Blogging, Anonymity, Trolls and Hatred of Motherhood

T0rina has just had to make Busy Intersection private because of a troll.

I've seen this happen before. Navigating the Maze is another foster care blog that closed to the public.

In a different but related happening, at Heart, Mind and Seoul (a blog by a transracial adoptee blogging honestly and forthrightly about racial issues) the blogger had someone threaten her children. She went private but then came back public.

All of this makes me so angry, and at the same time fearful.

I'd advise anyone connected to my blogging community: take as many precautions as you can. Heart, Mind and Seoul once used her real name. Busy Intersection posted multiple pictures. Pictures focus the attention of trolls and reveal vulnerability. It's like a deer flashing their underbelly to a wolf. Then again, Navigating the Maze stringently followed anonymity rules, and still got zapped. I'm not blaming any of these people for being victimized, I'm just trying to find a pattern and analyze the situation and predict the behavior of their attackers.

I don't use my real name or the real name of anyone I know. I don't post pictures. I do give my location, which is a major vulnerability. At first I thought it wouldn't be a problem, since I live in a county with a population of 700,000. However, two totally separate people have recognized my real life identity from my blog. After all, I'm an Asian hapa woman with a white husband and a black son. That's pretty damn conspicuous. The world is smaller than one might think. But I can't hide my racial vulnerability without removing the entire reason for this blog to exist.

Other things I do: last year, I changed a setting in Blogger that makes my posts not come up near the top of Google searches. I was getting too many hits from people looking for stuff like my collard green recipe. I comment a lot at Racialicious and have guest-posted there and Rachel's Tavern, but in future, I'm not going to link back to my personal blog. I enjoy participating in some really controversial topics at anti-racist and feminist sites, but I think I might need to change my nickname and not guest-blog or comment anymore as "atlasien".

Trolls love to vampirically suck as much mental energy as possible from their victims. I'm already a victim just because of all the time-consuming crap I listed above. For anyone interested in finding out more about troll psychology and strategies, check these two articles: one a deceptively light-hearted but insightful list, and the other a long journalistic investigative report.

There's a special kind of troll that attacked T0rina (and by attacked, I mean threatening to report her to CPS for having a "bad attitude" and a "potty mouth"). I've noticed they seem to always be men. They're motivated not by nihilistic sadism, but by a warped sense of righteous anger. They have the virgin/whore complex applied to mothers: the perfect mother/bad mother dynamic. The perfect mother is endlessly self-sacrificing, has undying love for her children and exists only so much as she loves her children. Nothing as corruptible as mere human nature would ever threaten her identity as a perfect mother.

The bad mother is anyone who is not a perfect mother. Bad mothers need to be put in their place and ground into the dirt. A lot of them are of the wrong race, or the wrong sexuality or the wrong social class. They don't deserve to have children.

Bloggers like T0rina -- prolific, honest, comprehensive -- perform an invaluable service for current and prospective foster care parents. She is parenting a child with RAD, FASD, cerebral palsy and sexual predatory behavior. A child with severe special needs that will probably never love her back. Her experience reinforces a very important truth: love is not enough. This is something that got pounded into us during our foster care training. They even had each one of us pour water into a cup with a hole in the bottom. "The water is your love. The cup is your child. What happens if the hole isn't closed by the time the water runs out?"

The answer is commitment. I'm much more of a selfish American than I am Japanese, and I'd be miserable in Japanese society, but I do really appreciate the value that Japanese place on commitment, duty and obligation. According to the fuzzier American pop-psych thinking, the right thing to do is feel, and you have to feel what's right. This ideology fails miserably when it comes to caretaking. If you love and love and don't get any love back, your love is not going to stay the same... because we're human beings, not freaking robot love fountains. You have to have something else that keeps you going, and by extension, keeps your child going.

One of the most difficult parts of being the parent of a special needs child is how much it isolates you. One of my friends told me, a few minutes after meeting Sunny, "he's just a normal 6-year-old!" and kept repeating how wonderful, happy and healthy and normal he was. I live in a more complex reality, but she doesn't want to hear about it.

And my case is easy. Sunny's special needs are not severe. He has some anxiety, some irritating behaviors; at infrequent and not-unpredictable intervals, he'll freak out and try to punch me in the face. Otherwise, he soaks up love and gives back love... it's not hard to be proud of my son and happy when he's around.

Parents of special needs children find online communities literally life-saving and life-changing. Finally, there are people who will listen. People who can give advice and suggest therapies and tell you you're not crazy and a bad mother for feeling or thinking the things you do. People like T0rina who explain how commitment works and what it looks like.

I'm not saying they're utopias. I've written before about online communities that create group-think, and an attitude that everyone is above criticism. I've given advice before (to international adoptive parents) that was received as an attack on someone's motherhood when it really wasn't. But giving someone honest advice, or criticizing certain institutional practices of parenting and child welfare... this is not the same as telling someone they are a bad mother and should have their children taken away because they don't fit your deranged fantasy of a perfect mother.

Adoptive parents of children from foster care do need to be held to a higher standard. But this higher standard should not be about us, or our value as human beings... it should be focused on the children. Not "am I good enough?" but "am I good enough to raise this child?" This is not about what we are, or even what we feel, it's about what we do. A child doesn't care about your individual moral worth or deservingness. That's not a step on Maslow's hierarchy.

Being involved in this world long enough will usually make you less judgmental of any kind of parent. For example, my sister-in-law's parenting choices are ones that often make me cringe. She feeds my 7-year-old niece a steady stream of soda and Cheetos and lets her play Grand Theft Auto all day on the weekends. But my niece is also safe, and loved with a fierce commitment. If only all children were so lucky... for the first years of his life, my son was not.

Everytime I hear of a troll attack like this, it reminds me of an experience I had in my childhood.

I was 11, and I was alone at home. I'd had dinner with my grandparents. My mother was out on a business trip and would not be returning until 9pm. I'd been trusted to stay home alone for a few hours.

The phone rang. I picked up and said hello. A man with a deep voice breathed heavily for a few seconds. He said "little girl, I'm coming to get you" and then hung up.

I called my grandfather, but I was so scattered when I talked to him on the phone, he didn't understand the urgency. I thought about walking twenty feet over to the neighbor's house, but the man might "get me" on the way there. So I turned off all the lights, grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen and crouched hidden under the desk next to the front door. If he came in that way, I'd at least go down fighting. I crouched under the desk, holding the knife, quietly crying and shivering, for the next half hour, until I heard the most welcome sound in the world: my mother's bracelets jangling as she walked up the sidewalk towards the front door.

The man who called on the phone got a fleeting amount of pleasure, took no risk, and made me experience some of the worst fear of my life. It's a simple equation. It taps deeply into the corrupt part of human nature, and I wish I knew the cure.