How can I put this? My skin and body believes in touch and that it is love. Thinking about touch is a different thorny business - altogether complicated and important, fraught, troubled, shaded, disappointing, impossible, banal even. I have absorbed this message through my parents' touch, it is perhaps the message that they most clearly conveyed and which remains most uncomplicated to me.
This lesson of the skin is abiding, it is extra to words and to sounds and to sight.
This is equally true for the father or, for the matter of that, for anyone else. The physical holding of the child is a form of loving, it is, in fact, perhaps the only way in which a mother can show the infant her love for it. The skin of this book makes its message plain, and it was clear to my parents: Please, touch your children, gently, with care, and often, and with love. How deeply my parents connected with some of its author's outlandish and judgmental theories and half-baked psychoanalysis I cannot say, but I gather not much. The skin is the sensory organ that matters most to human development, psychological, emotional, spiritual, intellectual. Hold them, cuddle them, bathe them, love them. Infants need mothers and fathers too - contact, skin to skin. So, touch your babies and your children, gently and often, especially when they are tiny but also as they grow. Skin-to-skin touch is essential for human thriving. The overriding theme of the book is simple and it is captured by the cover. I can see its cover: the sketch of a young mother nursing a child and the red title Touching still there, not yet faded as it has from the copy I now have. The book Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin was one such talisman. Perhaps it was only so for me, a child who loved books and who was eager to discover in them what the grownups knew.
We lived distant from the urban centers and the circulations of big ideas in our rural 1970's southern world, but we were near enough that occasionally a book from that world would not only come into our home but take on a talismanic value. I grew up in a house where there were many books.
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