Embarrassing Silence

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, discussing a This American Life episode about babies who were switched at birth and *remained* switched even though one of the mothers knew, that's relevant to... oh, all sorts of issues.

Unable to stand up for what she knows is true because her husband dismissed it, Mary Miller goes commando with the passive aggressive tactics, and it’s hard to blame her because she’s seeing her daughter raised by neighbors (the town this happened in is tiny) and she can’t do anything about it.  She drops hints and makes jokes to the McDonalds.  She sends her biological daughter cards with weird language about how she and the daughter she’s raising are “sisters”.  She apparently drops so many hints that everyone in her church knows about it, but of course, they don’t think it’s their place to do anything about it, and end up joining a semi-conspiracy of silence against the McDonald family. 

Mary Miller’s explanation for her passivity on this is heart-breaking.  She was sick, and thought she was going to die after the childbirth, but I don’t think that did much but delay the opportunity to reveal the mix-up for a few weeks, maybe months.  More to the point, when she brought it up to her husband, he immediately decided that it had to stay a secret because revealing it would embarrass the doctor.  As Mary puts it, that was that, because she simply couldn’t afford to resist her husband or cross him in any way.  She had 6 children at that point, and was dependent on him. 
Read the quote in context here.

What's significant to me isn't the bit about the mother. Or even that she was told "stifle yourself." Or even that she was stifled in her *doctor* might be embarrassed! Or even that her fucking husband was so alienated from his role as biological father of his own children that he was unconcerned that a child he was raising might not be his!!**

No, what's significant to me is that eventually her whole congregation knew about it, seemingly understood that it was a problem for a mother to knowingly raise one child while watching another family raise her own, and *still* didn't say anything to correct what, certainly early on, would have been an easily correctable mistake.

The other day I mentioned a broad problem of groups either making emblems of problematic members when they're confronted by outsiders, or, more often, permitting problems or problematic individuals to remain unconfronted rather than cause embarrassment for themselves or each other (let alone the embarrassing individual him- or herself.)

[** Put *that* in your pipes and smoke it, oh sociobiology/ev-psych adherents of the patriarchal/paternity gene theory of gender. If an actual pre-feminism, pre-60s *patriarch* didn't care who's child he was raising why allege human genetically-determined behavior so favors such a position today that egalitarianism in general and feminism in particular is doomed, doomed, doomed? --fl]