Venice Beach, California and it's the last leg of the travel part of the Found tour. I spoke at Diesel Books in Brentwood last night, hosted by the fantastic Diane Leslie and spoke on an important panel with the lovely duo of Hope Edelman and Dinah Lenney. Two smart, funny, intense women and what a fantastic night. A full house, standing room only. Thank you Diesel.

And now I head home, to my life, my world, my kids and this is what is on my mind.

According to a couples therapist I know, the number one reason for martial dysfunction is due to attachment disorder. The solution? Hold one another, non-sexually and with firm, steady and reliable arms. How long? 15 minutes, a few times a week. You can look all this up for yourself in the work of Harville Hendrix who wrote Getting the Love You Want.

So I do this, with my husband and there is a noticeable calm that results. He was more relaxed and in some ways, so was I. I found that I was willing not to be held though and just to do the holding--for him. Typical giver who doesn't know how to receive. But it was more than that too. I got this niggling feeling, like an impossible to reach itch between my shoulder blades, that I was being held by the wrong person. It was like I was putting a Band-Aid on cut but under the cut was a broken bone that still needed to be set. Pretty soon this feeling grew in me and became more than a feeling, it was a full body knowing, as if a halogen spot had been turned on to highlight what I needed and wanted most.

So I called her.

"Can you hold me?"

Next thing I'm on a plane and yes, my birth mother held me.

Try to see this. Two women, five foot ten each, more than a hundred and fifty pounds each too. Strangers. There we are, on her sofa, hip to hip (my left to her right, meaning I face the sofa cushions, she faces forward) and let go. In a moment, my ear against her heart and her arms around me and there you have it.

It took forty seven years but my mother finally got to hold her child and I got to be in her arms and it was good. I felt a powerful shift in the right hemisphere of my brain, an unwinding within that back quadrant, and then there was a rush of energy down my spine. An hour later, when I sat up, I was dizzy but I was different. It was as if a part of me, long asleep, had been awakened.

Yes, it was weird to be a grown woman in the arms of another grown woman but then, it was not weird at all. Yes, it was--at first--awkward because we weren't sure how to navigate the logistics of the holding but then, sitting hip to hip and allowing myself to fall into her embrace, it was not awkward at all. Yes, it was strange to have my ear against my mother's chest and to hear the far away beat of her gentle heart, but then it wasn't strange at all. I knew that sound. I had entered this life listening to her heart beat. It was the first sound my brain had ever registered, I'm sure and it was like coming home.

But let's really think about this. I mean really think from a practical point of view. Let's use some common sense.

What is strange, awkward and even weird is that we live at a time in human history where a child isn't held by her mother, where a woman is forced, coerced, bullied and/or reasoned into parting with her child and where a culture sanctions such separations of human flesh as moral, calls the practice "adoption" and then banks millions per year on this baby trade industry.

What is weird, awkward and strange is that we are not more outraged and that a woman, like myself, must find her way to healing via through a couples counselor who is trying to save my third--yes--third marriage.

What is weird is that all of us, or nearly all of us, suffer from this attachment disorder. Adoption seems to just turn up the volume of the problem. And yet we have no idea. We have no idea.

Holding my husband and being held by him is a nice idea but it is not, to my mind, the solution to society's issue of attachment dysfunction. Causes lead to effects and causes usually go far deeper than the issue at hand, ie: a marriage on the skids. The likely cause of attachment disorder in America and around the so called developed world comes from the fact that we don't hold on to our own babies, when they are born, especially if they are born in a hospital but rather allow them to be swept off to the hospital nursery. When we do get them home, we get about six weeks to bond (a fraction of the time it took to gestate) and whoosh, they are off to daycare and/or into the arms of a nanny or even worse, they have been adopted away from us.

I was one of the women who, against my own instincts, let a child of mine be swept from my arms and into ICU. I allowed it. I did. And I must face the fact of what that has done to him and to me. I must face the fact that I am a woman, who was not held by her own mother, who became a mother who allowed her child to be taken away and then, when I was with him for those first few years, was confused, worried, anxious and largely ineffective in the act of basic bonding. Yes, my kids are bonded to me but there are issues. They struggle and so do I. I have no doubt, they will struggle in relationships of their own, when they grow up. I am pretty sure attachment disorder is part of their inheritance. Yes. I have cried a million tears over my own mistakes. But crying isn't going to solve the problem. Yes, my tears will fill the banks of the dried up riverbed of my heart and allow more flow but action is required. I must take action--if only to write these words and to keep talking about what I believe--to bring about change to this core problem.

I believe, in my heart of hearts that we, as women, must address this root level problem in order to truly bring peace to ourselves, our children, our families, our marriages, our homes, our communities, our work and our world.

These are my conclusions. This is what I think and cry and wonder about as I sit in my hotel room at Venice Beach and look out at sea--a dark steel color today with powerful waves that roll to the shore and the curl away. I'm not going to walk down there, along the beautiful shore and do you know why? It's not safe. A motorcade of cop cars parades down the street just below my balcony and according to a young kid who brought me a salad, there was such violence in this area that a sharp shooter stood on top of this very hotel and shot a sniper who was down on the boardwalk shooting other people.

Why are we like this? Why are we so violent and angry and afraid? Why are we killing each other?

Is it this attachment disorder?

We are a people who haven't been held. We are a people--so smart--who are so foolish and so scared.