« historic newspapers, and why I love them | Main | found magazine »
the funny little universe
I've posted before about getupgrrl at Chez Miscarriage, who has a (well deserved) gigantic readership. I know Joshua at Noematic reads her, though I don't know how he found her and what it is that interests him about the subject matter. Now TNH at Making Light has posted at length about the recent string of posts at Chez Miscarriage on what is being called the mommy-drive-by phenomenon.
It is a good series of posts, starting here. It's so good that the rare internet looping feedback thing got started, for example: I posted an example of a drive by I experienced and somebody came over here because she wanted to respond to me, and of course, couldn't really do that at Chez Miscarriage. Do you hear the feedback whine? (I'll post a copy of my post below so you don't have to go digging through the millions of comments at CM to find it should you be that interested.)
I have said before, and I'll repeat it: getupgrrl is one of those people you want to have as your next door neighbor and best friend. She's sane, and she's funny, and she's observant and smart. She's been through infertility hell and she's kept all those qualities intact. I usually lurk over at Chez Miscarriage (and at Making Light, as well) but getupgrrl has got a talent for pushing the collective mind button in a way that makes people want to talk; for my money one grrrl is worth a couple thousand Dr. Laura's and her ilk.
But. I find myself needing to add a footnote to this whole hugely complex discussion, and I don't want to do it there. Here it is:
I agree that parental drive-bys are the ultimate in poor manners, and I try to keep my opinions to myself. And yet, I draw the line at public child abuse, and will, in cases where a child is being abused, speak up. I have done this only twice in my life, and both times were highly traumatic for all parties involved, but they aren't the situations that come back to haunt me. What I think about a lot is the time I did not speak up, and should have.
When she was six, my daughter broke her wrist jumping off a tree stump at day camp. We ended up in pediatric orthopedic care at the University of Michigan's hospital so she could be xrayed. We were just hanging out there in the xray suite waiting our turn to talk to the doctor before we went to the cast room. There were three examination tables in this particular room, one empty, one ours, and on the third one, next to us, a little girl maybe ten years old. She had an elaborate cast on her left arm, the kind that has a metal bar to hold it in a particular position. There were xrays on the wall light box and I could see she had three pins in the bone of her upper arm. This was, in other words, a damn serious break.
Her father was with her. A guy maybe thirty five. Well dressed, middle class. And hissing at her like a snake. I can call it up with perfect clarity all these years later. It went like this: don't you cry don't you dare cry you baby you sniveling baby you can't get away with that with me maybe your mother puts up with it the bitch but not with me. shut up shut up shut up. And it never stopped for the ten minutes we were in that room together.
The girl was weeping, tears running down her face in a steady stream, her whole body shaking. And I said nothing. Why? How could I not tell him to SHUT THE FUCK UP and leave the kid alone? I wanted to. But there was my own daughter, six years old and traumatized and sucking her thumb (though it had been years since she had given up that self-comforting method). I put myself physically between the girl and her father and my daughter, and I kept talking to her in a low voice, about anything else, about what we were going to do the next day, about a movie she wanted to see, about anything anything else, but we could still hear him. There was a nurse, a middle aged woman who was going about her business in another part of the room. I kept trying to catch her eye and couldn't. I don't know if she heard what was going on. I hope she didn't. I don't like to think that she heard it and didn't say something to stop it. Finally a doctor came in and got the father and they rolled the stretcher the girl was on out of the room.
Elisabeth said to me, very calmly, "Mama, why was he talking like that to her? Why was he so mean?"
It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears. I told her it was very, very wrong, that he should not have spoken to her like that, even if he was angry or upset. I told her I would tell the doctor about it. She looked at me very thoughtfully and finally just nodded and sighed and went back to her thumb.
This is the kind of situation where there are no easy answers, but I do know one thing: I feel as though I failed that child, and I will always, always regret that. I don't believe in heaven or an accounting in front of Peter the Woman Hater, but if I find myself there sometime, I expect this episode to be right at the top of the list of things I've got to account for. And there really is no excuse that holds water.
So sure, I will continue to try to be sensitive to the fact that other people don't need or want my opinions on how to raise their children, and to keep my thoughts to myself. Except if I ever run into this guy again, and I think I'd recognize him, I might not be able to keep myself from kicking him squarely in the crotch. And that's one drive by I'd admit to, without hesitation.
So here's what I wrote at Chez Miscarriage about my own experience with a drive by:
My daughter got great comfort from sucking her thumb. As she was a very unsettled baby to start with, and seemed content only when she had some part of my anatomy in her mouth (nipple preferably, but she'd make do with my little finger), we were thrilled when on the day she turned eleven weeks old she found her thumb.So fast forward, she's seven months old, crawling like a madbaby, already cruising, full of life, with a sense of humor. It's that magical period from 6 months to 12, you'll see, it's baby heaven.
We're in the grocery store. She's sitting in the cart, and we're having a conversation. I hold up a can of beans and say, hey are we out of these? She pats the can with her free hand, the other one is busy, thumb in mouth. How much of this was she getting? I dunno. I do know she said her first word at nine months and was talking in three word sentences at fifteen months. At twenty months she said: "oooh, a parakeet. I like a parakeet. I got one at home." (which we did not, no parakeet, but she was trying to be sociable). I have a PhD in linguistics and have taught child language acquisition, and I took careful notes of her language behavior right from the beginning.
Suddenly an older woman, maybe seventy, dressed to the nines, comes swooping in from nowhere, and leans between me and Elisabeth to grab her hand and pull her thumb out of her mouth. She says in this outraged way: don't you know that's the worst thing you can let her do?
I immediately pushed myself back between the woman and Elisabeth and said, Don't you know better than to touch other people's children? (In the meantime, Elisabeth had retrieved her thumb and was watching with great interest.)
The woman's mouth dropped open and then she pulled herself up and said, I raised three children, you could do with some advice. I've been listening to you talk to that baby for the last ten minutes as if she understood even a word of what you say to her.
I debated giving her an impromtu lecture on language acquisition and the difference between passive and active language skills, but I was too angry. I said, you keep your hands to yourself. And your advice, too.
It happened maybe five or six times total that people scolded us for letting Elisabeth suck her thumb, but this older woman really was the blue ribbon prize winner.
February 25, 2005 02:33 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.tiedtothetracks.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/358
Comments
Sara
The child in the hospital horror.
Sadly, I am pretty sure events like this are more common than we know. In a situation such as this with a seemingly aggressive other adult (I have heard women being just as venomous with even younger children), my own thoughts are: 'suppose I say something and the ranter turns on my own child?'.
On a couple of occasions I have quietly said to someone, 'please don't talk to your child like that'. I did not have a child with me on either of those occasions and luckily, the fact that I said anything at all seemed to stop both offenders in their tracks and turned the focus on to me without aggression - more like surprise that I said anything.
In your position I doubt I would have said anything to the father either, though I hope I would have said something to one of the staff as soon as I could. This type of thing leaves me shaking with rage and indignation.
Then there was the time when I had a few words to say to the supermarket employee who completely ignored my friend's 5 year old daughter, who had been queueing patiently to get a bag of banans weighed for pricing, in order to serve 2 adults who had just walked up behind her. 'She is a child; she is not invisible' was the gist of what I said.
I think this sort of indignation for me is a result of my own experiences in childhood. Sometimes I wonder how it is that other people seem to forget what being 8 or 10 or 12 years old and vulnerable feels like when I can remember it so well.
Posted by: Alison at February 28, 2005 04:35 PM
I love the sentiment behind Chez Miscarriage's post. Felt too late to the party to post on her site about it. What I find interesting about drive by mommy events is the ones that seem to support a cultural or social convention. The one where you're supposed to talk baby-talk, or perhaps use short sentences with children, is the one that's hit us more than once. According to the "mommy observer force" (could they be a mof-ia? a mommy-a? ha ha), we talk to our two girls in much too adult a fashion. How can they ever understand a word we are saying, and how do we expect them to learn language if we don't start slow and use simple words?!? Shocking. This from close relatives. But the kicker - usually we're only put on notice once we've spoken similarly to their offspring. The mommy-a seem to have a problem not with how our children are being raised, but with how their own children may get tainted by the raising going on in full view. And because feelings run high when parenting, I guess, "tainted" is probably too strong a word. "Affected" would be a better word. It just seems like a microcosm of the wider world where "tolerance" is professed, yet dissipates when the rules infringe on your own way of doing things. Now. I do have some perspective here. Speaking in long sentences to a 5 year old, or teaching your 5 year old to vote for choices for supper or outing options may be a form of social protest to some, but it's hardly child abuse, is it? So I guess I've been lucky in not landing any really nasty forms of mommy-a ire. Although the odd eyeballing in church has been a shocker.
It doesn't help that thanks to some freakishly huge genes on both sides of our family (sadly predictable as both their parents are huge), my children appear as if they are at least 1 year, possibly 2 years older than is true. That's a killer, when your 5 yr old looks 7, and people think she's slow or something for having a short attention span. Geez - she's 5! So the long sentences mask her age. Maybe we are cruel.
Posted by: Pam at March 1, 2005 01:36 AM