Cupboard Love

Cupboard love is a popular learning theory of the 1950s and 1960s based on the research of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Mary Ainsworth. Rooted in psychoanalysis, the theory speculates that attachment develops in the early stages of infancy. 

This process involves the mother satisfying her infant’s instinctual needs, exclusively. Cupboard love theorists conclude that during infancy, our primary drive is food, which leads to a secondary drive for attachment.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupboard_love

What’s on my mind? My firstborn arrived as the snow bucketed down in January, 1971. His twin sisters were born as more snow bucketed down in December of the same year. I was, as the joke often went, a slow learner about cause and effect.

Mother’s Day has come and gone, but I’m still thinking about the four-year-old who went missing from a school playground March 24, 1991. With his parents and others nearby, no one saw him drop from sight.

As though an invisible portal opened and quickly closed, he just ... vanished. His May birthday came and went. This year, his birthday fell on Mother’s Day, as it has several times in the 28 years since he walked into the ether without a trace. 

There were cruel rumors the child had been found ... The parents had divorced ... Untrue.

I met his mother, once. Her pain pierced my heart like a spear. Thinking of her lost child made me want to hold my own closer.

While there’s no comparison between that gut-wrenching story and my then-14-month-old son’s brief disappearance, having three children born in the same calendar year made it difficult to keep an eye on them.  

Parents and caregivers are often tested. My test came as a line of volunteers and police officers searched for my son in the high yellow grasses of an autumn field. 

I didn’t know how long he’d been missing. Ten minutes? Twenty? As he sat and played with his cars and blocks, his three-month-old sisters screamed for the food and diaper changes that kept me running in circles. When I looked up, their brother was gone.

The police came almost immediately after my hysterical call. As they and volunteers beat the high grass, another officer tried every door in the townhouse complex where we lived. 

The front door of an unlocked suite opened directly onto a kitchen. Although no one was home, a trail of cereal lead to a closed cupboard. In that cupboard sat my son, calmly and silently eating in the dark, one hand in a box of Cheerios. 

Kisses and tears met his triumphant return. There are many ways to lose a child, some of them tragic. We were fortunate.

© Nicole Parton, 2019