All these mothers are breast-feeding.
None of them works outside the home.
Most of the babies were delivered on the
premises — the Elizabeth Seton
Childbearing Center in New York — by a
midwife. When the little ones are in
transit, they nestle in slings or other
close-to-mom’s-heart contraptions.

“If you were a bottle-feeder or a href="/mwt/feature/1999/10/26/leach/inde
x.html">spanker you probably
wouldn’t be interested in this,”
comments Beth, the cherubic 29-year-old
mother of 16-month-old Santiago, summing
up this representative sample of
millennial moms.

These are attachment parents. No
bottle-feeders in these parts. These
women have discarded most of the
parenting strategies that dictated their
own upbringing, and turned instead
toward those that are considered
“instinctive” by their proponents. Are
these moms pioneers, bravely defending
the designs of nature against the
onslaught of science? Or are they people
unduly obsessed with their kids? Are
they fighting for the mental and
physical health of a new generation? Or
are they just riding a guilt-fueled
parenting trend?

A number of mothers say they didn’t know
there was a name for what they were
doing until after they started doing it.
They say that what is currently known as
“attachment parenting” — staying home
with the kids, sharing a bed, long-term
breast-feeding — is what felt natural
to them. But now that their private
choices have become fodder for public
debate, they’re taking flak from all
manner of authorities — federally
anointed and self-appointed.

Suddenly, it seems, everyone has
something to say about href="/mwt/feature/1999/09/30/family_bed
_rant/index.html">bed-sharing and
breast-feeding — much of it dismissive
or even hostile. Attachment parents,
though, have their own expert troops at
the ready. Not to mention a claim on
“instinct,” a fairly impressive weapon
in any debate.

At the heart of the attachment parenting
philosophy are five core practices. The
“Baby Bs,” as they are called, are birth-bonding, breast-feeding, bed-sharing,
baby-wearing (in a sling or a harness
like a Baby Bjorn) and “Belief in the
signal value of an infant’s cry.”
Coined by Dr. William Sears, a San
Clemente, Calif., pediatrician and
father of eight, the Bs seem simple
enough, and the underlying premise both
logical and comforting. As Sears
explains to new parents: “You want to
feel connected to your baby. My goal for
you folks is to help you become an
expert in your baby.”

And these days, anywhere an
attachment-minded mom looks, a
validating force stands ready to assist
her. There are zillions of attachment parenting Web
pages,
associations and support groups. There
are books by Sears and by href="/mwt/feature/1999/06/09/expert/index.html">Katie Allison Granju that
cover all five of the Baby Bs, each of
which has its own attendant court of
experts.

There are midwives and href="/mwt/feature/1999/12/07/doula/index.html">labor support doulas (who
offer emotional encouragement and
comfort during delivery) for the birth
part; lactation consultants for the
breast-feeding part. There are the
trainers who train such people. There
are support groups (La Leche League and
Attachment Parenting International are
big ones) and “Natural Attachment
Parenting Products,” which include href="/mwt/feature/1999/11/22/cloth/index.html">organic hemp diapers in
addition to the assortment of slings and
pouches for the baby-wearing part.

Best of all there is Sears himself,
author of “The Baby Book” and two dozen
other volumes that espouse intuitive,
contact-driven child-rearing. “If you
and your partner and your baby were on
an island and had nothing to follow but
your basic instinct, attachment
parenting is what you would do,” he
explains.

Sears sounds, at least on the telephone,
disarmingly like Mr. Rogers: a kindly,
vaguely creepy, almost spiritual figure.
Sears says that women can get the basics
of attachment parenting from, say, one
class (never mind that he’s sold around
a million books on the topic to date).
His next book, he says, will be titled
“Kids Who Turn Out Well: What Their
Parents Did.” Which implies, of course,
that if you don’t do what Sears suggests
you do, your kids may not turn out well
at all.

Sears, in fact, practically guarantees
results. Attachment kids, he says, will
grow up having advanced from the Baby Bs
to the “Four Cs:” confidence,
competence, caring and communication.

“These kids,” he intones, “will never
shoot up a school.”

An attractive prospect, no doubt, to any
parent of a school-age child in the age
of Columbine. If said parent happens to
be a working mother, though, her
prospects become less rosy. In fact, she
might find herself up against a wall of
sanctimonious attachment types who don’t
support her choices, since, according to
Sears himself, you have to be with your
baby most of the time to get an
authentic attachment experience
happening.

Here is Sears, for instance, on the
dilemma of the working attachment mom:

I say, “Forget the day you’re going back
to work” so they [don't] keep themselves
from getting too close to the baby for
fear it will be tough to leave. They
come back for the one-month checkup,
things are going great, they’re real
connected, baby’s in a sling, nursing on
cue, there’s a real harmony.

So mom says, “I’ve got to go back to
work in about a month, Dr. Bill, would
you mind writing me a little medical
note so I can extend my leave a few
weeks?” So I say, “Baby’s allergic to
formula” — which is true,
microscopically every baby’s allergic to
formula. I give them a medical reason to
extend maternity leave. They come back
in another month, they say, “I’m having
trouble finding a caregiver.” They come
back by the third month and say, “You
know what! I’ve decided to change jobs.
I’ve started a home business.”

Riiiight. When approached with the
question of what they would do
should they need to return to work
outside the home, many of the attachment
moms I spoke with took a more pragmatic
approach. “I’d pump,” says Jennifer,
mother of 17-month-old Carlyle and
6-week-old Maxwell. “People do it.”

Others, though, gave responses that
exemplified the philosophical gulf
forming between attachment moms and the
other kind. How self-absorbed and cold
appears the mother who can leave her
6-week-old baby in the hands of
strangers! How cruel it seems to let an
infant wail in a room alone, when you,
the mother, are right there, listening
in agony! How unnecessary the pacifier!
How unnatural the crib!

One begins to wonder how a working
mother could ever forgive herself, or
even be friends with these other
mothers. Until, of course, you consider
how incredibly Peter Pan the idea is
that everyone can afford to hunker down
at home with their kids 24/7. How smug
indeed seems the middle-class full-time
mom, arms folded over her life-giving
breast, eschewing the workplace for the
greater good of her brood. How easy it
is to point to the expense of day care
and the desirability of full-time
mothering from the high perch of
financial and conjugal stability.

Or maybe the gap is, once again,
generational. “A decade ago the big goal
of women was to be in the workforce, and
women were waiting until they were in
their 30s [to have families],” is how
one 25-year-old mom explained the
attachment craze. “Now a lot of people
are starting their families at an
earlier age because we’ve seen what
happened to those women.” Ouch.

Speaking of easy targets, the pithy
jargon and inevitable crunchiness of the
natural birth movement also lend
themselves quite nicely to teasing,
ridicule and general irreverence (“Draw
your door to birth!” urges one book.)
Attachment parents take plenty of heat,
and not just from the media. Many have
been challenged every step of the way by
their parents, faithful adherents to
laws laid down by an earlier crop of
experts.

Outsider angst is commonplace, even in
cities, where slings are already
ubiquitous. “I get it all the time,” one
young mother recalls. “People in my
family started right at the beginning:
‘I can’t believe you’re having natural
childbirth. You’re crazy.’ I’m like,
‘OK, I’m about to undertake the biggest
challenge of my life and you’re giving
me shit.’”

The mainstream media, getting in on the
game, has recently spotlighted the
unorthodox — for Americans, that is –
aspects of attachment parenting. Bed-sharing was unequivocally discouraged by
the Federal Consumer Product Safety
Commission this fall, despite its
prevalence in much of the non-Western
world; Rosie O’Donnell ridiculed
attachment practices on her daytime talk
show. The mothers, though, are fighting
back.

“On national TV the woman is saying,
‘These people are all in one bed, they
don’t ever put the kid down, the kids
never learn to walk,’” fumes Jennifer.
“It makes me so angry. It’s like someone
telling you that the way you’re having
sex is wrong.

“Attachment parenting is not never
putting your child down or all sleeping
in the same bed until the kid is 12.
It’s just using your instinct, doing
what’s right for your family.”

Beth, another attachment enthusiast,
fired off a letter to Rosie “busting her
butt.” “We’re doing something well,” she
says tartly. “Look at this child! He’s
flourishing and beautiful and happy. So
how can anyone say that breast-feeding
or bed-sharing is weird?”

History also figures into the
pro-attachment mix. “My grandmother had
her first one at home,” recalls Carrie,
mother of 23-month-old Lola. “All her
kids slept in the bed with her, she
nursed them all until they were
toddlers, and when she’d get pregnant
the oldest would go sleep in the bed
with the siblings.

“Then again, her parenting philosophy
was, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child.’”

This selective harking back to The Way
Things Used to Be — or as one zealous
mom-webmaster puts it: “The way
parenting was meant to be since time
beyond beginning” — has tapped a nerve
among ’90s women. In the grips of
millennial angst and/or postfeminist
gloom, the way Grandma did it is looking
better every day.

After all, the appeal of the “supermom” has faded and
with it the illusion that corporate
America would develop an infrastructure
to support working mothers.
High-quality, subsidized day care
remains a distant dream; lengths of
maternity leave in the United States
rank pathetically low compared to other
countries of the “first” world.

What has not changed, though, is our
collective membership in, and reverence
for, the cult of expertise. There is
someone out there to advise us in all
things: how to be healthy or successful,
how to decorate or throw parties or get
promoted. Attachment parenting is no
exception. Thus the irony: A cottage
industry is now churning out the
knowledge mothers need in order to use
their own instincts.

“I’m almost embarrassed to say, I felt
like I needed to read about it to
legitimize it,” admits Jessica Porter,
mother of 9-month-old Emma and
president of the Association of Labor
Assistants and Childbirth Educators.

“What we’re doing is not mainstream,”
echoes Carrie, who refers to Sears’ “The
Baby Book” as “my bible.” “Initially
everyone we came across questioned what
we were doing. So even though we’re
going by our instinct, we want to hear
that what we’re doing is OK.” Formerly a
publicist, Carrie is now a stay-at-home
mom undergoing certification to become a
doula.

“We’re paving our own way rather than
taking Dr. Spock off the shelf and
saying, ‘This is what the book says,
this is what we have to do,’” she
offers. Ten seconds later, I ask her
about La Leche League, of which she is a
group leader, and wait while she digs
around in her bookshelf.

“Now where’s my breast-feeding book?”
she wonders.

My search was not what I would call thorough. I didn’t make inquiries before I arrived. I don’t speak a work of Greek. I came armed with his name, the dates of his birth and death and the town he was born in. I could, at least, pronounce that. I had practiced. In fact, if I said only that, people sometimes thought I was from there — an illusion that didn’t last long.

It was midafternoon before I’d made it over on the ferry, gotten a bus into town and found a place to stay. I’d parked my bag on some nice woman’s porch, and when I went back for it, she was sitting with somebody who looked like her father, or maybe her grandfather. I asked her, just for kicks, if she’d ever heard my grandfather’s name.

“Makris,” she repeated after me. “Makris.”

It sounded different when she said it, and I tried to memorize the rolling “r” she put in.

She shrugged in my direction, but didn’t look finished. People did that. If you didn’t wait around, you missed the important part that was coming, and too bad for you.

“It was my grandfather,” I said. “I’m looking for his family.”

The woman looked at the man. She spoke to him in Greek. I understood “Makris.”

He took a drink of something with ice. I heard it. That’s how quiet this town was.

He spoke, then she turned back to me.

“My father says the name is from Galanado. You should go to Galanado.”

I squinted at her.

“Galanado,” she repeated. “Is here, is up there.” She pointed up, toward the hills. I nodded and tried to repeat this word, so I would remember where I had to go.

She grinned and said it slowly: Ga-la-na-do.

She waved at me from where she stood on the porch. By the time I got back to the room I’d haggled for, I couldn’t remember what she had just said. I went to the beach.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

The next day I woke early, drank a cup of strong Greek coffee — don’t ever call it Turkish — and walked along the shuttered beachfront kiosks, stepping over animals asleep next to stairways and stilts. I’d spotted a bike rental place from the bus, and when I found it I checked out the mopeds parked outside. The gears looked crusty, like they’d been sunk and dredged up, but the ones without gears looked all right. The guy at the desk inside looked sleepy, and I felt sleepy, so I smiled. A dog trotted out from behind him. It wagged at me so I scratched its head and waited.

“Miki,” the man said.

I put out my hand, and he looked at it. Then he pointed to the dog.

“Miki,” he said again.

“Right.” I dropped my hand back to the dog’s head. “Hey, Miki,” I said.

We agreed on a price for the moped I wanted, and I signed the paper and handed over my passport for collateral. He looked at the photo, then up at me.

“It’s me,” I said.

He pronounced my whole name out loud once, like a statement rather than a question. Then he handed it back to me and waved me out of the office.

On the road, I quickly began to doubt the wisdom of my idea. I weighed the ruinous condition of the tarmac against where it might lead: The green hills were etched, irresistibly vibrant, against the blue sky, every turn flashing some combination of grove and sea and cliff. I kept going. Maybe my grandfather had taken these roads as a child, I thought. When I came to a junction I looked at my map. Then I looked at the sign. There it was: Galanado.

A half-dozen old men sat in the shade at the taverna, across from a market. They all stared when I parked the bike and got off, so I went into the market. The smell of sawdust made me want to buy bubble gum, but instead I read as best as I could from the grimy card I’d been carrying around for months. It said who I was supposed to be looking for. The woman behind the counter squinted at me, shrugged her shoulders. I tried again. She reached across and plucked it out of my hand.

“Ah!” she said, so pleased she clapped her hands together. “Kinotita d’marchio!” — which sounded nothing like what I’d said. She called to her chubby son, who climbed onto a bicycle and began pedaling away. She motioned for me to follow him. The bright, white stones gleamed like cobbled teeth as I skittered after him on foot. No one answered the door he pointed to. Waiting in a patch of light, I listened to sounds from the open windows. An old woman kept peeking down at me.

A few minutes passed before a middle-aged woman approached. I stood up and brushed off.

“Hello,” I said. “Are you the –” I looked at my card, “ki-no-ti-ta?”

She smiled. “Kinotita, yes,” she said. “Come.”

Just inside the door was a tiny office. Beyond it was a hallway, and a big open room, and a piece of a kitchen: her house. It smelled like lemons. I told her what I was looking for.

“He is the father of who?” she asked.

“The father of my mother,” I said. “He died when she was a girl.”

“Oh,” she said. “That is bad luck.”

I nodded. She continued looking at me from across the desk.

“I am wondering if any of his people may still be here,” I said. “He had some brothers, I think. Maybe they had children.”

Her eyebrows curled a bit, and she shrugged, then turned to pull a ledger book from the shelf behind her, the ringed kind I had in grade school. I gave her the name and waited.

“I don’t see,” she sighed, finally. “You are sure he was from here?”

“No,” I said. “His death certificate said he was born on Ayia Anna. That’s where I’m staying. But they said the name was from here.”

She shook her head.

“No, you must go to Ayia Arsenios,” she said.

I stared at her. “Where?”

“Ayia Arsenios. That is really Ayia Anna, not where you are on the beach.” She paused. “Go to the kinotita there.”

She explained which roads would take me there and showed me to the door.

“I hope you find,” she called after me.

I passed through someone’s olive grove a few minutes later and ate some fruit in the shade, imagining for a minute that I was a farmer’s granddaughter. I thought of the tiny Bronx tenement my mother had described to me. Determined, I got back on the bike and headed toward Ayia Arsenios. I accidentally pulled through the town before I realized I was in it, and had to turn around and roll back. By now it was midafternoon. I asked a woman passing, “Kinotita?”

She pointed. The door of the office was propped with some spare mechanical part. Enormous, slow-moving fans hung from the ceiling. A dozen men were working in there, shuffling paper. I stood at the counter, looking at the little silver bell and feeling sorry for the third time that day that I was wearing shorts. They could see that I was standing there. Finally a man came over.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, “but do you speak English?”

He rolled his eyes, then put up a hand, like a crossing guard, that I should stay. He went into another office and after a few minutes another man came out.

“Hello,” I said. “English?”

He shook his head at me, made a so-so sign with his hand. He smelled like cigarettes in that way that some working men do, not at all like the smell after a night in a bar, and not like office people who step outside and then eat a mint. It smelled good.

Slowly, I said, “I am looking for the family of my grandfather. Named Makris. He was from here.” I sighed. “I think.”

He stared at me and said something in Greek. I shrugged. He shook his head. I stood there while they consulted, loudly. Smoky man won, I suppose, since the other guy motioned for me to follow him out into the street. Then he started walking. I followed him through several winding streets before he knocked on a door, then stepped back and called up to the window, “Maria!” His glasses were steaming up. My heart was pounding.

A woman came to the door and he waved his hand under his chin for me to talk. I said what I’d said in the office, slower even. I was beginning to sweat. She grimaced, looked back at my escort. She shrugged. I realized that we were looking for someone who could tell this man what the hell I wanted. Maria was not the one. We moved on. Two stops later a woman came to the door drying her hands and smelling of bread. She called inside, then pulled a girl forward and shoved her at me.

“Hi,” I said. The girl looked about 16. She was wearing jeans.

“Hi,” she said.

“I’m looking for the family of my grandfather,” I said. “The father of my mother. I think he was from here. From this town. I want them to check this for me, check the records, if there are any.”

She nodded as I talked.

“Where you are from?” she asked when I finished.

“From New York,” I told her. “Is that your mother?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “New York City?” I nodded.

“You are alone?” she asked.

I nodded. Eyes wide, she turned to her mother and talked very fast for longer than I thought it took to say what I said, in any language. The man who’d brought me had one unruly eyebrow that dipped and curled with each expression, and as the girl spoke, his face lifted into the first semblance of a smile I’d seen so far. The girl’s mother was speechless.

“You go with him,” the girl said, pointing. “He understands what you are looking for.”

We ended up on a porch across from where I started out. My guide was humming a little tune, now that I might be family. There was a small crowd gathered by the staircase that led from the taverna to the street, watching. He pounded on the door a few times, and a guy around my age opened the door, wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. His hair was a mess. The older man briefed him and there was a lot more shrugging. The sleepy guy told me, “One minute, OK? Sit.”

“OK,” I said, and sat on the edge of a green metal chair. My guide leaned against the post. I waved away some flies. My eyelids were sweating, and my arms, every part. My hands were filthy. I tried not to cry.

The screen door squeaked and the young man came out. He had combed his hair and put on pants. He sat across from me.

“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked.

“Do you have a name?”

“My name is Nicolas,” he said.

“Nicolas.” I held out my hand, and we shook. For the fifth time that day, I told my story. “I don’t know if there is anyone to find …” I trailed off and shrugged.

“What was his name?” Nicolas asked.

“Makris,” I said.

He introduced my guide, Mario, to me. We shook hands. After they talked, Nicolas pulled out a note pad. “OK,” he said to me, “tell me what you know.”

So I gave him what I had — two dates and a full name — and he transferred that data into legible Greek. The men from the taverna had crossed the street and gathered around us. Nicolas was some kind of star in that town.

“I go to the university in Athens,” he explained to me. “I’m just home for this weekend.”

“It’s my lucky day,” I said.

Mario was talking to the men gathered, and they were talking to each other. It was getting loud. One or two men climbed up on the porch and peered over Nicolas’ shoulder. “Makris,” I heard. “Makris.”

“This man says this name is from Galanado,” Nicolas said to me.

I shook my head. “I’ve been to the kinotita there. She said it is not from there, and I should come here.”

He nodded, impressed, and repeated it back. Now there were a half-dozen old men standing around. Mario detached himself and went up the street.

“He goes to get the books,” Nicolas said.

I sat back in the chair and watched the talking. The men had formed a semicircle and were arguing and frowning and shrugging, their hands flurrying the air. Someone pointed in the direction I had come from; then another indicated some other, unknown place. Their words rose and fell in time to their hands, or the other way around. One was biting on a pipe. Another wore a taxi driver’s plaid cap, backwards. He smelled like tobacco, and his hands were knotted and wide as boards. He winked at me.

Mario returned and parked himself in the other chair. Pages were turned, his brown fingers marking columns of faded names. The men peered over his shoulder, calling out and smiling, clapping each other on the back when their names turned up. This was a soldier’s log. After half an hour, they got to the end of the book. Then they tried another book. Our shadows shifted. There was no Makris in any records there.

“There were probably many towns with this name, Ayia Anna,” Nicolas told me, sitting up and stretching, “before the war. Many of them are named something else now, probably.” He looked sorry when he said it. I nodded without saying anything. He wrote for me, in careful university English, the name of the right minister, the right department, in Athens. One of the old men said something in his ear. Nicolas looked up at me.

“He says you should come back to Ayia Arsenios,” Nicolas said.

“Where?” I said.

He smiled. He had perfect teeth.

“Here,” he said, gently.

“Of course.” I felt my face flush, and I laughed. “I’ll remember. Efcharisto. Thank you.”

I shook hands with Mario, who smiled shyly, and then with each of the old men there. They stood, all of them, and waited to shake my hand. In theirs, my hand looked small and pale as a child’s, but I didn’t feel lost at all.