Serial Stupidity

Today's Doug Grow column presents a number of thorny questions.

It's a story many of us have heard before: 25 year old woman hooks up with a good-for-nothing layabout. She exhibits less than perfect common sense:

A short version of her view of their relationship: They had a child in Boston in 2000, married in his Russian home city, St. Petersburg, in 2001.

Leave out th globetrotting, and it's a story familiar in any trailer park in America.

The story turns tragic, yet stays the same:

There, they had a second child, who died -- under circumstances that aren't clear -- at the age of 15 months in 2002. Bree was the breadwinner for the family and for his parents. She worked long hours as an English teacher and doing public relations projects. He didn't work.

Oh, by the way, this doesn't happen in a trailer park. "Bree" has all the bona fides she needs to be "one of us" to Doug Grow and the MPR set:

Bree graduated, with honors, from Minnetonka High in 1993. She went on to graduate, with highest honors, from prestigious Wellesley College and then earned a master's degree in economics from Boston University, with high honors, of course.

Of course. And if someone has that much school, we have to identify with her, right?

But Bree, who turns 29 at the end of the week, has not lived happily ever after. She's living in a nightmare that began with love that quickly collapsed into an abusive relationship with a Russian, Mikhail Slobodkine. He also was an economics student at Boston University.

Grow goes on to absolve Bree:

Domestic violence cases are filled with questions that confound our notions of what is rational behavior. How can anyone get caught up in a relationship with a batterer?

Resolving the issues in these cases is never easy.

Resolving them isn't easy. But explaining them isn't rocket science. Let's recap:

• We start with the very archetype of the modern Minnesota woman - young, hypereducated, a west-suburban overachiever, the kind who just plain deserves to live happily ever after.
• She leaves Minnetonka, gets a big-league education.
• Meets a guy.
• Gets pregnant.
• Follows guy to, essentially, a third-world country
• Watches as guy falls apart
• Starts getting beaten. Spends the better part of three years getting pummeled. Stays with him, even has another child with him.
• Stays with him for nearly two years after their son dies under suspicious circumstances.
• Beatings get worse, until
• She flees Russia, leaving her daughter.
• Then she works on getting the kid out?

On the one hand, this piece has exactly the effect it's supposed to have. I'm a divorced parent. I've felt the throat-clutching fear of wondering if I was going to lose my kids through the ponderous stupidity of the legal system.

I also made damn sure I didn't give that system an excuse to screw me blue.

And while it's hard to say exactly what one will do in extremis, when the chips are down, one thing I'm fairly sure about; if I had a spouse who was trying to kill me, and who I believed had killed another child of mine, and I had another to protect - I'm fairly sure that I'd catch a later flight, and give that spouse a date with the wrong end of a baseball bat.

Easy for me to say? Bollocks. It should be easy for every parent to say. That it's not is one of the most truly horrifying parts of this story; since when are your children not something you fight, even risk you life, for?

And at the risk of falling into a stereotype - the hectoring conservative - this is where this story goes into the weeds for me. While I feel for "Bree's" loss, and the horror of her current situation, it would seem from Doug Grow's account that she has been irredeemably stupid at every turn. She got into a wretched relationship; we don't know the circumstances, but it has certain aspects in common with many similar stories that are common in America, from the trailer parks to the suburban high schools; dizzy little people (gender indeterminate) who enter into relationships for the most trivial of reasons, bring children into this world under horrendous circumstances, remain in the situation while the consequences harm them and the children, make trite and self-serving decisions all the way...

...and then expect to be insulated from the consequences.

As does Doug Grow. Damn the consequences - it's her daughter dammit; note the times Grow refers to Viktoria Slobodkine as "her daughter". Wrong, Doug: Viktoria is their daughter. And while Mikhail Slobodkine has been judged and sentenced in Doug Grow's column, the fact is that Bree Schuette left the girl with him. It's a key fact that decides the vast majority of less-dramatic custody cases in the US; the parent that leaves, loses. A very wise lawyer told me before my divorce - never leave. Never.

Doug Grow's efforts aside, I feel nothing beyond standard issue human compassion for Bree Schuette. It's her daughter that is allegedly in danger; Victoria did nothing to deserve this.

But Doug Grow grants her absolution, quoting a domestic-violence industry worker:

"This case demonstrates that domestic violence occurs across all aspects of society," Dusso said. "This young woman represents Minnesota's finest. She's from a nifty, suburban family. She's smart as a whip."

At the risk of sounding like Laura Schlesinger, no she's not. She's serially stupid; stupid about the men in her life, stupid about her choices, and finally, irredeemably, maybe irrevocably stupid about her daughter.

And she's trapped in a nightmare.

No. She got out.

Her daughter is the trapped one.

Posted by Mitch at June 17, 2004 05:06 AM