So apparently I’m on a blogging break. I didn’t plan it this way. But at some point in the last — what’s it been, two months? — just the thought of the internet made me want to break out in fucking hives. I’ve got reasons, oh my have I got reasons, but discussing them has the same hive problem, in that goddammit I am sick of the internet, being on the internet, talking about the internet, maintaining my space on the internet, etc. I just kind of looked around my life at the variety of things that require me to work to keep them, when they are entirely voluntary, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing with the precious, precious time I have in my life. I clean out my email and then I come here and clean out my spam and approve comments and then I clean out my blog email and then I catch up on my reader and then I read the news and I keep tabs on the things I am supposed to be angry about, and at the end, instead of feeling satisfaction at having gotten things done, I look at my logged off computer and think, jesus god, I have just spent the last few hours interacting with what might as well have been unicorns. The only evidence I have that I have done anything, interacted in the real world in any conceivable way that elicits results, is how much my neck is cricked.
Probably I am a bit overworked right now.
So I am just crocheting and writing non-blog things and going to my dance class and rearranging my furniture and making mix CDs and sitting on my couch when it is sunny and reading books and drinking coffee, and that has been all right. I’m going to keep doing that until it’s not all right anymore, and perhaps by then the need for unicorns will be back.
I just got a call from an old friend of mine. Zie just got out of an abusive relationship. I mean, just got out, like two weeks ago. Zie’s currently safe, but in that space some of you might remember or relate to: just sort of wandering around hir house in a daze, all twisted up and confused and not sure what to do next. Zie knows what happened to hir is best described as abuse, but is still using air quotes when zie refers to hir own abuse — zie’s just having trouble wrapping hir head around what’s been happening these last few years, and what the hell zie ought to do now.
I’m going to buy hir a fuckton of books, some specifically about abuse, and some just plain books — part of hir abuse centered around not being allowed to do anything, and not being allowed to think, and I want to give hir a whole big box of, “Here! You are allowed to use your brain again!”
Zie’s got spotty internet access at the moment, so I was also going to send hir some printouts of some of my favorite posts about abuse. I wanted to hear it from you lot: what are some of your favorites? I’m not talking about my posts necessarily (though feel free to let me know if one of them specifically resonated with you), but any post in the blogosphere that made you sit up and go, “Hey now.” Whether it made you think about your abusive relationship while you were in it, helped you put together the pieces after you left, or helped you look at a friend or family member and realize you understood what was happening better now — just any post about abuse that, you know, made you feel like that person just crawled into your head and described what was going on in a way you hadn’t been able to see.
I want to show my friend that there is a whole world of people emerging from the same cocoon zie is. Zie’s been cut off for such a long time, and zie is very hesitant to speak to a shelter (you know, the usual: it’s not that bad, zie doesn’t want to ask for help, etc. I did this one, too, and I wish I hadn’t, but that’s how it goes) — I hope hearing some words from others who have gone through it will give hir a thrill of recognition. And I also hope hearing some words from others who have gone through it and are now living their own lives and writing very powerfully and vocally might give hir some hope for where zie will be someday.
I’m sure a lot of you remember what it was like to lose your voices, and have to work very hard to find them again. I found the blogosphere after I had regained my voice, but for a long time, I couldn’t write at all. I dug up old journal entries, and snatches of stories I had written over the years, and desperate things scribbled into the margins of school notes, and I cut them up and pasted them into new sentences, because I needed so badly to speak but had forgotten how. I suspect the blogosphere fulfills that function for some people, giving voice to words that are stopped up in the throat. I’m hoping to hand hir a big pile of these posts and say, “Here, check it, every abuser is wearing the same face, and there every survivor is, too. You aren’t the exception that will never get better, that nobody can ever understand. You’re not terminally unique, and you will get your life back.”
One thing zie asked me very pointedly: “How do I make sure I don’t do this again? I’m terrified of talking to anybody ever again.” My advice to hir was to be selfish, that nobody will ever treat hir better than zie treats hirself, that putting hirself before others is how zie shows to the world that zie is not somebody who exists to meet other people’s needs and zie will not tolerate being used that way. Zie found that very hard to chew on — zie is, like I’m sure many of you are, somebody who (as my mother puts it) asks hir guests if their feet are cold and beats hirself up if zie didn’t offer them socks. I found being selfish very liberating, but I am not hir, and maybe this advice doesn’t do it. So, if you have some advice about how you changed your life to try to keep abuse out, leave them in the comments. I’ll print out this post and send it to hir, too.
Thanks, everybody.
I’ve made the posts about my job private. They’re not coming back. Sorry.
Nothing intimidate-y or bad has happened. I’m not getting harassed by antis or anything. Everything’s cool.
What happened was, the other day, another news story came out about the unemployment rate.
I realized three things always run through my mind when I read stories like this:
- I am so, so lucky to have a job I love, doing things I believe in
- I would be so, so fucked if I didn’t have this job and had to start job-hunting in this economy
- TERROR those posts I wrote
This just isn’t worth the risk to me right now. Which is disappointing. I firmly believe in saying things out loud, that putting words and stories and information out there is a crucial tool of change. I don’t like that I can’t do that in this instance. But my firm, firm beliefs don’t feed me during a recession, and honestly, the importance of doing this work far outweighs, for me, the importance of talking about this work. If I have to choose between the two, I’m going to choose the work over the words. I don’t know if that’s a choice I have to make, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.
I know those posts meant a lot to a lot of people. That was part of the problem. Every time I put one up, it rocketed across the Internet, causing me no end of panicky chest pains. The circles my posts are moving through are relatively small, when compared to the whole Internet. But I know from experience on this blog that the weirdest, smallest thing can EXPLODE and then the New York Times is calling me and I am paranoid in my house all weekend.
I don’t want to deal with that panic, and I don’t want to deal with that risk. So, no more posts about this. Sorry.
I’m disallowing comments on this post. I know a lot of you are probably disappointed and want to tell me so. I don’t really care, and I don’t really want to hear it. It’s a shitty call, but mine to make, and I’m not entertaining advice or comments.
No-Name Bloggers is a series that features posts from individuals who do not have public blogs of their own. No-Name Bloggers are encouraged to write about one of four themes: feminism, anti-racism, recovery, or personal introspection.
No-Name Blog Posts must fall within Harriet J’s usual guidelines for appropriate discourse on the site: no cross-talk, no value judgments, and speaking from personal experience (instead of generalized beliefs) is highly encouraged. Fugitivus is normally not a Feminism 101 space; however, to encourage a wide range of No-Name Bloggers, that requirement is not enforced for No-Name Blog Posts.
Harriet J may or may not agree with the content of No-Name Blog Posts; submission here only indicates that they fall within what Harriet considers a respectful framework of discussion. Though No-Name Blog Posts are potentially Feminism 101 areas, that does not mean abusive or offensive submissions or comments will be printed. No-Name Bloggers or commenters who do not understand the difference may be temporarily or permanently banned if and until they do.
No-Name Bloggers is not accepting unsolicited submissions, because Harriet is TERRIBLE at reading and responding to emails.
EXTRA SPECIAL NOTE: Don’t fuck about on this one. Anybody who reads this and all they can think to do is leave a comment along the lines of, “Well, I’m adopted and happy!” or “Well, I adopted kids, and it was totally ethical, of this I am 100% sure!” or “Well, I placed kids for adoption and I skip everywhere I walk!” you are a Frankenstein creature who is missing a heart and a good-sized chunk of your fucking brain.
Remember: if this isn’t about you, it’s not about you. Desperate attempts to logistically warp another person’s pain until it no longer poses a threat to your happiness will be met with a permanent instaban.
No-Name Blogger Cindy D.
It’s appropriate that your segment is called No-Name Bloggers. Because I think the worst part, out of all the parts ranging from mundanely bad to nightmare, the crowning indignity on top of a heap of indignities so tall they dwarf me, is that what happened to me, what I am after it happened to me — it doesn’t have a name. Names are what we give to things that are real, you see. A name means “we recognize that this happens, that it is a valid experience.”
That there is no name means that each time I want to talk, or am asked to talk, to describe, I have to tell the whole story. I cannot give a simple sentence, or even a single short paragraph, because there is no word, no matter how repulsive a word, that sums up either where I have been, or what I will be now, until the day I tell the whole story for the last time, to my children. It means I stay silent a lot, because the alternative is to walk myself through the whole lousy chain of events.
“Do you have children?” Simple, everyday question, but there is no easy answer. I gave birth to three. I nursed three, sang to three, dressed and hugged and delighted in three. But my experience stops just short of school, though the first of the three has gone on without me to become a teenager, with his sister and brother close behind. They were five and three and one; I was still nursing the youngest to sleep at night. They had never been in daycare except the oldest, who went for six months; the younger two had never been away from me for longer than a double shift. I worked nights, so I would be there when they went to bed and when they woke up, and took a double shift on weekends to get the bulk of my work hours out of the way while their father, aunts, and grandparents were on hand.
(There is a word that sums up all of this: I say “mother”, and even if you do not know all the details, even if you never heard my children giggle as I sang their names to music borrowed from hymns, you understand. Someday my daughter will learn that the Randall Thompson music’s only lyric is properly “Alleluia” and not “Arianne”; I am both relieved and saddened that the revelation will not come from me. There are a billion and one other details, but the one word means I do not have to explain each one; I can keep them to myself, whether I do so because they are painful, or because they are sacred.)
We have no word for “no longer a mother”. It’s perverse, really, when you consider how many women we turn into “no longer mothers” every single court day. They — we — walk through the courtroom doors after hearing the judge’s words, and the message is the same as we’ve heard throughout the process; we are expected to disappear. The children, no longer “our” children, will be shepherded to wherever they are now supposed to go, as valuable (or not so valuable) commodities. Where we go is no longer anyone’s concern, so long as we do not disrupt the important processes and important people’s time by refusing to go away. No one is any longer required to hear our questions or speak our concerns — always supposing, of course, that anyone was doing so in the first place — and each word from us is now an imposition. If we are supremely unlucky (if the children we were bereft of were good specimens, and someone feels confident that they can repeat the process with us in the future) we may be encouraged to our faces, in as many words, to go have more. Like buying a new Pooh Bear because my eldest lost his at the mall, only without the kind subterfuge of aging the replacement before making the substitution in secret.
So we leave the courtroom, and begin the aftermath, and find that in the world outside, too, our voices carry no more weight. The prevailing narrative about women like me is that you must do something heinous to stand where we are; people envision starveling, wide-eyed waifs covered in bruises, left to fend for themselves in unchanged diapers. Or abandoned at bus stops, or dropped off onto hospital steps in howling storms. They eye my few pitiful photos, growing more and more out of date, with skepticism, because the children in them look nothing like that. (And they are not the only ones who disbelieve; the judge in my case, shortly before he rendered his verdict, stated his opinion thus: “If what you’re saying is true, and if these had been MY children, my God, there would have been blood!” If I had known that was what I would have to do to secure his belief, there might have been; he said nothing of the consequences to that bloodshed, though, and I had been rather under the impression that the path to recovering my children lay in obeying the law, not breaking it.)
Of course, the truth is that starveling waifs often do not get adopted. Abused children do not immediately adapt well to being placed in strangers’ homes. A child past infancy who has not been loved and cared for reacts rather like a wild thing, self-protective and suspicious, and does not inspire many thoughts of family togetherness. Case workers urge reunification for them, because they otherwise stay in group homes or bounce between foster placements until they age out. Adoption happy endings (and the child-hungry foster parents who crave them) demand children who lack nothing but parents, and the easiest way to get them is to take them from parents. To make their parents disappear. I’ve come to believe that maintaining that required state of invisibility, of unrecognition, and the assumptions woven around the people consigned to it, is the reason why there is no name. If you name a thing, you run the risk of no longer being able to refuse to see.
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