Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  It is a season when your children are as beautiful as they have ever been, though you thought nothing could be as beautiful as their babyhood. The flushed, salty cheeks, the hair sticking to the sweat on their necks, their knobby knees, bandaged fingers, their giant protective equipment that seems to dwarf them at the beginning of the season, but which looks perfectly fitted by the last game. The effort they give forth that makes you weep at times. If you are like me, you have cried while watching the two teams shake hands after a particularly difficult game.

  Your children are doing important work, even though it looks like they are playing games. They are building their bodies, learning how to move, learning how to listen, learning how to take a small desire such as “get the ball” or “stop the ball,” and turn it into a hunger to make something bigger happen. They are learning how to lose graciously, one of the most valuable of life skills, and if they have good coaches, they learn about devotion: to team, to coach, to someone other than self, and this is healthy. It helps them grow up to be the kind of children who won’t live in your basement after college.

  This is a time when the children still need you to show them how to be. They won’t always, and the assertion of this truth will be increasingly painful as time goes by, but for now, know that, even though they don’t thank you and they leave their God-awful, wet, stinking shin guards on the cloth upholstery of the minivan time after time, they need you to orient them in society. You are training two or three or four little people to grow up and be better versions of yourself, and this is one way to leave your mark on the world, to time travel and leave part of yourself for future generations you won’t live to experience. It’s a marathon of slow growth.

  You can see this growth transform them, sometimes from week to week. One day, you will see the coach introduce a skill and your child will fumble with it like a puppy, yet improve bit by bit, until one day during a game, when the pressure is on, you will see the child execute the thing perfectly, exactly the way she was taught. Later, you will see the quiet pride on the child’s face when the coach praises her for it in front of the team.

  If you are like me, the first time you realize that the effort you invest in making these activities happen is a finite thing, and that one day it will go away, it stops being a chore, and begins to be something precious, like oxygen. You watch them with a different eye while they repeat the same drills for weeks, running, jumping, getting knocked over, failing, laughing, weeping, building friendships, pushing their limits, and for a brief while, all things considered, there is no limit to the hope vested in these beautiful young people of yours. The ones who sit with quiet anxiety during breakfast before a game are the same ones who sing “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” at the top of their lungs in the back of the minivan after the game, and you see sublime work happening here—a slow burn of something transformative—and you think as you shove the balled-up, sweaty gear into the washing machine one more time, that like with all things parenting, it’s not about you. It never was.

  THE DRESS

  Perhaps she is walking home, from work or from school, and she spies a ripped box filled with rolls of old plaster, half buried in a pile of garbage in a back alley. Maybe she picks it up and takes it home to her family’s apartment. Maybe she is forced to work sewing cheap tracksuits after school and on weekends, or maybe she has quit school to do this because her family needs the money. Maybe she has moved from her village to the big city, signed a contract to work, and hates the work, yet she is unable to escape it. Maybe she is living in near slave conditions, or maybe she is just the daughter or granddaughter of a seamstress who has learned how to sew because that’s what the women in her family have always done. Maybe she likes it.

  My first daughter was born with a drive to achieve. If you forget the part where she exhausted me from the moment she was conceived because my body took to a tenant about as well as I would take to a tenant in my home now, she was an interesting challenge. Precocious, they said. She spoke her first word in the bathtub at four and a half months—“tu-tu,” after I poked the floating plastic tub toy and said “turtle” sixteen times. She walked at eight months and two weeks, and though people might see this as a positive, it wasn’t necessarily. Children who skip the crawling and move straight to walking miss critically important cross-lateral movment that engages both sides of the brain. Plus, they are wild and unsteady, flinging themselves through space and time like little drunkards without the muscular development in the upper body to save themselves when they fall. If memory serves, she sported a split lip for a good three months until she got the hang of staying upright.

  She demanded books as a baby. Many of them per day. Since we didn’t let her watch television until she was older, we read a lot. If I tried to get creative with the language in a book she knew by heart, she would correct me until I got it right. She spoke in full, complex sentences at around age one. By the time preschool started at two and a half, I was relieved to drop her off somewhere, even if it was only three days a week for three hours a pop. I was grateful for the silence, and when twelve o’clock rolled around, I wasn’t always ready to pick her up.

  By third grade she was in the “gifted program,” which in Florida just meant extra homework, slightly more engaged teachers, and a better-behaved group of peers. She came home one day, dropped her Powerpuff Girls lunch box on the kitchen counter, and hissed through her teeth that she was going to get into a “top college.” I was amused.

  “What’s a top college?” I asked her.

  “A top college is one of the best colleges, which is exactly where I will be going. The best. Not like this stupid public school that doesn’t even recognize that when someone has a different idea for doing something, it doesn’t mean she should get in trouble for it. Sometimes different ideas are better. They don’t understand me. I want to punch my teacher.” She faced me with fists, her tongue pressing through the holes her missing teeth left behind.

  “I’ve had that feeling before,” I said, backing off slowly. “Can I help you?”

  “No. I’m going to do all my homework now. All of it. And it’s going to be perfect. I’ll show them.” She sat down at the kitchen table and slammed the cover of her math book open. “And you know what else? When I grow up, I’m going to leave this place. I’m going to move to Europe or Russia. I’m going to claim my rightful place as Russian royalty. I have Russian royal blood in me, I can feel it.”

  “Not one molecule of you is Russian,” I said.

  “Then forget Europe. Forget Russia. I’m going to move to France.”

  “France is in Europe, honey.”

  “Forget that, then. Paris.”

  “Paris is in France.”

  “See what I mean? They don’t teach you anything at this stupid public school!”

  * * *

  This daughter seemed to learn best by debate, and by debate, I mean “fighting people with words until she made them cry.” During mock trial in middle school, she made a boy, who knew he was acting a role, weep on the witness stand. I cried three times a week just dealing with her at home. This was a child on fire.

  By high school, she had blood in her eyes. She took as many AP classes as she could, lettered in two sports, joined clubs I hadn’t even heard of, clubs you couldn’t have paid me to join if I had ever had the misfortune to relive high school. She ran for class president and crushed it. When it came time to apply to colleges, she did what she said she was going to do when she was still missing teeth and wearing her hair in Afro puffs—applied to eleven top schools, and got into ten of them. She chose the one that gave her the most funding—an alarmingly selective private liberal arts college in the northeast. The kind of school whose brochure made me break out in hives of incompetence. The kind of school where people wore ascots and didn’t need safe spaces because they had drivers and summer houses. When she went away to school, everyone in the house was exhausted. We were a little bit relieved that she was gone. Our plain Florida
town wasn’t meant to hold her. Her future looked the kind of bright none of us had ever achieved: undergrad at a top school, then a top-ten law school, then perhaps a think tank or some policymaking down the road.

  The only bump in the road, one we hadn’t planned on, was the boy.

  What if, so far away, she learned a running stitch by sewing two mismatched pieces of cotton together, then cutting off the tip of the knot, and reusing both the thread and the fabric to do it again and again, until the stitches looked as if a machine had made them? What if she learned this before she could read? What if this was play for her: producing straight stitches like a row of ducks following their mother, morphing into children playing tag in a zigzag stitch? Then graduating to a whip stitch, a high-risk visible stitch that gave her a small thrill when executed perfectly, the identicality, the cadence if you will, of each small stitch folding into the fabric in just the right place. One exactly like another, like tiny soldier spines. Almost hypnotizing. Then slip stitching spare zippers into slippery cuts of satin, just for the practice, and finally, when she was eight or nine, sitting down in front of the sewing machine she had never before been allowed to touch.

  The summer before she went away to college, my daughter met a boy. He was a few years older, had already finished college and was well into law school, so calling him a boy might be a bit demeaning. He was a nice guy. Handsome. Earnest. He met my daughter for coffee one afternoon and they agreed to meet again.

  The next few weeks were bumbling. The two of them acted like cute caricatures of people falling for each other. My daughter developed a skill of poring over outfit combinations for hours, then appearing from her bedroom as fresh as if she had just grabbed something from a pile and tossed it on. It looked effortless but the pre-date clothing angst I witnessed proved it was not. The two would watch television together, or, because they were poor, they would go on picnics and read. At night, they liked to take walks. When he came over to pick her up, I noticed he draped his arm over her shoulder like he would a fence post, and sometimes he would knead her neck with one hand, almost as if he were guiding her, or perhaps choking her. I filed this away.

  When she went away to school in the fall, their distance caused more than a geographical rift. My daughter wanted to meet new friends, and go to social events, which made her boyfriend suspicious, and he grew afraid she was going to leave him. There would be bigger problems later, as there often are, but for now, the distance between them worried him, and stressed her out, to where she would call me nearly in tears before a Skype session.

  “I know how you can fix this,” I would say.

  “How?”

  “Break up with him. You’re too young for a long-distance relationship. You’re supposed to be having fun.”

  “I can’t have fun. I love him.”

  “Well, if he loves you as much as you love him, he’ll wait for you to finish college.”

  “I think he thinks I will meet someone else.”

  “I think that’s kind of the purpose of college, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to meet anyone else, Mom. I love him.”

  Maybe one night, after everyone is asleep, she folds her hair into a bun and molds the plaster around her nude form, pressing the white, cold, wet strips over and around her shoulders, under her armpits, across her breasts, her stomach, her hips, her upper legs, shaping the proof of herself, then after it dries hot and tight and itchy, she cuts it away, ripping the plaster from her young ribs like a first breath. She tapes it back together, and fills it, then covers it in cheap muslin stolen from a discard pile in the living room, pinning it carefully to her new self. She hangs the replica of her torso on an old IV pole, her pretend breasts the height of her real ones. She has made a dress form. She begins to sew her own designs.

  There is something I’ve seen happen to men when extremely beautiful women are within their grasp. They can get paranoid. They can fear being dumped. They can lose whatever confidence attracted the women to them in the first place, and they can become possessive. I haven’t experienced this personally, of course, but my daughters have. This young man was the kind of smitten that can only occur when the woman you are in love with is painfully lovely, extremely intelligent, and living in a college full of age-appropriate intellects fourteen hundred miles away. I think he was afraid of her getting away, so he bought a ring. It was exquisite. A perfect diamond solitaire in platinum. Then he did the old-fashioned thing: He asked my husband and me for her hand in marriage.

  We said no.

  In fact, I remember saying something like, “No! No! No! Please don’t. At least not yet. My lord, she just turned nineteen a few weeks ago! Her college is ranked third in the nation. She’s in a hard major. It’s only three and a half more years until she graduates. If it’s love it will wait.” Knowing full well that this child of mine couldn’t cook a meal, couldn’t balance a checkbook, and was so wracked with anxiety over the strategic social steps required to date this boy that she couldn’t communicate honestly with him, I was pretty sure that a marriage would push her over the edge. Note: She would be able to feed herself nicely within a year or two, and not only would she balance a checkbook by her sophomore year, she would be publishing economics essays, but that’s simply an anecdote to illustrate that at nineteen, this person was not ready to be a wife. Marriage is hard enough without thwarting your academic and professional dreams.

  He whisked her away during the first few days of her first semester break, just before Christmas—frantically, it seemed, as it involved a late-night pickup from the Orlando airport, and a drive, during bad weather and a cold snap, to St. Augustine, where both of his parents were waiting to watch him pop the question. There was a sparkling gelding pulling a carriage shaped vaguely like a pumpkin. And cameras. The ring gleamed like My Precious. It fit my daughter’s finger as if it had been made for it, though people should never see a thing like this as a sign. Sometimes rings just fit right. The young man was handsome and full of promise. She couldn’t communicate honestly with him, so she said yes. Of course.

  So I spent Christmas explaining to our friends and relatives why I was allowing this child, who was over eighteen and didn’t need my permission for anything, to get married and throw her future away. I spent a lot of time shrugging. There were no answers I could give without making us all look bad.

  Despite her own quiet misgivings, my daughter spent the holidays floating six inches off the ground, leafing through bridal magazines, and extending her hand in the air above her head to admire her rock against the bright blue Florida sky. When you caught her unawares, she covered her mouth with her hand and giggled, and this child had no previous history of being a giggler.

  Rushing a bad thing never makes it better. The two set a date; once again, against our desires. We had recently recovered from our oldest kid’s college expenses, to which, I am sorry to say, we were unable to contribute as much as he deserved. This child, my stepson, was bright and athletic and did his fair share with athletic scholarships and hard work. His younger brother, equally as sharp and athletic, chose the military instead of college, but we still had two college-bound daughters, as well as another son to finance. I was in the middle of graduate school, so to say that we were in a position to pay for a wedding would be like saying we were in a position to take a hot air balloon tour through Europe and Asia. But love, even the idea of someone else’s love, makes people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. We said we would help, though by doing this, a part of me felt like I was kissing my daughter’s future good-bye.

  With my daughter away at school, and studying forty hours per week while also not knowing jack squat about vetting vendors or photographers or wedding locations, the planning fell to me. I didn’t mind it, but if this wedding was going to be up to me, it would be modest. We decided that we would contribute three thousand dollars, and encouraged them to book a low-end venue on an off day. If they were truly in love, the wedding venue and all the trappings would
n’t matter. I reminded them of my grandparents, who had held their reception, which featured cookies and punch, in their church basement at eleven o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday. My grandmother had worn a two-piece skirt and jacket—her nicest—and my grandfather had worn a work suit. Then my grandfather went off to war, but that’s not the point. The point is you don’t have to spend a bunch of money on a dumb party when the marriage is what matters most. We could get a nice cake from the grocery store, and do something cheap with bales of hay and canning jars and baby’s breath. We could do our own food with BBQ, vats of Southern mac-n-cheese, metal pans of salad and baked beans. The signature drink would be lemonade from a mix. My daughter could get a simple dress, perhaps a used one. Maybe a rental.

  She starts with blouses, because she believes them to be simple. She learns the princess stitch, and fits the blouses to her shoulders and breasts perfectly, high-collared necks and perfectly fashioned wristbands in subtle colors, drawing attention to the fine bones in her hand, the angle of her jaw, in a way her mother does not like. She is beginning to set herself apart from others in this way, and she is told to stop. She sews tops and skirts for her mother’s friends for extra cash. She works cheaply and stays busy, for the college entrance exam scores are skewed in favor of men, and she never performed well in school, anyway. When she has saved enough, she buys a bolt of bright white satin, half a bolt of silk, some stark white tulle as rough as sandpaper. She copies the dresses she sees in back issues of bridal magazines. She learns to control the fickle nature of charmeuse, the whine of georgette, the romantic longings of light cotton batiste, the serious weight of damask. At first she copies only the simplest dresses, fitting each to her own dress form. Each dress slips onto her perfectly and the possibilities dance in front of her eyes, though a marriage of her own will not likely happen. There simply aren’t enough men in her town. If only she had some beads. And maybe a Web site …