by Tara Lasheen, ASW

ON SILENCE, PAIN, AND FAMILY

I work with young children and their families who are involved in the foster care system. Which is to say, each week I stretch from Vallejo to Daly City to meet with my clients on playgrounds, cement tops, sidewalks, under causeways, in broom closets in schools, hot cars, and public housing, sometimes while avoiding sprinklers in parks. They are always telling me, through play, body, and affect, about the unbearable pain they’ve endured “in the system.” Inching my way home in Bay Bridge traffic, I nurse doubts about the reparative potential of this work.

My work has offered me an uncomfortable glimpse into an assemblage of institutions, policies, and discourses that police the family. The systemic removal of children from their parents is one arm of this assemblage; abortion control is another. I worry that the recent dismantling of Roe v. Wade is less about abortion than it is about expanding the right to surveil and control families – all families, but particularly Black and Brown families – in new, horrific ways. 

It's eerie to hear Child Protective Service workers repeatedly cite concerns for the child’s “safety” as cause for removal, positioning themselves in such a way as to speak for the child. Similarly, the fallout of abortion bans will be to sequester the voice (i.e. attachments, needs, circumstances, fate) of the unborn baby away from its mother and to empower the state to appropriate it as the baby’s safekeepers. “Fetal personhood laws” effectively hand over the fetus-turned-property to the state, requiring the pregnant mother to do anything and everything to protect it, even at the risk of her own death, as Jia Tolentino points out in her recent piece entitled, “We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse.” Through technologies of silencing, the child becomes not a being in a family but a subject of the state from the moment of conception. 

The pain of all this is, to borrow Elaine Scarry’s words from The Body in Pain, “language-binding” and “world-destroying.” I see this in my clients’ play every day. At least we can play when pain renders words an impossibility. Because language develops from relationships, it is no surprise that communication delays are one of the first and most common symptoms in children with early caregiving disruptions. Words require trust in another. Silence can be generative and connecting, but in the wake of unfathomable injustice it is literally stunning. 

I will end with a short vignette taken from a moment of play with a seven-year-old child. Towards the end of our session, I ask if I can share an idea I had. He offers a reluctant nod. I say that I know that he has a lot of worries in life, like if Daddy is coming home and if Mommy is angry. Maybe he's created a world inside where there are no worries at all and he can be safe. He says an emphatic “Yes!” (a rare occurrence after I share anything) and continues, “I have a world that is full of rainbows and money and cotton candy.” He wants to show me what it’s like when he goes there. He closes his eyes, thrashes about, and shouts about the things in his world. I ask him if he goes there when things outside feel scary. “Yes,” he says, but when he goes there, he immediately forgets the scary things, he doesn't even know what they were.