Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

BETTER LIVING THROUGH MODERN MEDICINE

  A mere hundred years ago, my son’s first pneumonia might have killed him. His cleft palate would have been unable to be repaired, leaving a hole into his nose that left his ears vulnerable to infection, which might have killed him. Many people in my family might not have made it to adulthood without modern medicine, myself included. Medical advances have put a stop to a natural form of eugenics, that of letting diseases cull weak children before they had a chance to grow up. Now, thanks to science, children who once would have died young will live for years, sometimes requiring group homes and government funding, either in the form of Medicaid, disability payments, and Social Security, or “support” in the form of incarceration for the rest of their lives, though the funding is never enough to stop the constant financial and emotional drain severely damaged children create. Also, there is often no place to live until they commit a crime or require hospitalization. After discovering what my son is capable of, after watching his own early sickness and recoveries from illness and surgeries, after his struggle through therapies, social failure, and educational failure, after learning of his frightening deviant inclinations, is it wrong to have thought, however briefly, if it would have been better to have the marbled men in togas come and take him away? We’re not only talking about my son here; we’re talking about the potential damage of innocent children, the kind of damage that can’t be undone.

  A QUICK NOTE

  Both my son’s history and the promise of his future are exhausting. Since he has been born, I have not slept well. I have developed three autoimmune diseases. The level of stress we live under is almost too much to bear at times. I find that even while writing this essay, I can only write for twenty or thirty minutes before becoming stupefyingly drained, as if I myself had staved off the Persians at Thermopylae pass. I must nap every few pages. Even writing this is a battle. Yet, I love him with a two-fisted grip. A fierce love.

  IF I HAD BEEN A SPARTAN MOTHER

  If I had been a Spartan mother I would have physically trained for motherhood in order to produce the finest, strongest of sons. I would have run holes in my sandals, I would have thrown a javelin many meters past the target and into the woods, I would have spun a discus to the farthest clearing. I would have squatted, over and over, with rocks on my shoulders to strengthen my hips and legs. If I had been a Spartan mother, my husband would have come home from battle to find me on the riverbank, washing my cooking pots, and he would have taken me on his shield, his beard scratching my face, his sweat smell grinding into my pores. I would have prayed to Zeus to conceive a fine son who would go into battle for Sparta.

  My son would have wrestled the dogs in my yard until it was time to send him away, on the land I purchased with my own money and operated while my husband was at war. I would have ignored him when he cried. I would have prepared him for his hard life by spanking him when he was disobedient, and he would have learned to mind me. He would have obeyed, for in obedience there is both honor and the greatest freedom.

  I would have willingly given my son to the state, knowing that the action of letting go is what would shape him into the most supreme of warriors. In his teenage years, I would have seen him with his mentor, high on a hill, his thick hair blowing in the wind, his purple phoinikis cloaking his strong, muscular legs. I would have seen a set in his jaw there against the horizon line that foreshadowed the resolve it would take for him to kill to protect Sparta, or to die for her. There on the hill, I would see a foreshadowing of the man he would become and I would ache for him, yet I would be nearly vicious in my pride. I would turn my back on him, then walk into the woods by the river and howl the howl of a wolf, part anguish, part ferocity, part joy.

  The unpoetic reality of this foray is that in Sparta, the council would have examined my newborn and deemed him unfit, would have pulled him from my arms and prepared to take him. I would have heard the words “Mt. Taygetus” murmured under a dirty cloak, from under a filthy beard, and I might have begged, “Please, I understand. I have not done my duty. I have not borne a strong son. Let me kiss him good-bye,” and I might have reached for my soft, sweet-smelling child, my weak son, with his blue skin and his crooked neck. I might have snatched him and run, as I was trained to run, faster than the dogs could track me. I might have. Who knows if I would have abandoned my state for my son?

  Knowing what I now know about what his future holds, what his life will be like, the struggles he has already had, the alienation and sadness … would I have allowed him to be taken from me and laid out on the cold rocks for the eagles to pluck out his eyes and feed his flesh to their young? Would I have kissed him good-bye for the sake of society? Knowing what I know about child sexual abuse, about criminal pedophilia, about the unlikelihood of my son’s brain ever being different, I have to think of things honestly. Knowing what I know now, I might have said yes.

  Are some people better off dead? Unless you are at a college party and have done the kind of drinking that allows you to shout philosophical debates over a booming sound system, this is hard to talk about. For a mother, it is a near-criminal thought, yet, I understand the desperate, empty apothetae some parents find themselves near when they try to imagine a humane end to their child’s severe suffering, or in rare cases like ours, an assurance that the child they created and raised will not hurt anyone. We have to remember that Sparta didn’t mercy-kill for the sake of the child. Sparta mercy-killed for a stronger, better, safer Sparta.

  A SPECIAL KIND OF CLUB

  In March of 2014, Michigan mother Kelli Stapleton attempted to take the life of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Issy. Issy, who is strong and heavy, has a degree of autism that compels her to violently attack her caregivers, teachers, siblings, and parents. Issy had hospitalized her mother twice with her violent acts, and had recently been rejected from several treatment programs that would have offered hope to her family. Issy’s family was constantly fighting insurance companies and school systems to find an educational situation that would accept their child, a treatment facility that wouldn’t boot them out. Near the time when the murder/suicide attempt occurred, Issy’s mother was being forced to bring her daughter home from a facility that had once offered them their only hope. Kelli Stapleton, with a mother’s understanding of how little things were likely to change for Issy, was facing a future of physical danger for herself and her other children, violence, and the kind of hopeless unrest brain damage can bring to an entire family. I imagine that, without any sort of societal resources, without any hope of help from an expert, because there are no experts in this instance, Kelli Stapleton was at the end of her rope. I do not feel as horrified as many people seem to be by the murder/suicide attempt. I understand why she did it quite clearly, and from one exclusive club member to another, I have sympathy for her situation and will not call her a monster.

  Anyone who condemns Kelli Stapleton should remember that the woman tried to kill herself, too. She wasn’t simply attempting to murder her daughter. She saw no future for her daughter, and as a mother, would rather die than watch her daughter face no future, and as a mother, could not die and leave the uncertain future of her difficult daughter to someone else. Some would see it as a mercy killing, a flinging of the child into the apothetae, because she saw no way for this child to positively impact anyone in the world.

  People who do not have children with autism, brain damage, or other severe conditions do not understand what families of these children, not to mention the children themselves, go through. I know what it can lead you to do, how it can depersonalize your thinking to where you feel like you can’t go on and both you and your child would be better off dead.

  I understand the Spartans for wanting to eliminate weakness. I understand people who believe in this; it is tempting and easier than doing what we do. Sometimes I can understand this easy way out, but I love my son with a weakness and a fierceness at the same time. I want to reject that doctor’s bleak prediction of his future. I want to rejec
t that he is headed for prison. I want to reject that he is attracted to death, dismemberment, autopsy videos, and sex with young boys. I try, day after day, to find the right way to do things, thinking that if we find the right way, we can keep him from breaking the law. This, of course, assumes that we have not yet discovered the “right” way, and also that there is a right way. Perhaps there isn’t one, though when I say we’ve tried everything, I believe myself.

  Recently we saw a new doctor who suggests that my son’s executive functioning ability, the part of his brain that gives him self-control, may develop to a point where he could be functional somewhere in his late twenties. If this is true, we would only have to figure out how to keep him and others safe until then. Will he kill or hurt another animal? Not sure. It’s been some years since he’s done it. He claims he is finished with it. Would he harm a child? There is no telling. He is driven by a sexual desire for young children, and he has damage in the area of his brain that controls even the most basic impulses, so I would have to assume, for the sake of the children, that yes, he could, given any sort of chance. To be on the safe side, we keep a line-of-sight contact with him at all times, steer him toward work that will not allow him access to children, and are trying hard to develop a sense of routine in his life that makes him so comfortable that he will not wish to step outside of it.

  THE HAPPY SOCIOPATH

  Sociopaths are not all evil. Some of them, friendly, harmless, parasitic ones, are stilled by simply giving them the things that make them comfortable: good food, an easy job, and pleasant recreational activities. And at this point, I am sending my son to live with someone who loves him differently than I do right now, me with my heavy, burdened, and sometimes hopeless expectation that nothing I do will change him, nothing in my power can ever make him be whole in the mind, can ever give him a conscience. I have sent him to someone with a fresh heart who still has faith that good will come of him. Meanwhile, I catch my breath from sixteen years of nearly daily anguish. I recharge my batteries and get ready for when it is my turn again. Our son will likely live with us for the rest of our lives. Who knows what will happen after we are dead?

  NOW

  A month after the move, my husband and I are home, rattling around in an empty house, not sure what to do with ourselves. It is the first time in our blended marriage that we have been without children, and we find ourselves doing things that we wouldn’t do if the kids were home, like cooking meals without any pants on. My husband has taken to calling the bubbly La Croix water I drink “La Crotch,” and I head off on bike rides whenever I feel like it, or start supper at eight P.M. We sleep and sleep and sleep. We are processing, my husband says, what it is like to not have the constant worry surrounding us, although in the back of our minds, we still have constant worry.

  We left my mother’s house after having locked her electronics up tight with parental controls, porn-blocking software, and a plan for changing her passwords weekly. We have located a good psychiatrist and a therapist who understands autism, and my mother, who doesn’t take any crap, is hounding my son about his schoolwork the same way she once hounded me. He is never left unsupervised during waking hours. The school he attends has a superb special education program that might give him a chance at employment someday, and the kids in the school are nice. He says he no longer feels like killing himself at all. This has to be a step up from where we’ve been, and it will have to do for now.

  My son was thrilled when we got him a smartphone so he could communicate with us while we are apart. He knows that we locked it the hell down with all sorts of parental control software, which we manage from our computer. He doesn’t appear to know how to bypass the software. It shuts off at nine P.M., and he is not allowed to take the phone upstairs to his room. We can see every keystroke he makes, and so far, with the exception of some typical skanky teenage song lyric stuff, he has been behaving. In fact, it has given him something to be excited about. He uses his phone to take pictures of homework assignments on the whiteboards at school. We use it to stay in touch many times per day. He knows that if any porn shows up, we are selling it. We have found that technology, the one desire he values more than his other desires, the mouthpiece of his most unsettling deviance, may be the thing that trumps his deviance. If he wants the phone more than he wants the porn, we may be out of the woods.

  We Skyped the other day. He looked relaxed and content. I mentioned how we had taken his sister to the airport to go away to college and without acknowledging that, he said, “Oh, by the way, I learned something amazing at school today. Did you know that the Samsung Galaxy S5 is actually better than the Samsung Galaxy S5 Active?”

  “That’s good to know,” I say. He then tells me that my mother is taking him to a movie with a neighborhood kid he met at school, and he would need to put his phone on silent when he was in the theater, and that the family next door to his new friend has a very cute little baby. We agree to touch base before bed and I hang up feeling, however cautiously, like my son is in the right place, that I have made the right choice to send him away for now, but that we are still a long way from okay. I dial my mother’s number to give her the heads up on the baby. Like Thermopylae, there may not be any hope, but that doesn’t mean you can stop fighting.

  * * *

  Within a few months of having the phone, my son figured out how to bypass his parental control software, looked up child pornography every chance he could, and lied to my mother about all manner of things, to the point where my mother could no longer handle caring for him. We took away his smartphone and I moved to South Carolina to help him get through school while my husband stayed home in Florida. After he began sexually grooming an eleven-year-old boy through texts on his old clamshell phone, my son dodged a bullet when the boy’s parents declined to press charges.

  A few months later, my son accessed child pornography on his school computer and was suspended, and also, while on school property, accused a family member of sexually abusing him. The police were called to the school, and after a few hours of intense questioning, they believed my son when he admitted that he made it up to hurt the family member. We moved back to Florida. A few months later, he installed a Tor browser on his new school’s computer and downloaded child pornography. The police said they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him, since the browser did not keep a record of the illegal images, and he was given the minimum punishment—a two-day in-school suspension. The attorney we consulted said that home is the safest place for him, since no one can watch him the way we do. I unenrolled him from public school and we are homeschooling him senior year.

  FOUR ANIMALS

  Screw this.

  —DAWN S. DAVIES, ON GETTING UP IN THE MORNING, UNABLE TO OPEN EYES

  In the beginning of April, after having watched the bats exploding from the bat house at dusk, skyward slices of half-moon climbs and angular dives, she dreams she is a bat, and in the morning, wakes up so. Black skin wings warm and fluttering, sharp elbows easing out of bed, throwing herself around in dark space, barely controlled, one small screech away from disaster. She must trust the physics of sound for her orientation, the longitudinal waves, the percussive smack of vibrations against the dimensional mysteries that surround her, but secretly she trusts nothing, because she can’t see, and it’s not like she’s been a bat her whole life, used to avoiding disaster in the grille of a car, or the trunk of a tree, or the flight path of a sharp-clawed hawk. No, she has relied on her eyesight—myopic, yet constant—and now the eyes aren’t working right. The bat folds her wings and walks upright, smashes a toe into the vacuum cleaner, misses the doorway, fumbles around in the bathroom for the toilet paper. Gobbledang, dawndangit. Cusses. Every morning the eyes are sealed shut. Perhaps she used superglue accidentally, instead of the magical night drops the doctor has given her, the concoction that is supposed to allow her to awaken in the morning as a woman, not a bat.

  At least it’s not lupus.

  —DOCTOR #4

&n
bsp; In the summer of 2014 I was diagnosed with Sjogren’s syndrome, though I believe I have unwittingly participated in Sjogren’s-related suffering for several years. Not that big of a deal, according to many of my doctors. It’s not the worst autoimmune disease you can have. I mean, at least it’s not lupus. Sjogren’s is an autoimmune disease that causes a person’s white blood cells to attack the moisture-producing glands in the body. It can attack the lachrymal glands, which causes a loss of tear production that works to degenerate the entire workings of the eyelids and eyeball. Some days I can’t open my eyes but a sliver. When I can there is a dry, stiff film over them that makes it hard to see clearly, and I have to keep blinking. I often can’t keep my eyes open in restaurants or movie theaters or malls or grocery stores or other places that push air through big HVAC systems, or anyplace there is bright light. In these venues, I must wear special sunglasses with foam seals around them, so the air and light won’t get to my eyeballs. Before I got these glasses, which cost three hundred dollars, I walked around with my head tilted slightly back and my eyes nearly shut, my hand on my husband’s arm. Eye drops, which I use as frequently as a pothead, didn’t help.

  Sjogren’s can also cause neuromuscular pain, which, for me, feels like random, small stabbings throughout the body, and a generalized fibromyalgic aching, and pain in the joints that makes it feel like I have arthritis, though I seem to have no diagnostic proof of arthritis. It can cause inflammation of the parotid glands above the jaw, and the salivary glands under the jaw, which dries up saliva, causing tooth decay, tooth loss, and mouth sores and infections. After Doctor #4 said, “At least it’s not lupus,” I found a Sjogren’s forum where many of the members reported use of full dentures in their forties. I immediately pronounced Doctor #4 a “glib bastard.” Yet in a sense he is right. Sjogren’s isn’t that bad, in that it is not likely to kill you, only make you suffer.