Why One Person Isn’t Enough: Embracing Multiple Primary Attachments
This summer I had an awakening about my primary attachment bonds.
In the circles I walk in, I hear a lot about the importance of primary attachment partners (this comes from Stan Tatkin’s secure attachment work), and the importance of community.
But as a single mom with no partner, I just couldn’t figure out how this idea of a primary attachment partner fit into the puzzle of my life and relationships. I found myself asking these two questions:
If I don’t have a partner, does that mean that my family is not whole?
And if my community doesn’t feel strong, am I failing my kids somehow?
I always thought, “ehhh it’d be nice to have more community, but to be honest, I just don’t have the time or energy to commit to community outside of single parenting my two girls.”
But this summer I felt it.
I connected with a few friends that rekindled love and joy and friendship into my spirit and reminded me that I can have chosen family.
Endless Aunties and Uncles for my kids.
The awakening that I’m not my kid’s everything, because no one can be anyone’s everything.
This felt vital this summer. Not like a wish for community but like a real living truth that I need it in my life.
Being a single mom means that I am my kid’s primary attachment person. This means three important things to me:
I need to be well nourished, regulated and overall a happy person because I am it for them. What do I mean by “it”? I mean I am the person that helps them regulate their nervous system and if I’m dis-regulated, they inevitably will be too. I am their daily role model and their life role model. I feel pretty proud of the overall path my life has taken since they were born, but sometimes what overwhelms me is the day-to-day grind and them witnessing me totally wiped out physically, mentally and emotionally by the end of the day.
In order for me to the the primary attachment person for them, I also need primary attachment people. Otherwise I will run out of resources. These I’ve come to realize are my friends, my man, my therapist and my cat. Yes, my cat. So it’s not a primary attachment person, it’s primary attachment people. And to be honest, after going through a divorce, I don’t know that I ever want to have one person be my primary attachment person ever again, because relationships can break, dissolve and change and I’m no longer willing to put all my eggs in one basket for this reason.
I cannot be, and am not their everything. No one is perfect. No one is perfect for you, or me, or my kids. We need multiple people to fill our needs, but we so often look to one person to fulfill our everything and I think I’ve stopped believing this is true.
I feel this about relationships. Partnerships. Friendships. Medical providers. Family members. One person was never meant to be enough. And you know what, that’s actually taken a lot of pressure off for me.
So this summer I decided to grow my family (no, I’m not planning anymore kids right now!), I mean, I decided that all of my closest friends are now aunties and uncles. That I want them all to have relationships with my kids (even without me present so they now have regular chats with each other) and that I’m accepting relying on those people to help me and my kids.
Here’s the part I really struggled with though, I generally feel I can’t reciprocate - if you have a relationship with my kids, I can’t also have a relationship with your kids, because I just don’t have the capacity for that right now. I’ll say that as a single mom, I’ve started to just accept that often I can’t reciprocate. And I’m starting to be ok with that. I think one day, I’ll be able to have you over, cook food for you and help you with your kids, but today is not that day.
I think this entire realization partly came because my kids are just old enough and therefore I feel I can finally invest in community. I’m not saying that’s the best order to do it, in fact it makes a lot more sense to have community before having kids, but I had kids before most of my friends and lost a lot of community when they were born. And then for me it literally felt impossible to build community for the first few years because I was just so run down, it was actually just difficult to socialize or invest in anything except the daily running of my family.
So my take away from all this is that while community is amazing and while primary attachment partner’s sometimes feel like our whole world,
it takes precious resources to create community that some of us struggle to have.
it takes a willingness to be helped
and it takes a lot of people (or even a village) to support a family.