I am a woman with three children. I am not a criminal: I am not any of the things you've been told I am.

Off Our Backs, Feb 1995 by Wink, Jodeen

The child protection lady is very thin with a sassy, but tailored hair cut. She wears gold button earrings, teal eye shadow and a pale shade of frosty pink lipstick. She has no breasts that sag or rumple her straightness. She wears black leather shoes with only a smidgen of heel and black cotton/polyester suit pants under a camel brown trench coat. She smells like Avon perfume: Topaz. This woman has no children, but she does have a Master's degree and a nice manicure. If you're ever around the Social Service building and you ask her male co-workers about her, they'll say she looks really hot when she goes out to the bars on Saturday nights. I try to imagine the shift -- try picturing her in a racy mini skirt, dusky hose and heels.

But it doesn't matter what kind of garb she's cloaked in. She's an inquisitor. She has a job to do. And right now she's standing in my kitchen telling me that my neighbors are suspicious...I mean concerned, and she is scary, especially talking about the removal of my children as if it were no more than a matter of a day's work. She never smiles. She glances around the tidy house with its rooms that -- now that I think of it -- absolutely reek of Glad "Potpourri" and Pinesol, and she's disappointed. I can tell because I notice she's sucking in her cheeks: the Daton's facial cracking a bit around the edges. My oven-cleaning hands sweatily grip the edge of the bleached counter top. I wonder what on earth is appropriate to say or do at times like these.

"Well, this isn't so bad." she says, and my forty excess pounds lighten a little on the soles of my almost new loafers from Good Will. My fatty breasts droop like the ears of mutt dogs and perspire in their creases. I'm suddenly glad I elected to shave my legs two days ago. I'm happy about the house. I'm happy about brushing my hair!

We've been told you keep dirty house. That doesn't appear to be true. Is it true?"

"No. It's not true."

"Never?"

"I guess, sometimes...I mean, it gets kind of dirty sometimes."

"Well I'm going to stop back from time to time, unannounced, and check on it. Do you mind if I look in your children's bedrooms?" I let her see the children's bedrooms and she tells me the place looks pretty good, but I could try to keep a few of those stuffed toys picked up a little better. Then, because she's been sent out of concern for the children, she wants to look at the children.

She finds them healthy: no lice, no impetigo, not even a common cold. They have no bed sores, or rope burns, or cigarette burns; no bruises, welts, lash marks, nor any blatant signs that mother is a flesh chewing psychopath, and finally she's satisfied to leave.

I spend the next month thinking about that anonymous person. Was there really an anonymous caller? And if so, who the hell would put me through such crap? Did the child protection worker make all of it up? Was it a mandate from the Governor from hell that she go out and terrorize a few lousy welfare mother per month? Am I crazy? I spend the rest of my life fearing her threats to return and cleaning the house like some kind of Donna Reed worshipping freak.