Chasing Secure Attachment for My Son

And how working through my own insecure attachment will help.

Oct 04, 2023

My son’s absolute favourite fucking thing on earth is swimming lessons. He absolutely fucking froths it. He doesn't swim much at exactly 13.5 months old, but he does spend the entire lesson smashing his arms into the water wherever he sees the opportunity.

We’re lucky enough to have a fantastic au pair who loves our son to death and is happy to take him to swimming lessons. I’m grateful he doesn’t have to miss out because my partner has returned to work.

My partner and I needed to go to the bank the other day, so we decided to meet at swimming lessons. The au pair would take him to swimming lessons while we went there.

I met them in the car park. My son had been asleep in the car. When he saw me, he reached out to me as if to say, “I want you to carry me, Dad”, which I fucking love. As we were walking to the front of the building, I went to hand him back to the au pair so she could take him in and we could get to the bank, and he lost it.

I thought, okay, we will take him in, and once he gets in the pool, he’ll be fine; he fucking loves the pool. We sat by the pool when we got in there, and he was a little more reserved than usual. Possibly because he’d not long woken up. I didn’t think much of it.

Once the au pair was ready to hop in, she grabbed him, and they hopped in. He started doing his thing, smashing his arms around, laughing and smiling. He’s recently discovered the ability to wave. He fucking loves it. Every single car that drives past, he waves. As we got up, we waved goodbye to him, and he excitedly waved back.

But as we got further away, the excitement turned to a look of concern. But he loves swimming, he loves the au pair, and I told myself that 30 seconds after we walked out, he would forget about it and return to having the time of his life.

On the way out, I told my partner how much I struggled with things like that. I spoke about how I could see the concern in his eyes and how it was so difficult to explain that we were going to the bank and would see him again very soon. I hated the idea that he seemed worried we were deserting him.

Most parents want to give their kids the things they didn’t have but desired the most. It’s why my parents worked their fucking arses off to provide us with our own bedrooms and clothes, as they grew up sharing bedrooms and wearing hand-me-down clothes.

It’s also why, as a Dad, the thing I want to provide my son with the most is secure attachment. The comfort of knowing that I will always be there for him when he needs me.

When I got home that afternoon, I discovered it was his worst swimming lesson yet. He was upset the entire time. I know there could be a whole bunch of reasons why, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea that it was because we left him there, and I feel horrible about it.

I wrestle with the idea that sometimes, in that situation, I would have been better off not seeing him at the pool at all. Maybe it would have been better for him if I had just waited in the car park for my partner to hop in the car and let the au pair take him in from the start, but I hate that idea.

I usually exercise after work. When I get home in the afternoon, I often try to sneak a shower before he realises I am home because I know once he sees me, I have no chance of having a shower for a couple of hours until my partner finishes work, at which point I’ll dump him on her as soon as she finished work so I can have a shower because I’ve been marinating in my own stink for the last two hours.

I get internal conflict about it. I hate feeling like I should be sneaky and not let him know that I’m nearby, but there’s a part of me that sometimes it’s for his own benefit that he doesn’t know.

The point of all this is that it triggered me, and I haven’t been able to shake it since.

I experienced insecure attachment as a child. Not because my parents did anything wrong but because they weren’t as fortunate as we are today to have access to the research we do.

My mum, a midwife of 45 years, openly talks about how she returned to work when each of us three kids was nine months old because kids get clingy at that age, and it was common back then for mothers to return to work to teach kids to be independent and not so reliant on their parents. It’s a logic that these days is difficult to comprehend, but they were different times. We now know this as “leap six”.

In February 1994, I was five years old and gearing up to start my second year at “big school”. We moved house late the previous year so that I would start year one at a brand new school.

Mum came with me on my first day. In fact, all the parents came in for an hour or so. I still remember it clearly as day. I was happily mingling and playing with the other kids. Then, Mum came up to me to tell me she was leaving, and instantly, I felt sick in my stomach, like the world would end. I clung to her and begged her not to leave. But she had to. She was a mother of three, working shift work as a midwife and running a household. She had shit to do.

I lay on the classroom floor and cried for the next two hours. I did the same thing every day for the next fortnight. I don’t know why. It hadn’t happened at my old school. Maybe that was because I’d been at both preschool and my first year of primary school at the same place, with the same kids. All I know is at this new school, with these new kids, and new teacher, I was fucking petrified without mum.

I love rugby league. I always have. Around April of that same year, I registered for my first season. I was fucking pumped. I couldn’t wait to be allowed to play finally. When I got to my first training session, fear paralysed me. All the other kids were running around playing with each other, and I couldn’t leave my mum’s side.

No matter how much she encouraged me, I physically couldn’t do it, and I told her I wanted to go home. It was just too scary. When we got in the car to go home, I started crying because I wanted to play, but for some reason, I just couldn’t. I remember mum telling me that if I didn’t go back today, I wouldn’t play all year. I had to make that decision then and there. I was too scared and decided I wouldn’t be going back.

I’m not picking on my parents here; it was the mid-90s. One was a shift-working midwife, and the other was a welder with a second job. They weren’t child psychologists, and they certainly weren’t fortunate enough to have access to all the information we do these days. Hindsight is wonderful, and it’s easy to sit here now and say there were enough white flags to consider seeking behavioural help. And as much as it should shock absolutely no one that I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, again, that was a different time.

As a kid, Mum would always say that I’d be the first child to ever die of a stomach ulcer because of how much of a stressed head I was, but it was assumed that it was just who I was. Some people worry more than others.

Eventually, I got over the fear of new people and places just enough to get by, but it has been something that has lingered in the background all of my life.

I still struggle with it today, but it’s something I need to work on for the benefit of both myself and my family. How can I demonstrate secure attachment to my son if I don’t know what it looks like for myself?

My son has discovered his ability to walk up and down stairs. It’s fucking terrifying, and living in a double-storey house, I’ve never been more conscious of making sure the fucking baby gate is closed. I can’t help but admire his attitude, though. The other day, we spent an hour walking up and back down the big flight of stairs in our house. It’s all he wanted to do.

As a parent, I don’t want to tell him not to walk up and down the stairs. I don’t want to tell him that he can’t do anything, and as painfully monotonous as it was, slowly walking up and down stairs on my old runners’ knees was what he was doing, at its core, was practising something difficult.

Doing hard things is integral to positive mental health. It gives us a sense of achievement and builds self-esteem. So when I see him willingly challenging himself, I have to encourage it, even if it frightens the shit out of me. And if I do ever accidentally leave that baby gate unlocked, at least I know that he’s been practising.

Our au pair inspired me, too. She is an 18-year-old from Belgium, living with a family who were strangers only six weeks ago in a country that speaks her second language. Yet she has this fearless approach to putting herself out there and making friends. She wants a second job, not for the money, but because she wants to meet people and experience different things.

Sometimes, I wish I could go back and start again with all of the things I’ve learned in my back pocket, but I know that is nothing more than a waste of energy.

Sometimes, I think it’s a waste of time and energy to reflect on these things that have happened in my life because maybe they no longer serve me. But I think deep down; I understand that for me to grow truly and move forward, I will sometimes need to go back and unpack a few things. It’s like walking with a rope around your waist tied to a weight. If I stop for a moment, look back at what is weighing me down, and free myself from that weight, I’ll make far more progress for having dedicated that little bit of time to ridding myself of it.

As I touched on last week, at the moment, I am lacking a bit of community in my life. And it’s not because I have no community to participate in. It’s that same fear and paralysis I feel in new environments preventing me from taking that leap.

I know I can do it because I have done it in the past and had great success. Showing up to things like

Running for Resilience

exposed me to some fantastic people I have become good friends with, and without them, I wouldn’t be writing these blogs.

Through work colleagues, I have found community in every city or town I have lived in over the last 15 years. I never struggled to make friends at school. I’ve got friends who I have made through playing sports, too. But it’s as though there’s a mental block in my head that tells me there has to be a parallel purpose to any community I join. Almost like when I’m forced into a situation through work or sport, I have no issue finding community, yet I can’t comprehend the concept of joining a community simply for community.

I feel like that same five-year-old boy, terrified of his mum leaving him at school, is the same person who couldn’t go out in public without drinking and taking drugs. It took all that self-doubt away. I felt like I could be myself comfortably.

I think that incrementally, that self-doubt and lack of self-esteem grew and grew. And maybe that’s what it does when it goes unidentified and unaddressed. Maybe it doesn’t lay stagnant. Maybe it grows and grows until it’s too much to bear, and you’re forced to do something about it.

I still struggle every day. I’ve been working in my industry for almost 16 years. I know it inside and out. I have moved up several levels over the last six years. Yet I have days where I genuinely believe I have no fucking clue what I am doing.

I love being a Dad more than anything. Yet, I still have times when I believe I can’t do it. I think I’m not good enough, and I’m going to let my son down.

Maybe it takes something worth living to force you into action. I don’t want my son to grow up doubting himself like I did. I don’t want him to think that he can’t do what others can do because he’s not as good as them. But how do I teach him that when I don’t believe that about myself?

I’m working hard with my psychologist to deal with it all so I can lead by example, but I worry that maybe my reluctance to do this work in the past could have a detrimental impact on those around me.

It’s hard to find that balance between not having unrealistic expectations of myself and understanding that perfect is impossible but also trying to keep chipping away and doing what I can to improve daily.

Anyway, it felt good to get that off my chest.

Thanks as always for reading.

Cheers Wankers.

What are your thoughts on the value of reflection and using it to free yourself from things that could be holding you back?

Chasing Secure Attachment for My Son

And how working through my own insecure attachment will help.

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