Some of my listeners were frankly puzzled. But others were deeply and genuinely interested. My decision to write a book about the natural history of motherhood dated from this conference. By the way, I never did find anyone that seemed suited to psychoanalyze my research choices, and in the end had to settle with trying to answer the question for myself. The main outlines of my Darwinian self-analysis are all there, between the lines, in Mother Nature.
Maternal responses fall along a continuum that ranges from total commitment to absence of caring.
Young maternal age, for example, is one of the most reliable predictors of whether a human mother is likely to abandon her baby. The same teenager who abandons her first infant may later, when older, become the most devoted mother you will ever meet. I had two reasons for paying so much attention to the noninvesting far end of this continuum. So many of our preconceptions about maternal instincts come from focusing only on the cases that conform to them, yet we can learn a lot about the processes underlying maternal commitment by examining cases where maternal commitment is dicey, or fails to develop altogether. Secondly, if I was going to argue that mother love is both biologically based and contingent upon a woman's circumstances, I couldn't just write those words, I had to thoroughly document my case.