Call Abuse, Abuse

After an article entitled, Why I Will Never Live on Another Man’s Dime, a popular blog site wrote that they were looking for more inspiring stories about moving on post-split. 

Though I honor the author's courage and determination, and all women who rise in a culture that is stacked against them, I felt more angry after reading this article, than inspired. Angry at a culture that thinks that a mother struggling for her two cents, not knowing how to pay for her rent is an inspirational story instead of a story of abuse and the consequences of leaving abuse.  
 
A few quotes from the article “It was his house, I was just a guest.” “What I did as a mother did not mean anything.” “Now I have power. I am broke and I am struggling, but dammit, I have my two cents and I love it. I haven’t quite figured out how I will pay rent once the marital home is sold, or foreclosed.”

It seems to me that she was hearing in her marriage and in her role as a mother that with no paycheck, her life had no value. That she contributed nothing. So she left. Good for her, what choice did she have? Violence breeds in this place of believing that another has little value. It was not a safe place. But to offer her applause for having escaped with her two cents is such a diminishment of the seriousness of her situation. 

It seems a little like a gladiator sport. Put a mother in the arena and see if she survives. If she does, good for her. We applaud her courage. If not, well, maybe she should have "leaned in" a little bit more. Whatever the case, thumbs up or thumbs down, she is on her own in a system that does not recognize care and caregiving as work. A system we collectively support that recognizes only a paycheck as having value. No mother should have had to leave her home and her economic security in order to find respect or value.

We need to give this author, and other caregivers more than applause for surviving in a broken system. To offer this mother and all caregivers the protection and respect that they both need and deserve, we need to fix the system. We need to give the family economy a chance of survival by recognizing it as one of a partnership of both paid and unpaid work, both of equal value. And we need to give this all-important work to both genders to weave into their life design, supported by our larger community design.  

Riane Eisler's book, Creating a Caring Economy: The Real Wealth of Nations is where we can learn how to shift into a system which serves all of us, both men and women, more kindly, more generously and more sustainably. Dr Eisler's work at the Center for Partnership Studies is a cauldron of ideas and people determined to elevate the often invisible work of care and caregiving to its proper place by recognizing that paid or unpaid caring fo each other and for the planet that cares for us is the sacred intent of life. That profound elevation creates the possibility of changing what we value as a collective, and reordering how we measure a successful economy. That is the work that we all, both men and women must aspire to do.

 

Mother vs a Nation of Experts and Bullies

Has becoming a nation of experts and specialists empowered a nation of bullies? Could we be using our expertise, our education, to label too many of our children abnormal, a problem, because their way is different than the expected way? And is that labeling making it  more and more difficult to express our own unique way of being in the world?

When one of my sons was five and evaluated for a private kindergarten, the principal of the school (and the one doing the evaluation), pulled me aside after she had tested him to tell me how very "concerned" she was about him. Being a strong advocate for my children, I am slow to believe any “expert," but when she told me that he failed to put eyes on the face he was told to draw and failed to follow the directions to build a four block tower, I looked at her in disbelief, (and I looked at my son, the Lego King, with some irritation) and some fear, as she said she was very concerned. She looked very concerned.

I asked him later what was up. He said casually, “the eyes were there, but they were invisible.” “Ahh,” I said,“that makes sense.”  And he explained that a four block tower might fall, so he added two more at the sides as buttresses. My neighbor and his best friend's mother was an architect. I did not think he was the one with the problem.

Am I calling her a bully? She used her expertise, and authority to question him and his abilities, and caused me to doubt him, and my abilities, not to cause him or me harm, but because she believed that she knew better. My son ignored her, and I chose to ignore her, but it took all of my wits and and a lot of my time to trust this child despite her concerns and the many other well meaning critics of my child’s ways.  

When he could not keep his hands off a piece of equipment in a class he attended, the teacher called me and said he had little impulse control, and recommended medication.  For added emphasis, she told me that she had just started her five year old on medication for ADHD. I was appalled. I understood her frustration, but I saw his behavior as evidence of an intense curiosity. I thought that what was needed was a strategy, not a diagnosis. She had every right to insist that he keep his fingers off of her property, but instead of quickly labeling him, our task, as the adults was to find a way to respect his curiosity, and to help him manage and channel its intensity.

I could do that, so I decided to teach him at home and gave him as much freedom within the framework of our family community as I could. He had gone to school for two years before I made the decision to homeschool him. His first year at school, he capped his tremendous force of energy (something like capping a volcano).  He sat at his desk and tried to do his work but he doodled on his papers instead of finishing his work and dropped things, purposely, so that he could get up from his desk. He was then punished for not finishing by being kept in at recess.

Capping that energy took a tremendous toll on him. At six, he started coming home with severe migraine headaches. He was unhappy, acting out, not sleeping well. I explained to his teacher that her decision to not allow him out for recess because he did not finish his work was not the best strategy for this child.  I explained that the problem was not that he was being disobedient or that he could not do the work. He could do it easily but it was taking all of his energy to try to follow the rules of the classroom and sit at his desk. Unfortunately, the teacher could only think in terms of punishment, not strategy. She could not see that his doodling actually was a release for some of that pent up energy. (And the doodling was really good, really interesting, much more so than the worksheets that he was doodling on.)

My decision to homeschool allowed me to opt out of the school setting and its inadequacies, but this is not an option, nor should it be, for everyone. I am not advocating what I did, just grateful that I had the choice and the resources to do it. (And I have to add that for most women who choose to take homeschooling on - and it is mostly women - it may be a choice,  sometimes a joyful choice, but it is also a sacrifice. Women are filling a gap where our society is lacking, but this is a women’s story for another time.) But it was not, per se, homeschooling that did this. Homeschooling just gave me the room to do what I felt was right which was to trust my child’s unique way of learning.  Who was I to judge that his way was wrong because it did not fit into the common way?

But what if I did not have the resources or confidence to make this choice and we had no choice but for him to go to school? How would I have managed my sons frequent migraine headaches - medication? His headaches were simply stress and exhaustion, and went away as soon as he stopped going to school. Would he have started acting out eventually unable to keep a cap on his tremendous energy and busy mind? Was there something wrong with him, or the system?

We train children to adjust to our institutions. Are we now using our highly trained, often well meaning experts to maintain control? Are we using the label of ADHD as a bully tool and medication as a way to silence children who do not fit easily into our institutions?  

My son would have been labeled had he been evaluated, but instead of changing him, I changed his environment. I saw the expectations of the classroom as being crazymaking for him and his unique way of operating in the world. And I saw myself as his advocate, and his partner, and the only one who would be able to create an environment where his "particular set of chemicals" or this "particular soul" could thrive.

I believed in the mystery of this child, and believed that my greatest task as his mother was to learn to step out of his way. Not, as some might believe, to hand over my parenting responsibilities to a child, but to give him the room he required to unfold as he learned the also essential skills of how to operate within the larger community. 

His energy and laserlike focus could at times be narcissistic and self-serving, as it will be for a child and was even more so in a child with this intense energy. But as children find their unique way in the world, our responsibility, as the adults, is to teach them how to follow their own navigation system as they also, as importantly, learn to consider the others around them. It is a slow process, and it takes a childhood to learn this, but more important than any book learning we pour into their young minds, is this great task.

There are some children who more easily adapt to our institutional ways and expectations. That does not mean they are thriving. It might just mean they are better at managing their impulses, managing their own internal guidance system, sometimes losing it all together. That is as worrisome, but it is the children who are being labeled right and left with behavioral disorders, and mood disorders that I am concerned with here. 

We cannot medicate people out of their uniqueness. Though I acknowledge, with gratitude, that for some, medication has been their child's necessary support to their optimal life, we cannot medicate for obedience. And as adults, we need to learn to still our lives enough to find the patience and time to teach our children how to live in our community without losing their essential selves in the process. We need to learn that ourselves.

Mother vs Cultural Bullying

Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo only to be cursed by him after she rejected him.  His curse, that all who hear her prophecies, will not believe her, effectively silenced her.  The torture of having something to say, and no one to hear her caused her eventually to go insane.  Her strong and prophetic voice, forever silenced by what I would call a form of verbal abuse or bullying.

Women are often the target of verbal abuse in our patriarchal social system,  but I wonder, as the world begins to shift from what Riane Eisler in her book, A Caring Economy, calls a more masculine oriented domination system to a more feminine oriented partnership system, that patriarchy, as a collective, is increasingly becoming desperate to silence all whom it perceives to threaten the rigid rules of the hierarchal model of the domination system.

In a patriarchal social system, women are the “other,” a woman’s sense of the world is the “other,” and we are often overtly and covertly bullied into believing that our place in the world is lesser than, subservient, and somehow wrong. My interest is in women’s issues as I  see that as the pivot point for social change, but I also can see similarities between the “otherness” of women and anyone else who does not fit into the model or the values upheld by a patriarchy or domination system.

Verbal abuse, I describe, as the overt, or covert attempt to bully another into silence to gain power over them - someone they find threatening to their way of thinking or being in the world. To stay too long in a relationship of this kind, thinking you can positively influence it, is to risk slowly having your fundamental navigation system shutdown. To become lost, as the other intended, though I believe, often unconsciously, in a vast sea of confusion.  And, ultimately, to begin to become separated from your own soul, from your source, from God, from the essential You.

This "violence" is not the sort that we were taught to recognize and respond to, and there are often no witnesses, and no bruises. Instead of responding to your concerns, well meaning “experts” may label you as the problem. You may be diagnosed with a chemical imbalance, a genetic predisposition to a mood disorder, a behavior disorder, or just over reacting. All which make you the "problem" and will effectively silence your concerns, and negate your experience. You may begin to feel a sense of invisibility, and like Cassandra, a sense of insanity.

And I wonder, is bullying part of an overall pattern of domination in our culture. Not just in our relationships, in our families, in our workplaces, in our schools, but in our collective mindset, something that many of us are subtly, unwittingly participating in.

We decide, as a culture who is ok, and who is not. And those "who are not," we collectively tell, cruelly or kindly, and with authority that they have a problem. We may openly bully them for their differences or maybe we recommend medication and therapy (Both of those things necessary at times.) But, tragically,  we can send the single message that they are wrong, and the rest of the world is ok. That there is something different about them. They make us uncomfortable and we need them to be less visible - to be quiet.  

Have many of us become guardians of the domination culture, both men and women.  We don't generally like change. We don't generally like difference. We hold on to the status quo even when everything is falling apart around us. We have been stubbornly holding on to our beliefs that we can continue on in the ways of the thousands of year old domination system, and refuse to embrace the need for radical change at every level. 

Maybe we need to look at the larger systems that govern the world we live in. Maybe there are some among us, a growing number, who are responding, like canaries in the mine shaft, to something that is very wrong in our culture. Could we be labeling some in our culture as a problem, rather than, possibly, harbingers of change? And to those labeled "other," like Cassandra, with little sense of communal support or shared experience, the level of alienation, and oppression must be excruciating.  We have all lived too long in a patriarchal dominator system to not all be serving it in ways that we are not aware. I think we should take a close look at those (with sometimes the best of intentions) we are collectively silencing. Who and what does that serve?