by Kim Brooks
“Right,” she said. “But then again, it’s not exactly the kind of thing people talk about. My friend certainly didn’t tell many people when it happened to her. No one wants to be the neighborhood mom accused of neglecting her children. I think there are probably a lot of people who have similar things happen to them but who don’t come forward.”
As I drove home that day, I kept turning her words over, and in the months that followed, they’d come back to me from time to time. What if Sarah was right? What if what had happened to me was not an isolated incident, but a trend? How could anyone begin to grapple with the implications of this kind of criminalization if we couldn’t even admit that it was happening?
* * *
All that year, while I baked cookies and manned fundraiser booths and learned how to dribble a soccer ball so I could fill in as an assistant coach at a youth soccer league, as I signed up for and recorded my hours of mom-unteering, I thought about Sarah’s friend, and about other women like her. I thought about how lucky I’d been in the end, lucky that I had family who could help me pay for a lawyer, lucky that I had the resources to go back to Virginia and self-report, lucky that at the last minute, my lawyer had shown up in the courtroom, lucky that I’d been able to fulfill my volunteer hours in activities that didn’t force me to miss work or spend less time with my children. I thought about what might have happened if my lawyer hadn’t made it there in time and I’d been thrown into the position of all the other parents in that room, those who couldn’t afford their own defense attorneys and had to depend on the counsel of whatever overworked public defender the system sent their way. What if I’d had to defend myself? What if I didn’t have a nice, professional outfit from Ann Taylor Loft in my closet and had shown up in this judge’s court in dress he deemed inappropriate? What if I’d never made it to his court at all because I couldn’t afford to fly back to Virginia, or to take days off of work to do so, or to find someone to watch my children? What if by some circumstance or misfortune I’d missed my court date? What if my record wasn’t perfectly clean and, like many people, I had some minor past infraction? What if I was in the middle of a custody dispute? What if I lived in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and in addition to this criminal process, I was also facing a separate investigation from Child Protective Services?
In the weeks and months after my court date, I continued to fixate on these what-ifs and the other women like Sarah’s friend who might be facing them. And I continued to wonder what, in the end, the cost of these fear-based policies was for the individuals being charged with crimes, for parents in general and mothers in particular, and for society as a whole. And just as important, I wondered, how exactly was this cost being distributed among us? Could it be that the cost of fear was different for mothers as opposed to fathers, for single parents as opposed to married ones, for the poor, middle, and upper classes? After all, it’s one thing to insist children can never be unsupervised to an economically privileged, partnered, professional woman who can afford nannies, babysitters, a barrage of organized enrichment activities—a woman who has the means to absorb any burden. It is quite another to say it to a single mother, a poor mother, a mother who struggles to pay for housing, health insurance, food, and clothing, much less quality childcare. What, exactly, was the price of fear and who exactly was paying it?
* * *
In June of 2014, months after I’d appeared in juvenile court in Virginia, after the prosecutor had formally agreed not to prosecute my case, and after I’d completed my mandated community service, I wrote an essay for Salon titled “The Day I Left My Son in the Car,” in which I told the story of my experience in that parking lot in Virginia. Within a few days of the story’s publication, it had been viewed six million times. It elicited tens of thousands of readers’ comments, readers eager to express their sympathy, or to elaborate on my overall unfitness as a mother and as a human being.
Many readers sympathized with me and voiced horror at the kind of vigilante parent policing I’d described. Other readers echoed my frustration, lamenting how many of the freedoms parents had given their children a generation ago had now become impossible. Some parents recalled moments when they, too, had felt judged or self-conscious or unable to parent the way they wanted to because of their own irrational beliefs or broader social pressures. These commenters generally argued that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and that my arrest revealed more about our shared state of media-fed paranoia and culture of misogyny than about my own competence as a mother.
Others, meanwhile, viewed me as a symbol of everything wrong with parents, mothers, women, and the world.
“Try being a parent,” one commenter suggested. “That is what you are, it is your job.”
“If you didn’t want to be responsible and parent your children, why did you have them?” wondered another. One reader reasoned, “People get hurt, people get shot. Because people are stupid enough to leave a child in the car.” And still another reader wrote, “Watch your freaking kid. Period,” and declared, “God bless the person who calls the cops!”
The tone of the comments varied from indignation to disgust to enlightened disbelief. Some readers took an edifying tone and tried to explain to me what I had somehow missed: “When you left your four-year-old son in the car, you abandoned him in public. Of course someone called the police.” The reader went on to wonder why this wasn’t obvious to me. Others used my story as a call for increased vigilance on the part of bystanders: “WAKE THE HELL UP PEOPLE AND DO SOMETHING WHEN YOU SEE AN UNATTENDED TODDLER IN A CAR!!” or “You made a mistake. You were wrong. What you did could have resulted in a tragedy. Anyone who puts their child in harm’s way is irresponsible and those that defend them are pathetic.”
Other readers offered me advice on how to be a better mother in the future, noting (fairly) that I never should have allowed my son to whine his way out of coming into the store with me in the first place: “Train your child to listen to you; it’s your job to teach them about life. Not to cater to their whims. P.S. I’ll report you for leaving your DOG in the car.”
Another reader wondered, “How many kids have to be abducted, for us as parents to get it to our bleeding heads … that we are the guardians of our children’s well being and we should not even for a bleeding second compromise it!” And many responded anecdotally, like the woman who confided, “Once I left my 4 year old in the car, in front of a grocery store in small town while I ran in for a head of lettuce. When I came back … she was gone! I raced around the parking lot frantically, only to notice another woman parked in back of me with my daughter laughing away and waving. She said she wanted to scare me for doing such a stupid thing. She did! I never did THAT again!!!!”
If these commenters felt they had something to teach me about parenthood, others took a less patient, more excoriating tone. “What a bitch she is!!!!… She is a bad mother!!!… What a piece of shit mom. What a dumb, lazy moron. What a dumb cunt. Shame on her!! Shame on you. Shame on any woman who doesn’t want to take care of her own kids. What a horrible mother! Shame!”
And yet, in response to these comments, there were still others who not only came to my defense, but went on to point out the toxicity and cruelty of others’ judgment. One reader noted how “in my mother’s time, you sacrificed a significant portion of your life in order to raise kids. These days, it seems you’re expected to sacrifice your entire life. No thanks. Parents used to be responsible for providing basic necessities and keeping kids reasonably safe. Now parents deal with constant judgment up to and including people who want to throw you in jail for leaving your kid out of your sight for a few minutes. This is why I don’t have kids.”
As I skimmed the various Facebook page skirmishes that seemed to be igniting around my essay and the response pieces that cropped up in other publications, I realized that my story, unusual as it might seem, had tapped into a common and long-established tradition of mother-shaming, the communal ritual of holding up a woman as a “bad mother,”
a symbol on which we can unleash our collective, mother-related anxieties, insecurities, and rage. I guess, at some level, I had expected it. Sanctification and public shaming are two sides of the same coin. A culture can’t venerate and idealize the selfless, martyred mother as much as we do without occasionally throwing an agreed-upon bad mommy onto the pyre. I’d practically lit the tinder and sharpened the skewer for them.
What I hadn’t expected, however, were all the other “bad mothers” who reached out to me for support and guidance in the months after I published my essay, all the mothers who contacted me to say how grateful they were, because they had thought they were the only people in the world to whom this had ever happened, because they’d been so scared and so ashamed.
It turned out Sarah was right; there were more of us than I suspected.
* * *
The day it happened to Debra Harrell, she wasn’t worried and she wasn’t running late.
She wasn’t stressed out about catching a plane or buying a pair of headphones. For her, it was a day like any other day; she was up early, heading to the McDonald’s, where she’d worked every morning for the previous five years. Harrell was on the clock when it happened, trying to support herself and the nine-year-old daughter she was raising on her own, but the fact that she was working didn’t help her when a concerned citizen noticed Harrell’s daughter at the park, playing contentedly but without supervision, and decided to call the police.
Debra grew up in Atlanta. She moved to Florida as a young woman, married, became pregnant. By the time of the girl’s second birthday, it was clear that the marriage wasn’t working and Debra decided it was time for a change, time to go someplace new. She filed for divorce, packed up her daughter and all of their belongings, and took a bus north, back toward her home state of Georgia. Now that she had a child, she wanted to be close to her mother who still lived in Atlanta, but she decided against returning to the city itself. Raising a toddler, city life no longer appealed to her. She preferred the country—a small town where she could become friends with her neighbors, feel like a part of a community, give her daughter peace and quiet and space and fresh air. The two of them settled in the town of North Augusta, rented a small apartment in a complex where there seemed to be a lot of other families with kids. Debra didn’t have a car, so shortly after settling in, she walked down the street to a McDonald’s and applied for a job.
For five years she worked at the restaurant, first as a clerk and then as a manager. While she worked, her next-door neighbor, a woman who stayed home with her own children, watched Debra’s daughter. Eventually, her daughter started school. “She was always a good girl,” Debra told me. “Never any trouble. Lots of friends, an honor-roll student.”
The day that it happened, school was out, her daughter on summer vacation, which, as any working parent in this country knows, can be a logistical nightmare. American children often have ten, even twelve, weeks of summer vacation. Working parents often have two or three. In another era, parents might have relied on a network of extended kin, neighbors, or older siblings to keep an eye on vacationing kids who’d spend their days romping through sprinklers, playing sports, swimming, or exploring. But now, as K. J. Dell’Antonia noted recently in The New York Times, “in 2014, parents reported planning to spend an average of $958 per child on summer expenses … Those who can’t afford camps or summer learning programs cobble together care from family members or friends, or are forced to leave children home alone.”
Debra fell directly into that trap. On this particular day, her daughter didn’t want to stay home, where the neighbor could keep an eye on her. It was a beautiful day. Her friends and schoolmates were outside, attending day camp, going to the park. She wanted to join them. The park where many of her friends played was close to the McDonald’s where Harrell worked, about a mile away. It was a safe neighborhood, lots of kids, a big playground, water jets to keep cool; some volunteers from her church even brought snacks. Her daughter had a cell phone to call her mother if there was a problem, but Debra couldn’t imagine what kind of problem there would be beyond a scraped knee. And so she was perplexed when she received a call not from her daughter but from the local police department. The officer was calling from Richmond County Sheriff’s Department.
“What’s this about?” she asked them. “Is everything okay?”
He wouldn’t give her any information. He’d tell her only that the North Augusta County sheriff wanted to see her in the precinct.
By the time Debra arrived, she was terrified. She’d been frantically trying to call her daughter’s cell phone, but the phone was turned off. When she arrived at the precinct, she begged for information and was told that yes, her daughter was there, but she was not allowed to see her or talk to her. Her daughter was being held in a separate room, alone. Later, she would tell her mother that she’d assumed she had done something wrong at the playground and was going to be sent away to jail for it. Knowing her daughter would be terrified, Debra asked if her boyfriend or her neighbor could come pick the girl up. She was told this was not possible, that her daughter would be sent to foster care while the case was processed. After that, an officer told Debra that he wanted to hear from her what had happened, that he was going to film her and that she’d better tell the truth.
“I’ve got nothing to lie about,” she said. “Why would I lie?” The officer then interrogated her in a private room, without an attorney present, filming the interrogation. I watched this video long before I spoke to Debra. It was aired on a local news channel soon after I wrote about my own experience. In the video, Debra is sitting on a chair in a dark room. She’s crying, but she holds her voice steady, wipes her tears discreetly, her head bent forward.
“You’re her mother, right?” the officer says to her.
“Yes, sir,” Harrell answers.
“You understand that you’re in charge of that child’s well-being?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s not other people’s job to do so.”
“Yes, sir.”
He tells Harrell that workers at the “feed-a-kid program” at the park have reported seeing Harrell’s daughter there unattended several times. Harrell replies that she has not left her daughter “every day,” as she doesn’t work every day, to which the officer responds, “Don’t give me that one-day-only crap.”
“Yes, sir,” she answers. “Yes, sir.”
* * *
It is not possible to talk about the history of child-saving in America without also talking about race and class. When the officer interrogating Debra Harrell lectures her with almost palpable disdain—“You’re her mother, right? You understand that you’re in charge of that child’s well-being?”—it’s easy to imagine the kind of mother he sees before him: unemployed, dependent on state and federal benefits, maybe a substance abuser, maybe domestically abused; a dropout, multiple kids by multiple dads, none of whom are anywhere to be found. It’s likely he does not see a mother working full-time to support her daughter, a mother who has weighed the risks and benefits of her own limited options for childcare. Instead of a person, he sees a symbol, an easy scapegoat to stand in for the complex web of economic, educational, and racial inequality that led to Debra Harrell’s having so few options in the first place.
Unfortunately, there is nothing new about using child-centered sentiment as a cover for class-based hostility. The historian Paula Fass notes that it was after the Civil War that Americans first began to focus on the plight of threatened, neglected, and abandoned children, and to seriously question, “What after all was a child’s due, and what were society’s obligations to provide it? When did the interests of children override the authority of parents, and who determined this? What did it mean to be forced into an early adulthood, and how was this related to what Americans understood as a proper childhood?” By the end of the nineteenth century, rural to urban migration and industrialization stoked fears about the spread of “children of the streets”—the abuse
d, orphaned, undernourished, and exploited foundlings that came to be seen as a grave threat to modern, American life.
Charles Loring Brace, a nineteenth-century reformer, founded New York City’s Children’s Aid Society in 1853, an organization dedicated to saving children from “hereditary pauperism” as well as the criminal consequences of maltreatment, homelessness, and abandonment. The society is largely remembered for initiating the “orphan train,” from 1853 to the 1900s, an initiative that resettled more than 120,000 children from urban slums to new and more “suitable” homes in the West. Fass describes how, “in salvaging children from isolation and neglect, Brace and the Children’s Aid Society hoped in the long run to save American society from the criminal consequences” of maltreatment and indecency. In 1875, New York passed the Children’s Act, which aimed to remove children aged two through sixteen from poorhouses, including those who lived with their families. Reformers reasoned that protecting such children from the harmful influence of their parents was sufficient reason to break up families, and this trend continued through the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century, as “well-educated, well-connected, and well-raised” child-savers and reformers sought to teach the urban poor and newly immigrated how to better care for their children, and to rescue these children when their families did not prove up to the task. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, Fass writes, “the reconstruction of family life took place against a backdrop of abandoned children who were assumed to be the detritus of the new immigrant and working classes’ lack of responsibility … The new standards of the family were class standards, as the reformers incorporated class ideals into the very notion of family decency. Indeed, the middle classes defined themselves in terms of these distinctions embedded in the very nature of family life.”
As I read about these distinctions, I find myself recalling the conversation I had with David, my first lawyer, the night I returned to Chicago. “Listen,” he’d said. “Try not to worry too much. I don’t think you’re the person they’re after. You’re not the kind of mom they’ll throw the book at.”