Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  NEURODIVERSITY AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  By the time my son was eleven, we had removed him from six elementary schools for a variety of reasons, some of which were related to bullying, and some of which were due to the school’s inability to come up with any sort of “resources” that would work for him. Now, I hail from Florida and I love my state, but here is what I tell people who have the misfortune of educating a special-needs child here: Move away as soon as possible. There are any number of states ranked higher in special education funding than Florida. Just pick one and go to it.

  In the spring of his kindergarten year, my son was barely verbal. He could not grip a crayon. He could not recognize letters. Auditory processing tests showed that his processing was so poor that he understood 20 percent of what was said. He had a diagnosis and an education plan in place, but no one seemed to notice how much help he needed, because he was handsome, he smiled and looked you in the eye, and he didn’t drool or spin or flap his hands.

  The school held a field day, though Lord knows why they don’t do these things in December when the weather is a little less dangerous. By spring, Florida can produce temperatures over ninety degrees with a heat index of over one hundred. The school had asked parents to pack bottled water and sunscreen and towels for their kids to sit on during this field day. Before they went outside that morning, the teacher told her class to get these things out of their cubbies. My son could not process this information and the teacher assumed his act of noncompliance was belligerence, so she let him go outside without them, and my son sat in the dirt all afternoon without his towel, without any water, and without sunscreen. When I picked him up, he was sunburned and limp, with red ant bites all over his legs.

  “What the hell happened to him?” I asked her.

  “This is what he gets when he doesn’t listen. Your son is very disrespectful,” she said. “I hope he learned his lesson.”

  “He has autism, you idiot. He needs help,” I said, and that’s when another teacher had to step between us. This is a small example of how badly the schools responded to our special educational needs, and it is also an example of a person who could not execute the most basic actions of self-preservation, and who still needs help to survive, both socially and physically, every day.

  Third grade was when my son first confessed that he wanted to kill himself. The kids were mean at his new public school, a borderline inner-city school that had the good fortune of hosting the “autism cluster” that did him no good whatsoever, because wherever he turned, a teacher would accuse him of not trying hard enough, or a student would kick him in the backs of the knees to make him fall down, or trip him in the cafeteria, or blow spitballs in his hair, or call him “faggot.” We left that school two days after his suicidal confession, using a scholarship to attend a private special-needs school that cost $24,000 per year.

  THE PASS AT THERMOPYLAE

  In 480 B.C., Spartan King Leonidas led a small number of Spartans and Greeks, reportedly under fifteen hundred in number, to hold off over four hundred thousand Persians at the pass of Thermopylae. It was supposedly a remarkable battle. Leonidas was told by the Delphic Oracle that either Sparta would be destroyed or he would lose his own life. Leonidas was so devoted to Sparta that he chose the latter, and the three hundred Spartans and some nine hundred Greeks inflicted high casualties on the enormous Persian forces before finally being encircled and losing their lives. This battle fascinates me. The force of desire versus the force of numbers, the betrayal, the last stand. I often think about that pass in that moment, the holding back of the troops pressing down on them, the bloody, rocky, scrubby earth beneath their feet, the battle screams, the rage they must have felt against their impending defeat.

  CURRICULUM VITAE

  My son was slow academically. He read no social cues, which left him with a large, invisible “Kick Me” sign on his back that every other kid in school could see. He didn’t understand the schoolwork, and seemed to have a virulent lack of motivation to do anything that was important to his future. We could not stir him to do a single act he didn’t want to do, and we tried rewards, punishments, incentive charts, even bribes. He didn’t care for the reward. Punishments were something to sit through until they were over. When we asked him why he didn’t want to do the most basic of things he said, “Because I don’t feel like it.”

  By this time, right before the hormones hit, my son had overcome his physical infirmities. He barely got colds, had never had strep or a puking flu. He was also pleasant and compliant. He had learned to smile brightly to disguise his confusion. He never talked back to authority figures, and he was friendly and extremely handsome. Adults loved to talk to him. He came across, and still does, as more capable than he is, which sets him up for disappointing people. As a result, perhaps as an act of self-preservation, he developed a prodigious ability to lie through his teeth about everything: what he did, what he said, what he understood, what he felt or thought. Once he figured out this skill, he used it regularly, even when he didn’t need to lie at all.

  When my son was nine, he watched a neighbor punch in her garage door code, then a few days later, when he thought the neighbor wasn’t home, used the code to let himself into their house. He stood in their kitchen, without any kind of plan, when the neighbor walked in on him and shrieked in surprise before marching him home to us.

  When he was ten he started masturbating in public. In school, in our family pool, in the living room of our home, in front of other children, on the summer camp bus when his sisters were present. When we asked why he continued to do this when he clearly knew it was wrong, he told us he did it “because he felt like it.”

  At eleven, we discovered that he had killed his friend’s hamster while over at the friend’s house, by squeezing it to death. When we confronted him, he admitted to having killed several other animals, mostly neighborhood children’s pet hamsters or rabbits, and twice, baby chicks at the feed store, quietly, when no one was paying attention, and he had also hurt our family dogs by squeezing their noses until they screamed. When we asked why he did this, he said, “Because I felt like it.”

  Immediately after this confession, he declared he wanted to kill himself. We had him admitted to the children’s psychiatric ward that night, where he stayed for five days. On his first night there, against my suggestion—for I had a keen understanding of this child’s impressive sensitivity to any sort of medication—they put him on a cocktail of psych meds that triggered hallucinations and frightening manic episodes as soon as the drugs soaked into his brain cells, right about the time he was released from the hospital and sent home to us. On his first night home, he said he still wanted to kill himself and he felt like doing it with a knife, so we locked up all the knives, and also our shoelaces, medicines, forks, rolling pins, kebab skewers, scarves, toothpicks, bug killer, and sports equipment, and I stayed up in the living room, expecting to intercept him at three A.M. on the hunt for a knife or a skewer to help him end it all. When I asked him why he wanted to kill himself, he said, “Because I feel like it.”

  The next morning, he talked about how he thought he could fly if he could get to the top of a tall enough building, and when I announced that I had misplaced my keys, he disappeared into my bedroom and flung all of my clothes out of the drawers and closet and onto the floor, looking for them. He also said he heard voices. I called the doctor simply to say, “I told you so.” Within two days of being off the meds, the mania and hallucinations disappeared. This was the same week that both of my daughters voiced concern for their own safety and each one independently mentioned that she couldn’t wait to graduate and get the hell out of our house.

  My son was released from the psychiatric hospital with a label of conduct disorder, a strange diagnosis for a child who never raised his voice or talked back, but it was given, the attending psychiatrist had said, because he could not legally diagnose my son as a sociopath until he was over the age of eighteen. He also told us to brace ourse
lves for a lifetime of violence, drugs, theft, and prison, and that there was nothing that could be done with “these kinds of people.” Sociopaths are damaged in the brain, he told us. No amount of therapy can make them feel anything but a continued drive to have their own needs met.

  When my son was fifteen we discovered a history of child pornography he had looked up on the Internet. A few years before we had come to the absurd place of being able to laugh about the experiences we had gone through with this child. We would say things like, “Well, he’s broken into someone’s house, but at least he didn’t start any fires.” When he grew attracted to fire, we would say, “At least he’s not killing animals.” When we discovered he had killed animals, we joked a horrific joke. We said, “At least he’s not into kiddie porn.” Somewhere during the discovery of the child pornography, something inside us died. We found we were unable to be shocked by anything. We can now talk about little kids being tied up. We can talk about a toddler getting a rim job. We have seen clips from videos of three-year-old boys being anally penetrated by fat, hairy, fifty-year-old men. We can talk about Japanese anime child porn, and the legality and morality of it. We know the Supreme Court’s stance on it. We know what kinds of people have gotten what kinds of prison sentences at what ages, for making child porn, for trafficking it, for downloading it. We can talk about murder of and cruelty to small mammals, because our son had told us how their eyes popped out of their heads when he squeezed them, and how the warm weight of them in his hands after their deaths made him feel: powerful. We have felt the frosty, cold horror, anger, resentment, and fear of two teenage daughters who slept with their doors locked, stopped bringing friends home, and left for college as soon as they could. We know what it is like to live under self-designed house arrest, tag-teaming our parenting, or bringing our son with us wherever we go, because the lines between his autism and his supposed sociopathy have blurred so we don’t know which is causing what. If we leave him alone in the house, he might find his way to the neighbor’s house and kill their cat, though he hasn’t displayed an interest in that for several years now, or molest their young son, which he says he would never do, but come on. We’ve seen what he is attracted to and we have seen how he has such poor impulse control that he can’t leave a gallon of lemonade alone in the refrigerator. He will drink the whole gallon in an hour and a half if left alone to do it, going back to the fridge over and over when no one is looking and pouring himself one small, surreptitious glass at a time until it is gone. He cannot stop himself.

  We put passwords on our computers and cell phones, and only allowed him to use the computer while we sat with him. When I noticed he was taking extended naps during the day, we found he had stolen our Wi-Fi password and used it to connect his game system to the Internet and looked at child porn in the middle of the night. We took the system away. He then looked up child porn while at his other grandparents’ house, using their computer. When we squashed that, he stole his sister’s old iPod touch, connected to Wi-Fi with it, and used it to watch porn. We had a fear of the feds busting down our door and arresting my husband, or worse, my son’s grandfather. One day when at the public library, I left my son alone for two minutes while I went to the bathroom, and I found him in the children’s section, looking at cartoons of naked kids in a potty training book.

  And still, because he didn’t choose to be this way, he requires compassion. He is a boy. He is a boy with autism. He is a boy with autism and focal seizures and brain damage. He is a boy whom I love. He is a boy for whom I have depleted myself, a boy who may or may not become dangerous, a boy who, had he been born in Sparta, would not have made the cut.

  A DISCLAIMER

  Here is the disclaimer I manage, out of compulsion, to slip into conversations I have with therapists, doctors, and attorneys. Lest you are wondering, because everyone does, though no one asks me directly, neither of my two daughters nor my two older stepsons have ever been in trouble with the law, with the exception of a rare traffic ticket. All are gainfully employed or in college full-time, socially accepted and acceptable, and are unusually contented, productive people, though my daughters are jaded from living with their troubled brother. There is not likely any social or emotional reason for my son to exhibit the behaviors he has. Like one doctor told us, “Sometimes you just get an unlucky roll of the dice.”

  HOW CAN YOU LOVE A SOCIOPATH?

  You do because he is yours and has always been. You do because you know he is more than the sum of his dangerous behaviors. You do because you know you didn’t raise him tied to a pole out in the backyard, or beat him, or tease him. You love him because when he says, “Because I felt like it,” he may have reached his depth of ability to articulate a complex emotional situation. You love him because whatever accident that tossed his brain happened to him as much as it did to you. None of this is his fault. You’ve seen the big, bright white hyperintensities on his MRI. You held him while he seized after his shots. You’ve seen the IQ test results, which are a stubble of points away from classifying him “intellectually disabled.”

  A SOCIOPATH’S PURPOSE IN LIFE

  We all need to know our life’s purpose. As a woman with many choices and a jack-of-all-trades attitude, I struggled for years to find mine. As a mother, I have nudged my children toward ways of thinking that would help them know themselves. As a member of a modern society, I am expected to support aborting Down syndrome babies, hell, even perfectly normal babies, yet rail against the institutionalization of mentally deficient citizens, because that would be wrong and because institutions are inhumane, though people don’t seem to realize that prisons have replaced mental institutions for many who would have once benefited from structured, medically managed living. As a mother of a special-needs child, I must figure out for my son what his purpose is, then help him do it, so he doesn’t end up in an institution. I suppose the question here, after I spend forty hours writing this paragraph, requiring respite from the concept itself, getting up from the computer and pacing through the house, eating cold meat straight from the refrigerator, my dogs hopeful on my heels, is: What is a sociopath’s purpose? What is this child’s purpose? How can I direct him toward a purpose when he has no desire for anything other than feeding his desires? I want to know his purpose, and just as important, I want to know how we are to keep on living like this, raising what could be a ticking time bomb, a kind, pleasant ticking time bomb.

  WHERE IS GOD IN ALL OF THIS?

  I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read the apologetics. I’ve talked to pastors, all of whom had healthy children. I’ve read the spiritual warfare theory. I’ve read the saints. I’ve read the rabbis. I’ve read the philosophers. Where is God in all of this? I have no idea whatsoever. It’s a problem.

  REGISTERING FOR SCHOOL

  On the first day at his new school, my son walks into the guidance office, shakes hands with the guidance counselor, and calls her ma’am. He wears black, fashionable glasses that make him look studious and clever. She asks him about his academic interests and he says he wants to go into medicine, so the guidance counselor, based on my son’s looks and countenance, begins to enroll him in college prep classes. I stop her. Tell her obtusely, without hurting my son’s feelings or embarrassing him, that we are thinking of para-medicine, perhaps patient transport, or certified nursing assistant, or phlebotomy, and that we have a specialized educational plan that we must follow, and she should probably take a look, here, right here, at the paper I slide across her desk. I point to his latest neuropsych evaluation, which reveals a processing speed score that, if it were a stand-alone IQ, would be a 54. “Oh,” she says. “Let’s take a look at some other options, then.” Part of my worry is illuminated by the fact that my son can snow anybody, at first sight, into thinking he is neurotypical. He shakes hands like a man, locks eyes, says please and thank you like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.

  THE FACTS

  No one has any advice. We have consulted neurologists, neuropsychologists,
psychiatrists, behavioral therapists, autism specialists, and experts in sociopathy, conduct disorder, and organic brain dysfunction. I have written letters to sexual deviance experts at universities. I have reached out to minor-attracted therapy groups and pedophile programs, and no one has told us anything of value, outside of certain medications that might put a damper on his sex drive, some of the same medications that caused him to hallucinate and go manic when he was younger. After our first bout of neuropsychological testing when my son was thirteen, the psychologist felt so sorry for us that he didn’t charge us the second half of the two-thousand-dollar fee. He told us we were going to need every penny we had for inpatient treatment, and perhaps lawyers to keep our son out of jail when he started breaking the law. When we asked about residential treatment, we were told that he hasn’t broken the law so he doesn’t belong in a state-funded institution, and therapeutic boarding schools, a temporary beacon at best, can cost up to $90,000 per year. Basically, we were told, home is the safest place for him.

  Here are some of the things I think about: What might I be doing wrong in his life that could make him snap? What lifestyle system could I design that would keep him from turning toward children for his sexual release? What can I do that I have not already done?