month; no smile for a week, I’d choose the first. It didn’t matter one wit that he might have been smiling on the inside, my heart hurt.

I thought about this experience recently when I read a New York Times report in about a study that seemed to demonstrate that Botox not only neutralizes how one looks, it neutralizes how one feels, particularly how one feels empathy. At issue is ”embodied cognition” — the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. In one experiment, women who had been injected with Botox were asked to look at a set of photographs of human eyes and match them with human emotions. Women with Botox were significantly less accurate at decoding both positive and negative facial expressions than the women in the control group. Read the rest of this entry »

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