this woman’s work

Julia made me read the Tipping Point (remember she bought it for me because I was so lazy about reserving it at the library) in part because she wanted me to see that the many many many small things I was doing would actually come together at some point and also because she wanted me to see that I’m a connector.

I love to fix people up, it’s true. I like to introduce people who might like each other or might need to help each other. It’s not all altruistic. Because I’m introverted, I don’t have the energy to keep up with everyone I’d like to keep up with (I also don’t have the time) but if I consolidate my friendships/acquaintanceships, then my friends can help me keep up with each other! Like if I introduce Person X to Person Y and they hit it off, then either of them can let me know how the other one is doing, keep me in the loop, etc. and I won’t feel so guilty that I haven’t seen one or the other in awhile.

I like to throw parties and invite my most disparate friends, too, because I’m a great believer in making mutts out of playgroups. It’s wonderful to have time with only the like-minded folks but it’s invigorating to throw a whole new perspective into the mix now and then. Suddenly you find out that you’re like-minded group has a pocket of people with an interest you didn’t know about. And wham-o, bam-o — you’ve got another interconnected friendship going on.

It’s the part of networking that I like. I’m not so hot at the large group meet-ups (although I’m getting better) but I do like meeting new people and figuring out who I know that maybe they’d like to meet. And when they hit it off? I feel like Madison does when she puts the whole Thomas the Tank Engine floor puzzle together and then dances around the room with satisfaction.

I may not really be a people person but I am a person who likes people and it’s fun to see people I like hit it off.

Edited to add: Rereading the post I linked to above makes me realize how far I’ve come just since March, which inspires me to think how far I’ll go likely by NEXT March. Listen, oh ye introverts among us, if I can do this anyone can.

So this happened before the time when Madison overheard the mom talking about slippery feet in dance class, right? Do you think it factored into the strong reaction she had in the dance class?

from Heather

Yup, that did happen after. The Incident happened at the beginning of February and then dance class was in April. Madison had already been talking a lot about wanting her skin to match ours months before February and for me one of the sad ironies of this whole thing is that the family in question was one of our social examples of families who don’t match and how that’s ok. I grieve the loss of the friendship with the wife in part because early in our relationship she was part of my support system around this stuff. (Didn’t I tell you that this was ironic?) Not that we agreed on everything about race or adoption but we agreed on enough that the differences were details.

Anyway. Yes, this may have played a part in her strong reaction at dance class. Then again, she had been talking a lot about race and differences and not matching so while The Incident surely didn’t help, she was already struggling. And that’s one reason I just felt so unglued about it all — the wife in question had been witness and support during those particular struggles and so to have her husband be so hurtful and at their home where my daughter had always felt safe — well, it just made it that much MORE. Again, I don’t hold the wife responsible for his behavior and she didn’t witness the event. I just want to make it clear that there’s a whole lot going on here and the password protected stuff is about my friendship with her but I feel pretty darn comfortable publicly condemning him.

I also wonder — and this is pure conjecture — if some surrounding circumstances of that class made Madison feel extra-sensitive going in. Because that class was bookended with socializing with various families including the family in question (without the husband/perpetrator of said deed). Given that she has expressed concern for the kids, I kinda wonder if seeing them might not have pushed The Incident to the forefront of her mind just before heading into ballet. But I don’t know. And I guess truly it doesn’t matter because all that matters now is coping with the fall out.

When I was about thirteen the little girl who lived across the street told my mother that her parents were abusing her. She was about eleven and had grown up in foster care so it is true that at some point in her life she’d experienced horrific abuse and neglect. What was not true was that she was experiencing it when she asked my mom for help. My mother knew that her story – that she was only allowed to eat the food scraped into the garbage disposal – was probably not true but my mother called child protective services anyway. First she invited the neighbor girl to spend the night and then she called CPS. When the report turned out to be unwarranted, she apologized to the family but said she hoped they understood why she called. She wasn’t taking any chances, my mom explained, because no one called when she was a child and so the abuse continued.

Our chances of being saved from dire straits through the intervention of another person go down as more people become involved. That’s the lesson of Kitty Genovese. Instead of making a call to CPS, most of us would ask a friend first. “What should I do?”

My mom was brave to take in the neighbor girl and make the call. She also didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood to consult with first — no one to give advice or make her doubt herself. It’s ironic that if my mother had had more support that she might not have acted. The act (reaching out to protect a child) is morally separate from the results (an embarrassed and loving family forced to defend themselves to the state). But if she’d had more friends to talk to, they might have focused on the imagined results and talked my mom out of acting. I don’t know. I can’t ever know.

It’s less clear if there is no one saying, “Help me.” It’s hard to know what to do when you can see that there is something not quite right but there is a lot of noise in the way distorting the situation. I keep talking to people who know about as much as I do and who are just as conflicted and we all keep talking ourselves in and out of action. We keep looking for an opening because we don’t want to press. We keep, reluctantly, hoping for a crisis so that we know, yes, the situation demands our intervention.

Mostly we talk because talking almost feels like action. Analyzing every little thing seems a little bit like figuring out what to do next. Only it’s not and instead it feels like we are more mired than ever in doing nothing.

I’m frustrated. And sad. And angry at myself.

Maybe I’m too hung up on results. I want the outcome to be a certain way (where help is accepted, where the truth comes out, where change is made) and I know from past experience with this situation that I’m likely going to be as frustrated after as I am now. I also know that the situation is murky and that it could be argued that our concerned take on things is more about our values than about any moral truth. We all know we intervene if a child is eating out of the garbage disposal. What if there is no child and no garbage disposal?

Argh.

I kept trying to write about something that will not be written about. Rats. (I wanted to write about someone else and couldn’t find a way to do it and still protect that person’s privacy. Double rats.)

We’re all confused over here at my house. We’re all walking into walls. Figuratively for the grown-ups, literally for the kids. For example, Noah was the only one to remember that he has religious school today. And an ice cream social! You can imagine the horror if he hadn’t remembered in time to get there.

Yup, things are crazy over here. Going on-site this week will either make things much better (at least for me) or twice as nutty. I’m certainly curious to see how it goes. (There’s no wifi there so blogging will be sporadic.)

I’m getting itchy writing fingers and my white board is filling up with ideas. I always have service ideas although (as longtime readers know) I have no great love of service magazines. I was staring at two of these ideas thinking about how much I didn’t want to query them because I would have to go look at the magazines to craft the queries and how much I don’t want to have to look through the magazines when it occurred to me I could write ‘em as essays. And then I was horrified because at least two of them are more than I want to share. (I know! Me! Reaching a limit on sharing in public!) Then I free wrote a third idea because Brett found it the most intriguing. I hit a wall but later that day while doing laundry I realized that I hit that wall because I started off lying to myself at the start of the piece. I mean, I look at what I wrote and say, “Oh Dawn! You protest too much!” My naked denial lay there all accusing me. Damn denial.

I’m thinking about denial a whole lot these days and having these denial-colored glasses on mean I’m seeing it everywhere. Nothing good ever comes of it. Then I listened to The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, which seemed right in line with the Barbara Tann story. Those are big, hairy cases of denial but I’m thinking about small-scale denial, too, particularly in the unbloggable situation where I’m watching someone stomp all over their relationships in the effort to keep face.

I feel unreasonably angry about that, which is why I was trying to blog it. There is nothing to do with my anger but stomach it until it fades away because it’s not me that’s hurting (I’m collateral damage). I mean, I’m hurt but it’s like holding a grudge aginast the sun because you got a sunburn when you’re the one who didn’t have the sense to go get under some shade. That’s what the sun does so you take it in small doses. Likewise people in denial can’t help but lie by omission even when you want them to be honest.

There. I think the only people who will know what I’m talking about will be the two people I bitched to about it. Mission accomplished.