The Lost Art of Attachment Theory
How understanding my infant years is helping me heal.
When a Korean War refugee’s sperm and small-town white girl’s eggs intermix, you get a fetus whose genes aren’t sure what kind of human being to turn into. The unlikely pair married in 1967, while cities burned from the rage and exasperation of race riots, conceived me in 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and I was born in 1969, the year Nixon came into office and unscrupulously bombed Cambodia.
My parents married two months after the Supreme court issued the Loving vs. Virginia decision, disallowing the ban on inter-racial marriages in the state of Virginia and the remaining 15 other states where whites and people of color could not legally marry. Only 3% of marriages in the U.S. in 1967 were interracial.
My parents were from two ends of the world that could not have been more different. My dad was a Korean War refugee, and my mom, an Irish-Scots girl from a small working class town outside of Boston.
When my mom gave birth to me, she was surrounded by her family and friends in her hometown in Massachusetts. Sadly, my dad, an airline pilot, got based in Chicago a couple months after I was born. He, my mom, and newborn me had to uproot and move to an…
