No-Name Bloggers | Cindy D.

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.

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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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