A dumb
interaction is kicking up more thoughts than I anticipated, so let's
talk it out.
I called the child abuse/neglect
hotline on a mom who was letting her son pee bare-ass naked on a tree
planted outside of City Hall. The only information I had on them was
a license plate. If this arrived on my plate, as an assessor, it
would be one of the dumber ones I would be asked to go out on. I was
fully prepared to just let it go and keep about my walk about town. I
excused myself to the mom, introduced myself as someone who works for
the department, and said, “Just a heads up, this is the kind of
thing people call us about, and if you'd like to avoid flak (under
the presumption this may not be the first or last time) consider
finding a bathroom. She was illegally parked with her hazards on,
another kid strapped in the backseat with her tail-end sticking in
the street. This was a parking maneuver she could have achieved in
front of a restaurant, you know, on the square where a dozen were as
close an option.
What made me call was her response. “Can you please leave me alone? You're create a memory for him right now. He's potty training.” The largest part of me says fair enough, when you have to go, you have to go. The kid wasn't pissing in the street just outside of the car or on the wall. He had the temerity to hold it until the top of the steps. I didn't go in guns blazing slinging accusations or calling the decision to let him pee there one thing or another. I politely suggested a way to not catch shit in the future, and it was thrown in my face. As someone who has to assess people's dispositions and speculate whether that's lending itself to neglectful situations involving children, the lesson, “Proudly piss on the tree in public, and then lash out at anyone mildly nodding to how that might not be the best” trigger a red flag.
There's a solid chance it will get screened out and no one will come knocking on her door asking safety questions or figuring out what the seemingly insane helicopter-parent regime is in a household where mom's first instinct is to say, “You're making a memory for him!” as though there's trauma in the idea of anyone politely approaching his mother. But I want to press on to the larger point.
All sorts of calls are fielded and sorted until they make it to individual counties. Then they get screened by supervisors and decided upon whether we actually need to go out. From the kid left in the car or kid pissing on a tree, to the ten paragraph tale of drug abuse and violence that has allegedly permeated a family's history. It's not just up to one person to say something is abuse or neglect or rises to the threshold of sending someone out. It's a discussion and team effort. There's guidelines and trigger words that will get flagged like a knife in your bag at TSA, but every family and situation is different. Sometimes, defensive cuntiness is just how someone is. Sometimes, they're high right then, and hoping you don't notice the needle on the couch from the doorway.
On the drive home, I got to thinking about personal responsibility. It's been something of a theme of my latest discussions with my dad and is not thrust into the limelight as my supervisor seems like she's going to be a hurdle in toning down what she thinks it is I'm supposed to do as an assessor. I've been the person who's been turned to and “politely engaged” to varying degrees about how I'm talking or carrying on. In those moments where my instinct is to bite back and escalate, I usually shut up. I'll never guess who's going to bother speaking out or about what, but I have to read the room and be responsible for me. The theater or the porch at the bar at the grocery store (the 2 instances that come to mind immediately) are not the time to kick up more dust.
And let me be clear, I've drunkenly pissed on walls or trees and been inappropriate as well. This isn't about the act in and of itself, it's how you respond to a challenge of your internally superior decision making, and what impact that has on your children or the culture at large. If we played the “What if everyone does it” game, we don't want a hundred kids pissing on our community plants, but I've never liked that kind of thought process. I just remain skeptical that your response to someone who introduces themselves as someone who works for the department that gets calls about this sort of thing testifies to your judgment as a caregiver. Like, if you pushed a cop who pulled over to help you change a tire. What are you thinking? I'm not a cop, but I'm something of a literal authority on what stories manifest as assessment-worthy for neglect.
Part of me is clapping-back though. I hate when people try to weaponize DCS, but I do have a touch more sympathy for how confusing it can be to discern when you should and shouldn't call. In morning safety staffing it often comes up, “Well, why didn't they call 2 weeks ago?” Even working there, my first instinct isn't to call us, let alone if I never had any interaction with us except through horror stories in the news. Had she even been flustered and hurried and politely waved me off I would have let it go. My point and the potential for the call and assessment would have still remained and been true. I qualified to the hotline worker why I was calling and the confusing headspace I was in. I don't feel guilty, I just wish it wasn't so hard.
Moving into the piled-on thoughts the interaction provoked. It's the thousand little indignities that take the oppressed into the lashing-out killer categories. When I complain about my job, beyond the hijacking of my time and focus, the interpersonal negotiations, the extra words to try and lock in and very basic and obvious point, or the feeling of dread and exhaustion at the idea of moving or reading one more line speak to the decision to power through or get exploratory. When life is going generally well, those thousand indignities shrink. You can write someone off as having a bad day. You can stub your toe and notice how good they still look after a recent pedicure as you hop up and down in pain. The idea of lowly peon “going postal” affirms the lore of the ticking time bomb getting it from all angles with no way to balance the scale.
I think a lot of us are in that “dare me to lash out” place, even if it looks different for each person. I think a lot of “entrepreneurship” and “live your dreams” mantras put in overtime to mask what modern poverty and chronic stress look like. I think people forgo obligations to each other and indulge, and have been indulging, like a quintessential glutton for punishment. Guilt feeding guilt. Self-smug cycles of reinforced opinions. To a huge extent, the world “out there” doesn't exist. The shadowlands where kids in cages, environmental holocausts, and all-things fascism is but a fantasy where everything you don't like and can't deal with also doesn't exist. An interjection into your world is the height of a betrayal of the new cultural contract. “You're making a memory for him right now!” Sure, lady, and many more actual ones you should be concerned about are coming.
I started thinking about what it means to take responsibility. There's feeling that way and taking action, which is a good portion of my underlying pulse. There's shouldering the fallout of people forcing things upon you, like the isolation and judgment after the bait-and-switch of their good will or intentions. A colleague I asked for advice from said, “Some people here want to be managers” referring to the way that being an FCM can lead people to be intrusive and dominating in a way that's wholly inappropriate with a holistic appreciation for the nature and limits of the task. This would be a kind of irony in putting upon yourself the burden to be an unduly dick because it's easier than adopting the larger task of challenging your biases and finding resolve in your patience and broader appreciation for the circumstances we find our families in.
This is me trying to take responsibility. Part of me is genuinely concerned for those children's welfare with a mom “like that.” Part of me feels petty. A large enough portion of my time has literally been paid for to go and question people who've behaved like her or made decisions to let their children do, at least questionable things, in-line with their conception of good parenting.
The Hotline says they will inform professional report sources if their recommendation to assess or not is subject to change. The stories get filtered, get eyes, and get discussed. When you're in the business of exercising your judgment to make up or down calls for varying degrees of “official involvement,” you want different perspectives and specialties to lend their guidance. So it goes for life generally. So springs forth sentiments about respecting elders. We can pretend until we suffocate and drown that we live in bubbles and can never be questioned, or any and every intrusion into our precious memories is practically an affront to the selfish God we consider ourselves, but in reality, we need to do the work, have the discussion, and understand ourselves in the broader contexts in which we live.
The music of defensive and fearful tones is as familiar to me as anything. She was defiant. She was raging against the larger broken points about mutual respect, shared space, and self-reflection. Whether The State could ever (it can't) manage to put that into a codified trackable metric of neglect indicators and their consequences or not, that's what she was doing. I would have accepted basically any other kind of response to my interjection and left it alone but that one.
What made me call was her response. “Can you please leave me alone? You're create a memory for him right now. He's potty training.” The largest part of me says fair enough, when you have to go, you have to go. The kid wasn't pissing in the street just outside of the car or on the wall. He had the temerity to hold it until the top of the steps. I didn't go in guns blazing slinging accusations or calling the decision to let him pee there one thing or another. I politely suggested a way to not catch shit in the future, and it was thrown in my face. As someone who has to assess people's dispositions and speculate whether that's lending itself to neglectful situations involving children, the lesson, “Proudly piss on the tree in public, and then lash out at anyone mildly nodding to how that might not be the best” trigger a red flag.
There's a solid chance it will get screened out and no one will come knocking on her door asking safety questions or figuring out what the seemingly insane helicopter-parent regime is in a household where mom's first instinct is to say, “You're making a memory for him!” as though there's trauma in the idea of anyone politely approaching his mother. But I want to press on to the larger point.
All sorts of calls are fielded and sorted until they make it to individual counties. Then they get screened by supervisors and decided upon whether we actually need to go out. From the kid left in the car or kid pissing on a tree, to the ten paragraph tale of drug abuse and violence that has allegedly permeated a family's history. It's not just up to one person to say something is abuse or neglect or rises to the threshold of sending someone out. It's a discussion and team effort. There's guidelines and trigger words that will get flagged like a knife in your bag at TSA, but every family and situation is different. Sometimes, defensive cuntiness is just how someone is. Sometimes, they're high right then, and hoping you don't notice the needle on the couch from the doorway.
On the drive home, I got to thinking about personal responsibility. It's been something of a theme of my latest discussions with my dad and is not thrust into the limelight as my supervisor seems like she's going to be a hurdle in toning down what she thinks it is I'm supposed to do as an assessor. I've been the person who's been turned to and “politely engaged” to varying degrees about how I'm talking or carrying on. In those moments where my instinct is to bite back and escalate, I usually shut up. I'll never guess who's going to bother speaking out or about what, but I have to read the room and be responsible for me. The theater or the porch at the bar at the grocery store (the 2 instances that come to mind immediately) are not the time to kick up more dust.
And let me be clear, I've drunkenly pissed on walls or trees and been inappropriate as well. This isn't about the act in and of itself, it's how you respond to a challenge of your internally superior decision making, and what impact that has on your children or the culture at large. If we played the “What if everyone does it” game, we don't want a hundred kids pissing on our community plants, but I've never liked that kind of thought process. I just remain skeptical that your response to someone who introduces themselves as someone who works for the department that gets calls about this sort of thing testifies to your judgment as a caregiver. Like, if you pushed a cop who pulled over to help you change a tire. What are you thinking? I'm not a cop, but I'm something of a literal authority on what stories manifest as assessment-worthy for neglect.
Part of me is clapping-back though. I hate when people try to weaponize DCS, but I do have a touch more sympathy for how confusing it can be to discern when you should and shouldn't call. In morning safety staffing it often comes up, “Well, why didn't they call 2 weeks ago?” Even working there, my first instinct isn't to call us, let alone if I never had any interaction with us except through horror stories in the news. Had she even been flustered and hurried and politely waved me off I would have let it go. My point and the potential for the call and assessment would have still remained and been true. I qualified to the hotline worker why I was calling and the confusing headspace I was in. I don't feel guilty, I just wish it wasn't so hard.
Moving into the piled-on thoughts the interaction provoked. It's the thousand little indignities that take the oppressed into the lashing-out killer categories. When I complain about my job, beyond the hijacking of my time and focus, the interpersonal negotiations, the extra words to try and lock in and very basic and obvious point, or the feeling of dread and exhaustion at the idea of moving or reading one more line speak to the decision to power through or get exploratory. When life is going generally well, those thousand indignities shrink. You can write someone off as having a bad day. You can stub your toe and notice how good they still look after a recent pedicure as you hop up and down in pain. The idea of lowly peon “going postal” affirms the lore of the ticking time bomb getting it from all angles with no way to balance the scale.
I think a lot of us are in that “dare me to lash out” place, even if it looks different for each person. I think a lot of “entrepreneurship” and “live your dreams” mantras put in overtime to mask what modern poverty and chronic stress look like. I think people forgo obligations to each other and indulge, and have been indulging, like a quintessential glutton for punishment. Guilt feeding guilt. Self-smug cycles of reinforced opinions. To a huge extent, the world “out there” doesn't exist. The shadowlands where kids in cages, environmental holocausts, and all-things fascism is but a fantasy where everything you don't like and can't deal with also doesn't exist. An interjection into your world is the height of a betrayal of the new cultural contract. “You're making a memory for him right now!” Sure, lady, and many more actual ones you should be concerned about are coming.
I started thinking about what it means to take responsibility. There's feeling that way and taking action, which is a good portion of my underlying pulse. There's shouldering the fallout of people forcing things upon you, like the isolation and judgment after the bait-and-switch of their good will or intentions. A colleague I asked for advice from said, “Some people here want to be managers” referring to the way that being an FCM can lead people to be intrusive and dominating in a way that's wholly inappropriate with a holistic appreciation for the nature and limits of the task. This would be a kind of irony in putting upon yourself the burden to be an unduly dick because it's easier than adopting the larger task of challenging your biases and finding resolve in your patience and broader appreciation for the circumstances we find our families in.
This is me trying to take responsibility. Part of me is genuinely concerned for those children's welfare with a mom “like that.” Part of me feels petty. A large enough portion of my time has literally been paid for to go and question people who've behaved like her or made decisions to let their children do, at least questionable things, in-line with their conception of good parenting.
The Hotline says they will inform professional report sources if their recommendation to assess or not is subject to change. The stories get filtered, get eyes, and get discussed. When you're in the business of exercising your judgment to make up or down calls for varying degrees of “official involvement,” you want different perspectives and specialties to lend their guidance. So it goes for life generally. So springs forth sentiments about respecting elders. We can pretend until we suffocate and drown that we live in bubbles and can never be questioned, or any and every intrusion into our precious memories is practically an affront to the selfish God we consider ourselves, but in reality, we need to do the work, have the discussion, and understand ourselves in the broader contexts in which we live.
The music of defensive and fearful tones is as familiar to me as anything. She was defiant. She was raging against the larger broken points about mutual respect, shared space, and self-reflection. Whether The State could ever (it can't) manage to put that into a codified trackable metric of neglect indicators and their consequences or not, that's what she was doing. I would have accepted basically any other kind of response to my interjection and left it alone but that one.
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