Remembering Frank Gifford

August 9^th, 2015.

Frank Gifford died today.

I go online and gather a lot of information

                about him

--things I didn’t know

even though I was a huge fan

as a kid, as was my father

as were my brothers

--our devotion to the New York Giants

football team

          rivaled in its religiosity

only by our devotion to the New York Giants

baseball team.

Back then

I didn’t know Frank Gifford was from Bakersfield, California.

I didn’t know his grades were so bad in high school

he couldn’t get an athletic scholarship to his dream school

--USC.

I didn’t know he played for Bakersfield Junior College

and made the Junior College All-American Team.

In fact, I didn’t know there was a Junior College All-American Team.

I vaguely remember my dad telling me he was

an All-American once he did make it to USC.

My dad probably knew all the stats of Frank Gifford’s career

as it unfolded

playing three different positions and each

superbly.

He loved sport stats, my father,

      and today

the day of Frank Gifford’s death

I discover he had enough achievements

 in a 12 year career

to fill a pocket sized record book

                all on his own.

But today, even as I marvel

                at how much I did not know

about him,

I am the captive of what I did know

--the hours

spent stretched out beside my father in his bedroom

                on Sunday afternoons

as the Giants’ fortunes rose and fell

and their names crackled in our mouths

                like hard candies

--Charlie Conerly, Joe Morrison,

Rosey Brown and Rosey Grier, Andy Robustelli, Sam Huff,

Pat Summerall (the kicker with the golden leg) and

Frank Gifford;

Dad’s voice

my brothers’

and mine

whispering and shouting

 in a harmony of hope

frustration

           euphoria.

Yet, as sweet and bitter as it is

       to recall those Sundays
(my father and brothers are all gone;
my oldest brother, Larry, was a director for ABC
and actually worked with Frank),

                        at this instant

                I am gripped by a memory

of the day Frank Gifford, All-American, All-Pro,

visited our high school in Summit, New Jersey.

I was in junior high at the time.

Our classes were in a wing of the same building as the high school.

If memory serves, our All-American high school coach, Howie Anderson,

made it happen.

The event was held in the gym.

Frank Gifford did not come alone that day.

He brought one or two teammates with him,

but I really only remember him.

He was that big a presence.

The entire student body

               was crammed onto the wooden bleachers.

Frank enlisted our two top players

in a demonstration—Mike Papio, our quarterback

and Darnell Mallory, our halfback

                 —both exceptional athletes,

                champs of our division

                       and adored and idolized by all.

As I do the math today

I reckon Frank must have been about 29 or 30 years old.

But he had no age that day.

He was young, tall, tapered and beautiful.

My father and his friends called him “the golden boy”

but he was more like Mercury than gold.

I thought Mike and Darnell were geniuses of the gridiron

but as they all ran plays together

                     Frank Gifford showed us a whole new level of mastery

          that couldn’t be achieved in high school

and couldn’t be appreciated through a TV screen,

a mastery that said, “This is what you get if you keep at it,

keep practicing, keep honing your gifts for another ten years.”

He moved like music

                  explosive

                    quick

                          fluid

                in a way that was his and his alone.

He was animal, wind and god.

His ready and open face

               shone with a light

                                that was his and his alone

yet shared generously with all of us in the gym that day

the way a king shares his beneficence.                                  
Because my father was a journalist

       I had already met a lot of stars

--Roy Rodgers and Dale Evans, 

             Gene Autry,

           Fess Parker, to name a few.               

But in these years of my own athletic dreams

                I had never seen the likes of him.
He was a true action hero before the term was created.

               

I see him there, still...

                Frank Gifford

           beautiful in his youth

                                and beautiful in mine

in a way that only youth bestows

      when moments themselves

                are
               big

                  deep

                          and wide

           as a roaring

      stadium
            and feel like they'll never end.

C 2015 Bob Kamm

The Gaze

for my granddaughter Kiera

She is nearly one year old

and has probably learned more

               in this year,

making all the new and strange

               familiar,

than I have in the last twenty.

However

clearly she has not heard

that stars reside light years away

because

her eyes are twin blue stars

right here

              before us.

Clearly she has not heard

that blue stars in particular

are so hot

they are gone

in the blink

of a cosmological eye.

Her twin blue stars warm

                with no danger of burning us

or burning out.

Yet there is another kind of light

that arises from her

but does not originate in her.

It is gathered by her presence,

called home by her cheeks.

I have seen this light

                on the cheeks

      of white orchids

in the rainforest of Peru

--a light that filters down through

layered leaves and

     nestles silently on petals,

a soothing glow

          that quiets you

and draws you closer.

Twin suns gazing.

Cheeks gathering.

A small smile summoning.

All saying silently together,    

“I am here.

 I see you.

          I see you

                            seeing me.        

I am awake.

                I am alive!”

C 2014 Bob Kamm

Hold the Sky

for my granddaughter, Ember

My granddaughter

               Ember

just short of

her second birthday

reaches up, out, down

because holding

is new and

             how she understands things best.

She literally grasps

                   in order to grasp

but not just with hands

           as she did some months ago

--a tiny plastic dinosaur, a piece of apple, a stick

her grandpa’s glasses—

now with her arms, her whole body.

“Hold!” she sings reaching her arms out,

                                             her tiny torso arching to the effort.

(All her words are small songs, even

single syllables have at least two notes).

She sees a tree outside

and sings, “Tree.  Hold!”

She points to the clouds

and sings, “Clouds.  Hold!”

and the sky, “Sky.  Hold! Hold!”

this one with more intensity

reaching her arms almost straight up.

 “Can you hold the sky, Ember?” I ask

“Yeah,” she answers with two notes.

“And can the sky hold you?”

“Yeah,” two notes and a nod

                       of utter certainty.

She throws her head back,

    stretches her whole body,

               rises on her toes

as if to will herself

higher and higher

    until she can

         hold the sky

and by holding

                  know it.

Later in the day

    walking alone

I look up and think,                             

“I’m almost seventy

              and maybe I’ve forgotten

                             how to understand the sky.

I’m not talking about collisions of molecules

      or the scattering of light waves.

I’m talking about

                      knowing the sky

as only a mystery can be known

    by getting your arms around it

                       pressing yourself against it

                            letting your heart beat into it

and its heart beat

            into you.

Maybe I need to reach higher.

Maybe I need to reach harder.

Maybe I need to stretch my body more.

Maybe I need to throw my toes all the way into it

                    as I once did

                              long ago

                          when I first held the sky

and the sky

         held

                me.”

C 2014 Bob Kamm

My Brother Lew Has Cancer, Part II

My brother, Lew, had cancer.  He died on the evening of July 8^th.  He was sixty-eight.

It still feels unreal.   He was only diagnosed in April of 2011.  I know, many others go much faster.  Our oldest brother, Larry, was gone suddenly in a matter of weeks back in 2004, at sixty-four.  If this were a hundred years ago, both of them would have been considered old.  But it isn’t and they weren’t.

Untimely death.  Maybe we call it that because when someone is taken too soon, it scrambles our sense of time. 

Today is 1955.  The latest national event is Fess Parker playing Davy Crockett on TV.  Our father, a New York City journalist, manages to arrange for us to meet him.  I am eight.  Lew is ten.  We walk into a hotel room in New York and there he is, all six foot five of him, in buckskin and a coonskin cap.  We sit on his knees.  He shows us the enormous bowie knife.  He tells us that the Georgie Russell character played by Buddy Epsen wasn’t a real person, but represents a number of sidekicks that Crockett had.  We feel as if we’ve been initiated into special information from a larger-than-life figure.  He gives us each a coonskin cap.  We have our pictures taken, sitting there on his knees, in our caps.  We are going to wear them for the next several months, go to sleep with them on our pillows.  We are going to be celebrities in our neighborhood because we got them directly from “Davy Crockett himself.”  We will spend the summer running around the little town of Highlands, New Jersey, where our grandfather lives, with coon tails flying—flags of boyhood.

This is today.  It walks with me.  If I take a quick step in the right direction, I can be running up Bay Avenue in Highlands, a mile from the ocean with Lew beside me.

                                                   ****

It’s also today that he is asking me again about our mother’s final days.  He wants to know the mechanics of going to sleep until the end comes.  She had morphine pills placed under her tongue.  She slept for five days and died.  He is going to ask Nancy, his oncologist about methodology.  He continues to have breakthrough pain at night and he and Nancy continue to adjust the medication to combat it.  Cancer not only consumes the body.  It consumes the mind.  Beyond a certain point there is nothing else to think, feel, talk or learn about but this treatment, that theory, this drug combination, the quality or personality of this doctor, nurse, lab tech, survival rates, the fate of others with similar afflictions and, above all, pain and managing pain.  The joys and interests of a lifetime are utterly upstaged. Lew has thought hard about the courage it took our mother to say, “I’m there.  No more.  This is it.  I want to sleep now until the end.”  He tells me, “This isn’t it, yet, but it’s getting close.  I want to be prepared.” There are discussions of “the sublingual approach” being “a general part of the hospice comfort pack” and “fentanyl lollipops for immediate control of pain.”  Fentanyl lollipops.  Could the inventor of lollipops ever imagine that phrase?  All at once, things are moving faster than any of us have foreseen.  I’m booked for a return visit.  I’ve been convinced he’ll still be alive and awake when I get there.  Now I’m not so sure.

Then, suddenly, this email from him:  “This IS it Bob.  The combination of pain, fluids, and this and that over the past 2+ days has reached the point where Anne and I have this very evening to stop the dance…this has happened very quickly.  Where does this leave you?  Staying home?  Trying to have one last visit when I don’t know what the situation will be?  It leaves you and me forever in one another’s arms in ways that I’m sure neither of us would ever have imagined.  I want you to have as much time as possible to think about what you might want to do (to come or not to).  No matter what happens, what events unfold, know this:  I love you tremendously and thank you once again for your blog and so much more.  I will give Mom, Dad and Larry a big hug from you and confirm that we hope it will be many, many years indeed before we are all together again.”

I call as soon as I read this.  He is sleeping.  I ask Anne to try to read a final email to him if he awakens: “Lew, I love you. I love you.  I love you.  That is all I can give you to take with you.  I am so grateful for the love we have shared over a lifetime and over these last few years but especially these last few months.  You did not run.  You did not hide from what was coming.  You opened your eyes and your heart to all around you so they could receive the last and fullest measure of your soul’s gifts.  Thank you, my precious brother, thank you! I am walking with you to the threshold and waving you across.  Bob”.  

I am planning on going anyway, even if he is in his final sleep.  I can support my sister-in-law and Lew’s grandson, Ben.  And maybe Lew will sense my presence.  But this is not to be.  The day before my scheduled departure, Anne asks that I not come.  “The last 2 days on Lew’s downward spiral have been a free fall…  So, Bob, since spirit energy knows no time and space, you are as much with Lew now and he with you, as you could be here.  Save yourself and take a walk to Montana de Oro (the state park with miles of rustic beaches that are special to us) and visit with Lew there. Coming at this time would be futile...”  She wants to devote all her energy to his final moments.  It makes sense to me.  I stay home.  The next evening, before I would have arrived, he is gone.

                                                 ****

This is today, too, perhaps a year after coonskin caps.  My mother gets a phone call and goes gray in the face.  Lew has had a bad spill from his bike going down one of our town’s steeper hills.  Apparently a dog ran out and startled him.  He is at Overlook Hospital.  We rush there.  My heart hammers.  How hurt is he?  I feel my mother’s fear.  I see my father grit his teeth.  This is the first time in my life that I have been faced with the possibility one of us could be badly hurt in a life-changing way, or even killed.  I am shaking inside.  I grip my mother’s hand as we enter the hospital room.  At the same instant, we all connect with Lew’s eyes.  He is sitting up, alert, bruised all over his face and arms but fine.  When he comes home the next day, he gets to sit out in the side yard on the chaise lounge.  His bruises are all dabbed with some kind of jelly.  He looks funny and knows it.  Mom and Dad buy him a huge quantity of comic books.  He burns through them.

This is today.  I think about that moment when we walked into Overlook Hospital.  I think how wholly unpredictable and unforeseeable most of life is.  I think about how little time has passed though the calendar says it is nearly sixty years.  I think about how the beaches of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, were playgrounds and holy places in our childhood.  There was one beach where our parents paid a quarter for us to get on.  Then we were given a small yarn—red, blue, yellow, green, brown, gray, purple—that indicated we had paid that day.  We tied it on our bathing suits so the lifeguards knew we had paid.  I think about how the beaches of California’s Central Coast have become my holy places in adulthood, and certain beaches in the Rhode Island and Massachusetts area his…and where his ashes will be scattered.  I think that calendars and clocks are tricks, illusions.  They have nothing to do with time as the heart knows it.  Time is liquid, not linear.  I need to get some yarn in different colors.

                                                 ****

Another today.  He is retiring from 36 years of teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.  I ask, “Do you think you’ll do some part-time teaching?”  He answers rapidly, “No.  I’m done.  I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of my career.  But I’m done.”  I ask, “So what do you want to do?”  Again, he answers without hesitation, “Spend time with Anne, read, lay on the beach.”  For the past few years he has been sending me reading recommendations which we refer to as “Lew’s Book Club.”  He has done enough reading in his academic field.  These are wonderful novels, all the best contemporary stuff. He and Anne buy a little place to spend their winters in St. Augustine, Florida.  Anne, reading, beach (no yarn necessary).  All set up. Perfect.  What could go wrong?

                                                 ****

And this is today.  Our father has just died.  We take his ashes to a special beach at Montana de Oro state park here in San Luis Obispo County, Larry, Lew and myself.  We each pour some in the sea.  When Lew pours, a little wind tosses the ashes in a swirl around him, almost a caress.  Later, at a memorial service, we all speak some words about our father, the journalist, the lover of words.  Lew’s testament: “He was a man in full.”  Yes, not a perfect man, not a perfect father, but a man in full.  This day I can say the same of my brother.  He was a man in full.  A rare phenomenon in an angry time of half-beings.  A man in full whose bravery was met by the brute pain that cancer visits on its victims…and yet, a man in full to the end.

                                                 ****

Another today.  Some kind of sibling rivalry.  He is five years younger than Larry and only two older than I.  I guess I am an unwitting usurper, by dint of my position.  So, yes there are occasional struggles, a rare fist fight when I am six or seven (he wins with a fist on the top of my head that sends me crying), and some residual resentment riding into adulthood.  But this is generally not Shakespearean.  It’s run-of-the-mill jealousy, a peevishness that surfaces from time to time.  When our father dies, and I begin writing poetry in earnest for the first time in many years, he is avidly supportive.  He asks, “When are you going to start doing the thing you were born to do full time?”  Meaning, writing.  Meaning, specifically, writing poetry.  Meaning, life is short.  Who cares if you make money at it?  Just write.  I am touched by his enthusiasm and it continues and even grows as the last sheath of sibling rivalry is shucked away by the death of our brother early in 2004 and our mother in September of the same year.  “Write, Bob.  Just write.”

                                                ****

And this is today, toward the end of my visit in April of 2013, I am thinking what a good person Lew is.  He has never done any serious hurt to another human being.  He is a good man who has shared his joy of teaching and the French language and its literature with hundreds of students.  He has loved his wife, has been more a father to his adopted sons than their own, more a father to his grandson than his own.  There is no rhyme or reason to why this person gets cancer, or that person dies of a sudden heart attack or another person lives to 95 after being a royal prick most of his life. 

                                                   ****

This is a thought today.  It may be true that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, but that is not the case with memory.  All these moments, thoughts and feelings exist simultaneously within me.  As I said, time is liquid, not linear. It has depth and breadth, current and cross-current. Conflicting truths flow together, forming something unforeseen in a new kind of present tense.  We are a family of five and yet now we are one.  “We thought we’d be boys forever…”  So I wrote in a poem after Larry’s death and it is still true.  We are boys forever.  The sandbox will always contain us, the pine limbs bear our weight.  Yet, we are also reduced to one now…one person to hold the elixir of memory for an entire family.  One person to carry the love and the loss.

                                                   ****

Another today.  I am in my late twenties.  I write Lew and ask him to share his sweetest memories of our childhood together.  The first thing he offers is the two of us on all fours as little boys, probably three and five, playing animals under the dining room table.  I am so grateful for this, for it has left my own ready-recall file, but the moment I read it, the memories come back in detail. 

More than sixty years later, in this today, I realize he has always been there, for I was the youngest.  They were all there, always—Mom, Dad, Larry and Lew, each pouring their own rich memories into the chalice, many of which I could never have reclaimed on my own.  I have never known life without at least one of them being at the end of a phone call or email.   But Lew is gone and I now know life alone, life void of contribution.

 As I try to understand why the bond is so strong, the grief so deep, I return to that space between the four legs of our dining room table, a table that protected us like a mother elephant, and those moments when we crawled around making animal sounds, so close to each other that his particular five-year old boy smell wrote its verse in me, and the feeling when our bodies would bump against each other, and the sound of his breathing and his voice as it manifested growls, purrs, howls, barks and trumpeting—verse after verse.  We knew each other only as little brothers can in the dawn light of life. 

It was a unique bond.  We were animals together, slept in the same room, knew that we came from the same people, looked up to the same faces, loved the same voices, rode the same hips and shoulders and were looked after by the same oldest brother.  We ran through the same storm door into the winter snows where snowmen, snow angels and sleds were the kings, queens and royal carriages of our little land, a land where together we discovered the neighborhood and friends, games and rituals, hiding places, magical trees, swinging vines and outcroppings of ancient faces.  We also ran through the same screen door into the bright summer air to dash through backyards and front, ride bikes, throw and kick balls, climb fences and trees, explore brooks and catch lightning bugs. And on trips to our grandpa’s, we tanned nut-brown like twins under the same sun on the same sand and in the same Atlantic waves.  There was only one person on earth right beside me from the beginning, each of us making our own marks on our lives’ first pages of poetry--my brother, Lew.

No words or deeds can fully honor my love for him.  But I am heading to the beach today…and I have yarn.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

Winning and Losing in Love Relationships

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have participated in some form of team--athletic, social, religious or work.  We have been exposed to people who place their own ego's above
the success of the team.  Probably the easiest example to consider comes from a sports team.
Think of an athlete, man or woman, who has great stats game after game.  Now imagine that in spite of their performance (or more likely, because of it!) the team loses game after game.
Would any of us, with the perspective of adulthood, call that person a success?  Unlikely.  We might marvel at his or her persistence and talent.  We might also think of him/her as "a ball hog"
or selfish.  Does any of us believe that Kobe Bryant or Mia Hamm would consider themselves successful if they hadn't won championships?  A no-brainer, right?  But here's the thing.  A love relationship is a team of two.  It calls for an even greater commitment to collaboration than other teams because our hearts are so fully engaged.  We are more vulnerable on the "love team" and our childhood hurts are so much more likely to be triggered.  But the core question is the same as on a sports team:  are you a team player or a ball hog?  Do you push for your own victories over your partner as if they were actually the other team...or are you capable of letting go of the need to win in order to serve the greater good of the relationship?  

We know what the answer is for most of us much of the time.  We have a hard time letting go
of having our way or being right. Why?  Because being wrong has such powerful resonance during our early years.  When we are little, we need to be attached to our parents.  It is not a desire.  It is a biologically written need whose goal is to serve our survival and optimal development.  Far too often, when parents correct children they come down hard.  They forget they're dealing with a small fragile being whose brain is nowhere near fully developed.  As children, we immediately fear the loss of love, which is potentially catastrophic for such a genuinely dependent being.  Since our parents tend to react to us in fairly consistent ways, we develop a pattern of adaptations to those moments.  We try hard to be right, to be on their good side.  Some of us fight for it, meaning we cry, flail, object, blame someone or try to talk our way out of a situation.  Some of us flee, meaning we hide within ourselves and physically withdraw from our parents.  Some of us freeze in the moment, become paralyzed and speechless.  Some of us discover it is safer to just submit.  In all these cases, we are feeling a great deal of discomfort because the withdrawal of parental love, even for seconds at a time, is so potentially devastating.  

Fast forward to adulthood and you find yourself and your partner having a difficult time allowing the other to be right.  On an unconscious psychological level, the dynamic is, "If you are right, I am wrong.  If I am right, you are wrong.  Whoever is wrong is going to feel bad.  Someone is coming out as the parent and someone the child."  It's a zero-sum game that parallels the childhood pattern when parents had all the power and we needed them with all our hearts.  So here we are in our twenties, thirties, forties and on, being ball hogs in our relationship so we can avoid feeling that feeling.  Of course, we don't live with a coach in our home to help us run better plays.  We don't have crowds cheering us when we serve the team. But we can gradually learn to get in touch with the deeper feeling that drives this reaction, grieve it and be liberated from the impulse that drives us to create win-lose.  We can do some of this work when we are single, but the deepest work comes when we are in a relationship for there are wounds that are only triggered and therefore available to work on when we actively seek to be in loving connection with another.

We are strange creatures, aren't we?  We long for love.  Then, when we find it (after the 
romantic phase is over) we treat our partner as if he/she is the competition, not a teammate!  We have to defeat the very person who might love us...for fear of feeling unloved.  Once again we see how early patterns can hijack the present and deprive us of the thing we cherish most.

Parenting From Depth, Part II: Children Should be Seen and...

 

Early in our Imago Parenting Course--Connected Parents, Thriving Kids--we give a quick survey of how parenting styles have changed over the years. For hundreds of years,
parenting was parent-centered, authoritarian, "because I said so", "children are to be seen and not heard." You really have to shake your head on how this approach dominated for thousands of years. Why didn't we as a species see the terrible limits of this approach sooner? Well, that will be a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that parent-centered parenting did a lot of damage on this planet, some mild and some on the level of holocaust--children treated as slaves, property, brutalized and even killed because "father knew best"in some way. Finally, after the World War II, there was a gradual shift towards child-centered, permissive parenting. "Cchildren are to be seen and not heard" gave way to, "Children are to be seen, heard and given whatever will support their 'self-esteem'". Being a baby-boomer, my experience is that I and my cohort grew up with a sometimes confusing blend of authoritarianism and permissiveness. I think this conflation of the two styles dissipated gradually over the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st.
In the last few years, a lot of parents and professionals in the field of child development have arrived at the conclusion that child-centered parenting has frequently gone too far, indulging children, allowing their scheduled activities to run the life of the household and generally being unwilling or unable to leverage a "positive no" that actually can give children a clear boundary and nurture in them a greater sense of responsibility, a sense that there are other people in the world besides themselves and a mature person makes room for those others. Now what we see, and what we in the Imago community are working towards, is parent-child centered parenting; parenting that emphasizes the relationship between the two, that sees both as catalysts for each other's growth and enrichment. Toward that end, children are to be seen, heard, felt and responded to in ways that are appropriate to the need and the developmental moment, but not over-indulged. As our workbook states: "I am in healthy connection with my child when I'm emotionally available to learn what he/she needs from a parent who is willing to take charge." One obvious example: Conscious parents know that four year olds need about a dozen hours of sleep and are best served by a bedtime around 7 in the evening, not nine, ten or eleven. They also know that it's a good idea to make sure kids burn off a lot of energy about three hours before that bedtime so that they are ready for the quiet enjoyments of bath and reading and gentle play.
My own mnemonic device for this parent-child centered approach is the Italian word cara,which means dear. I set it up this way:
C=Consistenly (consistency across situations, not constancy which is impossible)
A=Attuned, (meaning emotionally available to "get" our children's reality)
R=Responsive, (in a timely manner to the present and long-term needs)
A=Appropriate (to the developmental moment the child is experiencing)

So, being a C.A.R.A. parent means we would respond to a crying infant by picking it up, comforting it and attuning to learn what it need: Just the comfort? A diaper change? A warmer/cooler/quieter/more-or-less stimulating environment? Food? Etc. We would understand that an infant can't meet its own needs and certainly cannot regulate its own emotions. She needs us to do that for her just as she needs us to walk for her because she can't walk and speak for her because she can't yet speak and make decisions because the left side of her brain where decisions largelyt get made is, for all intents and purposes, not at all functional. But an appropriate response to a crying teenager might look very different. It might mean that we would mirror his feelings: "Oh, I can see that you are really hurting over this." Or, "You seem really angry about this. Is that what you're feeling?" It might mean we offer hugs. It might mean we let him know we're available if he wants to talk, but empower him to work it through on his own if that's his choice. Your get the picture. The bottom line is to be Consistently Attuned, Responsive and Appropriate...which includes our own needs, thus the parent-child relationship. Sometimes, especially with smaller children, it IS appropriate to drop what we're doing and come to their aid. But as a child matures, we have more choices about our proximity to her and her issues. It's important for kids to gradually get through living examples that their parents are "others" and have needs themselves and those needs will sometimes preclude an immediate response to their own. For an infant, the experience of an unmet need can be catastrophic. For a four year-old, far less so. For a fourteen year-old, still less--IF the parent has been consistent over the years in balancing (based on the child's developmental stage) the child's needs with their own. Children ARE to be seen, heard, felt, "gotten" and responded to with appropriate loving behavior; but parents are people, too, and also need to be seen, heard, felt and "gotten"...mostly by their life partners and other adults but, over time, by their children, too. When kids get that their parents are separate people, they grow up to be much more responsible contributors to culture. So there is no danger of children becoming narcissistic if they are truly seen, heard and gotten by parents who intuit or have learned through study what is appropriate at a given moment.
In my book, Real Fatherhood, there are a number of examples of good moments...and bad ones that I tried to correct as quickly as possible. Our Imago Faculty has called such errors, "beautiful mistakes" to remind us all that none of us can be perfect. In one such situation, my son was eight years old. I had been giving him an allowance of $2.00 a week, for which he did certain chores. He got very money focused because there were things he wanted. Suddenly I realized that it was a significant error to pay him to do things. After all, he and I were a family (I was a single dad at the time). We were a team. To pay him changed his status. He became an employee. Kids are not our employees. They are family members and what was appropriate for Ben was to bear his weight as a family member.
Obviously, there were chores he could not do, given his developmental moment. But he could help prepare meals, do dishes, wash the car and do yard work with me. So I self-corrected by telling him that I would no longer pay him for specific chores. He would still get his $2.00 a week so he could learn to manage money--which was the real and right purpose of an allowance. His initial reaction was to pitch a fit. "How will I make more money?" he cried at me. I held steady and let him know that he really couldn't right now. Eventually he'd be old enough so he could perhaps do things for neighbors or have a paper route. I let him cry it out. He was mad at me and he had cause. I was correcting a decision that was less than attuned to the situation at the time. He had a right to his frustration and tears. But the whole thing was over in about a half-hour. That was one of the best half-hours I ever invested in his character...and mine. Parent-child relationship!
C2012 Bob Kamm

Your Child's Emotional Tuning

 

When an infant calls for help and her parent is consistently available and responsive in a
way that meets the child’s need, that child is implicitly learning that it is good to express need
because it will be satisfied in a timely manner. She can’t think at this age, of course, but her
body knows at the cellular level what is happening. This is the ground floor for emotional
balance in adulthood.
A child who experiences such emotional attunement and response from
her parents doesn’t have to escalate her expressions to magnum crying, screaming and flailing
to get mom and dad’s attention. Consequently, as an adult, she is likely to be able to do
without rapid escalation to bring attention to her needs in an intimate relationship but also in
friendships and the workplace. This truth debunks the old idea of letting children cry it
out…which we now know stresses the child’s system with large flows of cortisol and other
stress hormones that can actually do damage to her hippocampus—a part of the brain that is a
building block of IQ because of its key role in creating long-term memory.
Our degree and accuracy of responsiveness is what we might call “emotional tuning.”
Indeed, the entire neurological and hormonal system, of which the brain is the most obvious
component, is an instrument for sensing and feeling in the early years, not thinking. It is being
tuned by caregiver interaction as certainly as a piano is tuned by a piano master. This
emotional tuning determines which emotional notes, note sequences, chords and reaction speeds will
become the most common in the life of the individual. You can continue the metaphor by imagining what kind of parent interactions will lead the child to produce Wagner-like reactions rather than, say, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven or, in today’s terms, the quiet and contemplative music of Michael Hoppe or the blaring, machine-gun like emanations of metal rock and rap…as well as all the possible variations along that continuum.
Unfortunately, we parents are not perfect and there are plenty of times when we either
miss our children’s cues or are simply unable to satisfy them due to outside stresses pulling at
us—a bad economy, a catastrophic act of nature, ethnic strife and war, just to name a few of
the possibilities. So, many of us will pass through our critical and highly dependent first four or
five years experiencing something between inconsistent emotional attunement and response
from our parents to very little at all. When we arrive on the shores of adulthood and find
ourselves drawn into an intimate relationship, friendship or important workplace issue, it is
natural that these old deficits come with us and do a lot to shape the dynamics of those
relationships. The good news is that through the right kinds of courageous emotion-based
work in adulthood, those old tunes, as deeply written as they are, can gradually be rewritten
into a more harmonious musical score.
C 2012 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment III, Couplehood, the Final Frontier

 

I have an old friend who is passionate about our founding father, Thomas Jefferson. He speaks of him with the adoration and devotion of a young boy for his dad. As I write this on the morning of October 6, 2011, many people across the world, myself among them, are mourning the loss of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. He might well be seen as the founding father of a new age. Never in the history of human business and culture have so many people been so enamored of a corporate CEO and the brand he birthed. I use the word "enamored" with intention. In its core, you see "amor"...meaning love. Between Jefferson and Jobs, we could identify a very long list of public figures who have been the objects of enormous affection on the part of huge numbers of individuals. This is just more evidence of the centrality of fierce attachment in human existence.

I have been very fortunate in my life to learn at the feet of some very smart, wise and talented people. I will readily admit to you that I am fiercely attached to these beloved mentors. Given that I am sixty-four years old, you might think I am done seeking mentors and am busy being one. Maybe there are a lot of people smarter than I am. I am aware of still having a lot to learn and I cherish people who can bring something new, potent and truthful to me. Most recent in that category are Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the husband and wife team behind Imago Relationship Therapy, as well as Bruce Crapuchettes and Francine Beauvoir, the senior faculty members of Imago Relationships International, under whom I have done most of my training over the last three years. What have these four people brought to me in my sixties that is so valuable? Since this is a blog post, not a book, I'll be brief, at the risk of understating their gifts to me.

I went through a lot of individual therapy when I was younger...a key moment of which I shared in my last post. The process of regaining my capacity to grieve over childhood hurts literally helped me save my life and grow into adulthood.

Harville and Helen brought a major new insight to the therapeutic process. I don't think it's a stretch to call them the true founding father and mother of transformational couplehood. They have shown us that no matter how much work we do one-on-one with a therapist, there will be wounds that will never be addressed, can never be addressed until and unless we are in a love relationship in which both of us are committed to help each other heal. As intimate as is the one-on-one patient-therapist relationship, as capable as it is through the process of transference of stirring up old feelings for healing, there is no relationship that more closely resonates with the vulnerability of our first connections in life with our primary caregivers--usually mom and dad. In the womb, in infancy, in early childhood and all the way into adulthood, we are at our most dependent and sensitive. Templates of the basic dynamics of relationships are being imprinted in us. As adults, with our lover, we are as open as children once again, hopeful, joyful, ecstatic and dependent. So old early hurts that have managed to lie dormant for decades can be suddenly triggered when our partner seems to ignore us, or talk to us with edge in their voice, or give us a cold shoulder or forget to do something for us. There are just some layers of feelings that only a lover can trigger and make available for processing--not a boss, not a friend, not a therapist, not even a child.

Not only have they shone a bright light on a key truth about human existence. They have presided over the training of thousands of therapists in specific practices that couples can actually learn in workshops and in therapy sessions. Those practices constitute a comprehensive toolkit that has been tested and honed. It is very user-friendly. It is the iPhone of couplehood.

You might be thinking that Harville and Helen's insight naturally raises a question about the limitations of a solitary wisdom path such as meditation. That would be right. Notwithstanding that there is genuine value in the practice of meditation, the iconic journey away from civilization is not, for me, the optimal or even most heroic.

The final frontier of human development is not on a mountaintop in Tibet or in an ashram in Massachusetts. Couplehood is the final frontier. But it is not "out there." It is "in here" or "down there." It is the ultimate site for personal and relational archaeology. Couplehood unearths what has remained hidden in spite of serious efforts through many other methods and moments. Without couplehood, we cannot fully become whole, and unless we become whole, we cannot fully experience couplehood--a challenging, yet sweet and virtuous loop.

Through the application of Imago practices I have repeatedly seen people discover things about their own life journey that were utter epiphanies for them and brought transformational energy. In my own practice with my darling wife, I have processed and learned things that shaped my consciousness from my first breath, things that were still hidden from me as I entered my seventh decade of life, in spite of a great deal of inner work. I have been called to new levels of consciousness, honesty, courage and understanding. The power of these revelations is self-affirming. I'm convinced that it literally reorganizes brain synapses...making us into a qualitatively different human being, more feeling, more compassionate, more curious about our partner, more honoring of their otherness and, above all, more capable of being attached appropriately as adults, rather than caught in the co-dependence that results from being over-burdened with unconscious injuries from our earliest years.

For the insight of couplehood as the final frontier, for the practices to help us navigate that realm and for the sweet, steadfast and patient teaching I have received, I celebrate my fierce attachment to my Imago mentors. Above all, I whole-heartedly celebrate my fierce attachment to the woman who brought me to the Imago well to drink, my true partner, the amor of my life, my Andrea.

C2011 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment, Part II

Before my son, Ben, was born, I had tried hard to imagine him as a particular individual with particular features...not just "the baby." But when I saw his face for the first time as the doctor held him up, I realized this was no baby. This was a person, of me, of my family. He was completely recognizable. He looked an awful lot like my Grandpa Sam, my mom's father...except for his creamy blue color. After more than thirty hours of labor, it felt as if the room were tilting and spinning when he finally emerged. My eyes were fixed on Ben but I was falling away in a strange kind of slow motion. I was on the verge of passing out when I felt his tiny spirit lasso and haul me back. I tumbled forward off the cliff of my own breath as he took his first. In an instant, I knew him and he knew me. Our souls collided.

Fatherhood comes upon men in different ways. During the six weeks that followed Ben's birth, I experienced a high beyond anything I'd ever felt. This was not just a new page or new chapter in my life. I had been transported to a new planet. Everyone and everything was different, as if the world itself had just been born. And I had a mission unlike any I'd ever imagined--to protect, nurture and love this person into full flowering. There was no questioning this. It had an irresistible primordial potency. I'm sure millions, perhaps billions of fathers before me had felt this same flooding of the heart...but it was my turn now.

That high felt as if it would never end. I would be the best possible me for the rest of my life, victoriously dueling with the demons of the world to make a sanctuary for my boy. But it did end, almost as if scheduled, right at six weeks. It ended with a bang, not a whimper. Like a lightning strike. I fell into a massive depression. I'm sure I'm not the only man who has experienced "post-partum depression." It isn't talked or written about much, but it happens. We could talk about the crashing of the happy hormone-neurotransmitter pump...but let's not.

The high was followed by a low that matched it. My confidence had flown. I was in the world without any refined skills to make my way and provide the safe-haven Ben deserved. I had just turned twenty-eight. Much of my twenties were spent traveling in Europe, the Middle-East, writing songs and performing. I dreamt of a career as a folk-singer, though I was a few critical years late. That train had left the station. Music was changing. Besides, even when everything is in sync, how many people actually get to live that dream? I went to the local city college and started learning carpentry. I'd have something to fall back on, I thought. But when Ben arrived, I was still in contractor kindergarten. Everywhere I looked, I saw closed doors. Unlimited optimism had turned into unlimited despair and utter paralysis. I contemplated suicide.

Fortunately, there was help available and I grabbed it as fast as I could. Within a few days,

I was on the floor of my therapist's office sobbing my guts out. Initially, all I could feel was that I loved Ben so much more than I had ever loved anyone or anything--yet, I couldn't be the father he needed. I didn't have the skills or the smarts. I had spent most of the last ten years in self-centered pursuits. How could I possibly be a father? What preparation did I have?

After about ten minutes of "woe is me" in the present, things shifted. An image of my father showed up in my mind's eye...not my father as he was in this day, at the age of 58, but as he was when I was about four years old. The image was so clear, it was as if he were in the room with me...and I was that four year-old little boy. "Dad!" I cried, reaching up for him as that little boy. I was inundated with memories from that time...most of them about his absence and my longing to be close to him, to climb in his lap, nuzzle into his body, ride on his shoulders or just be in the same room with him so I could see and hear him. They didn't present themselves as memories, though...but as the present, as immediate reality and need.

Like most men of his generation, my father was a career man. We lived in northern New Jersey. He commuted by train into New York five days a week. Most of the time, when he was around, he was engaged, energetic, warm, playful and funny. Clearly, this was a far better situation than if he had been cold, distant and cruel. Still, it had its own odd curse. Since my father was such a magnetic person, my little boy soul could not help but yearn fiercely to be with him. But being the third of three boys, there just wasn't a lot of time left for me. So that was my deepest hurt with my father--needing to be close to a dynamic man who certainly loved me but just wasn't available enough. I was left gasping for the oxygen only he could provide.

I had known this intellectually for years. I wasn't a novice at psychology or therapy. But for the first time in my life, I was feeling it from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. I was that little boy.

I needed my dad desperately. There was no other reality.

After nearly two hours of crying, I was exhausted. The therapist hugged me and told me to go rest. The next morning, I was back. More tears. More images from the past as clear as if they were happening for the first time. I stayed with the little boy. I surrendered to his need. I was him and as him, felt helpless within this need that could not be met no matter how hard I reached for my dad or called for him.

After another two hours, it ended, cleanly. There were no more tears. I sat up, blew my nose and said, "That's it."

"What's it?" the therapist asked.

"I couldn't be a man because I wasn't done being a little boy. I needed my dad to come home and be with me."

"Well, that's very clear!"

I stood up. "I've gotta go," I said.

"Where to?" the therapist asked.

"Home. I've gotta go home. I've gotta go get a job and take care of my kid."

"Alright!"

We hugged and I was out the door.

Two days later, I got a job selling cars. This was not even on my list of "things I'd like to do". But I had a friend who had done it and told me I had the requisite people skills and there was good money in it. But I needed to make a living and right now. He turned out to be right. Within a month, I was making more than I ever had, and learning the art of selling. Some of it was repugnant to me. That just spurred my creativity so I could find other ways of relating to people without manipulating them. Some of it was quite satisfying. All in all, it was a legitimate way to make a living. Over a couple of decades, I mastered selling, moved into management and ultimately, beyond into consulting and the deep work of leadership development. I never looked back. I never had that feeling of needing my father as a four year-old again. I never again felt paralyzed in the face of life challenges. I had a firm grip on my manhood and did a decent job of raising my son, who is now a grown man and a father.

So, think about attachment. It was fierce attachment to Ben that both triggered the unmet need of my father and gave me the courage to face its force. That need is an intense dynamic which I would argue is common to all children. By fully processing the sorrow of not getting enough of my dad, I was liberated from it...detached, so that it no longer ran my life from its subterranean realm. I was also able to detach sufficiently from my unrealistic dream of fame and fortune so I could be a real and present dad. I would have to do some more work on that dream later, work that had to do with my mother, but the key factor at this moment was that my feet were planted firmly on the ground. I had been the victim of what we might call "the artist's conceit"...meaning that artists so often believe there is an intrinsic beauty and value in their work that the world should and will beat a path to their door eventually to embrace them. That conceit, in my view, is a projection of unfulfilled early needs.

I said in Part I that the fierceness of our attachment to our caregivers is beyond what most of us allow ourselves to feel most of the time. This was true of this situation following Ben's birth. If you had told me that I was going to have to cry for my dad as a four year-old for nearly four hours in order to stand up and be the father I wanted to be, I'd have been pretty skeptical. Having actually done it, there is no way anyone can talk me out of the value of those tears, and the truth that as children, our need to be close to our parents is the dominant force in our lives. There is also no way anyone could talk me out of my appreciation of how our extraordinary brains are capable of holding onto enormous old hurts in the hope that one day they will be healed. Frustration of early need sends the resulting pain underground, from which place it will run our adult lives until we are able to connect with it and grieve it in its original context. No amount of thinking or talking about it will yield the same result.

I am also convinced, from my own experiences and from what I see all around me, that the need for attachment is life-long in humans, though its nature changes with development and aging. Look at human history, at both our cruelty and our finest accomplishments. Look at it through the lens of attachment and all comes clear, from Caesar to Hitler, from communism to capitalism. None of it happens without the fierce need for attachment being unmet, distorted and driven into other areas where it writhes and dominates our lives with sub-optimal adaptations, including cataclysmic brutality. You will also see, laid plainly before you, what we need to do to end the cruelty and create cultures of compassion and connection.

C 2011 Bob Kamm (For more on my fatherhood experience, see my second book, Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, available at amazon.com and other book outlets).