by Lisa Fenn
I lay awake many nights wondering where I went wrong. Had I set these boys up for failure by misjudging their maturity levels? Had I depicted them as survivors and champions, when in fact they had the life skills of young children? Had I deceived everyone, including myself? I had promised the Suttons and the Crocketts that their boys would return educated. I had promised countless Americans that their donations would indeed end the hardships. I had assembled a platoon of super supporters who were heavily invested, both monetarily and emotionally, in Leroy and Dartanyon’s success. But I wasn’t a mentor or a coach or an educator or a financial counselor. I was a television producer, and I had attempted to “produce” two lives. I’d assembled the elements on Leroy and Dartanyon’s behalf, written their script, and expected a cinematic ending. Maybe it was my tenacity rather than Leroy and Dartanyon’s that had led us to our current state. Maybe it wasn’t their fault. Maybe it was mine.
And once self-pity set in, I found it difficult to shed. Navid worked long hours to establish his new practice and typically fell asleep upon returning home. Talia ended her bout of colic by staging a two-month hunger strike just when she was supposed to transition to solid foods. Saxon had speech delays, favoring violent, destructive tantrums over words. Both children were walloped by a bevy of winter illnesses as we entered the New Year, keeping me awake all hours of the night.
The phone rang six times a day, and I panicked each time I picked it up. A typical afternoon included any combination of these disheartening news items:
Leroy skipped class. Dartanyon skipped tutoring. Leroy’s phone was shut off. Alani was out of diapers. Kayla was out of groceries. Dartanyon spent the money for his gis on video games. Leroy’s femur broke through his skin. Dartanyon’s ankle broke in half. Leroy failed his level design class. Dartanyon failed room inspection. Dartanyon’s laptop crashed the night before his paper was due. Leroy’s heart fractured beneath the weight of Kayla’s scorn. Dartanyon forgot about his quiz. Leroy neglected the light bill. Alani was in the emergency room with a fever. Dartanyon’s passport had water damage. Leroy’s apartment had bed bugs. Dartanyon needed an emergency visa to Brazil for a tournament. The wheel popped off of Leroy’s chair. Dartanyon popped a hamstring. Leroy’s seat cushion was leaking gel all over his pants. Dartanyon left for a trip and forgot his pants altogether.
It was a storm in a teacup. There was always one fire still smoking while the next one kicked up. Worse, Leroy and Dartanyon were stubborn in their self-sabotaging ways, and pointing out their missteps led to a bevy of pathetic excuses. Where were the invincible warriors I’d met three years earlier? Were their superpowers deactivated when they moved apart? Had I been too easy on them? Had I expected too much?
All I knew for sure was that Leroy and Dartanyon were carving permanent stress lines into my forehead, which led me to be irritable with Saxon and Talia’s needs. I resented Navid for his work obligations and inattentiveness. I called his office crying one afternoon, screaming at him while Saxon and Talia screamed behind me. “You have to come home!” I yelled. “I can’t make it through these days by myself anymore!”
“You have to figure it out,” Navid said. His voice was firm and low, signaling that his assistant was within earshot. “I cannot help you right now.” I hung up on him in disgust, even though I knew he could not walk out on a full schedule of patients who also needed him. My demand was a desperate test. I wanted him to prove that he cared about me with the same fervor with which I was caring for everyone else. I wanted him to stop this carousel of chaos and rescue me.
That night, I escaped on a late-night walk under the stars and through the snow. The snow squalled that evening. It mirrored what I was experiencing within: gusting in all directions, at the mercy of stiff winds, never landing, never resting. I once heard a meteorologist explain that squalls differ from blizzards because the blowing snow makes accumulation hard to measure until the weather system passes. As I trudged on, I thought of how this is the case in life too—how a storm’s progress is difficult to gauge when you are caught in the thick of it.
I arrived home to Navid’s homemade cross on the back lawn. Each January, he removes the branches of our Christmas tree and saws off the top third of the remaining log. He fastens the two pieces together to make a cross, and then he puts it unceremoniously back in the tree stand. Navid does this as a visible reminder of how the miracle of God entering this world does not end once the gifts are opened and the carols go quiet. He does this to remind us that God stayed, through more than two thousand dark winters since. He does this to remind us that the power of the Christmas miracle is available to us all year long. Yet standing before the wooden cross, I did not feel strength. Instead, I throbbed with loneliness, languishing in a spiritual chasm. I felt stripped of the qualities I needed to mother successfully: the joy, the peace, the endurance—the very virtues promised by my faith. I had never seen this demoralized version of myself before. I didn’t like her. I thought of my favorite Anne Lamott book, which says all prayers can be boiled down to two types: Help Me, Help Me, Help Me and Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. I lay in the snow beside the cross and leaned on the first petition.
“Help me . . . ,” I called feebly into the dark. “Anyone? Help?”
SAXON’S SPEECH THERAPIST encouraged me to speak to my son in short, direct phrases when I wanted him to execute a task. “He is not yet able to receive complex instructions or abstract concepts,” she told me. “Break it down into chunks of language that he can handle. Simplify the world for him.” Shoes on. Brush teeth. Eat apple. Hug mama. Saxon began to respond, his eyes brightening as his discovery of communication lent order to his world.
I hunkered down for the long, insular New England winter, operating a virtual command center with the mission of navigating my two little ones plus Leroy and Dartanyon through their days. I was wholly depleted of energy, yet I put one foot in front of the other and plodded ahead.
“Why didn’t you turn in your animation assignment yesterday?” I asked Leroy.
“I didn’t know it was due,” he replied.
“How could you not know it was due? It’s listed on the class portal. I’m looking right at it,” I said, agitated.
“Oh, I never check that thing.”
“Why would you not check the one place where your assignments are listed? It’s the literal road map for your success.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The portal is stupid. A lot of time it’s down for maintenance anyway.”
Saxon waddled in. “Play cars?” he asked.
“Play cars,” I answered. As I sat on the floor beside him, guiding him to pick up “red car” and “give Talia block,” I wondered if applying a version of Saxon’s modifications might benefit Leroy and Dartanyon. I could help break things down for them. So I began sending them daily to-do lists that typically read like this:
Complete English paper. Send to me for editing.
Study for quiz on chapter four.
Pay phone bill.
Ask professor for partial credit on late analysis assignment.
Complete budget worksheet and return to me.
But giving them five things to do in a day was like asking them to drink from a fire hose. They couldn’t organize their time to handle multiple tasks. I lowered the bar—if they could complete just one task a day, while I picked up the slack on some of the others, I counted it a good day. “You’re doing too much for them,” my mother-in-law said late one night as I was writing to Leroy’s professor, with Talia cooing on my shoulder. “They’ll never learn if you do everything for them.”
“But if they complete one task, they’ve at least learned to do that one thing,” I countered. “And if I don’t take on some of the other things, then this house of cards falls, and they lose the opportunity to learn that one thing well. But if they can learn to do that one thing, it will hopefully lead to them mastering two things in a day, and then three.”
“Or they’ll learn to take advantag
e of you,” she asserted. “How many chances are you going to give them?”
“I don’t know. I’m finding it’s not easy to overcome the mind-sets of poverty.” Leroy and Dartayon didn’t have the same opportunities I had as a kid to make mistakes and learn from them with my parents’ safety net beneath me. “One chance isn’t enough. They may need a hundred chances to make up for lost time.”
“Makes sense,” she said, nodding. “Keep doing what you’re doing. Give me the baby.”
In many ways, growing up in abject poverty disabled Leroy and Dartanyon more than their physical challenges. Both boys were living out the consequences of being raised with no accountability, no responsibility, and few expectations. In my lucid moments, I saw these years as a training ground to acquire missing life skills and reverse the destructive habits they had absorbed throughout their youths. The only problem was, they didn’t share my vision. Dartanyon was my procrastinator, always agreeable yet rarely productive. “Yeah, I was just about to do that,” he said when reminded of a task, which really meant, “Not only was I not about to do that, but it had not even crossed my mind to do it, and even though you’re telling me now, I probably still won’t do it.” Asking Leroy to so much as deliver the rent check to the leasing office was like asking him to roll a boulder across the Arizona desert on an August afternoon. My direction was met with disgruntled sighs, as though he was doing me the favor. “This is for you,” I implored. “I am trying to help you achieve the goals that you set for yourself.” Another sigh. Life’s responsibilities seemed like a series of interruptions to both boys.
I walked regularly through the frozen nights to numb my frustrations. I knew that so much of my life had been comfortable compared with what is tragically possible in this life. I had thus far avoided the land mines of illness and suffering and loss. As a result, my fortitude for hard times was low. I feared prolonged discomfort and relationships I could not fix. I feared the unknown. I feared failing. And as I walked, I reckoned I needed the dark as much as I needed the light. How could I ever find the courage to walk through the shadows without practice?
Over time, the rhythmic crunch of the snow beneath my boots began restoring order to my heart. I reminded myself that Leroy and Dartanyon had not asked for my daily invasion into their lives. They were under no obligation to be my friend, or even to appreciate my efforts. I set my bruised feelings aside, and I focused instead on centering truths: The train. The crack house. The call. Take care of my son. I thought of how God gathered up the prayers of a destitute coach, a shaken paramedic, a strung-out father, a had-it-up-to-here grandmother—prayers of ammunition, from all who were willing to join forces to combat Leroy and Dartanyon’s earthly plight. I traced these markers over and over again as I walked, for while my present feelings were capricious, these enduring touchstones served as a road map for me. They reminded me of how I got here. They reminded me that God wanted me here. They reminded me, in a whisper, to continue, for though the course is hard, the cause is not necessarily lost.
And each night I passed by Navid’s Christmas tree cross. Easter was approaching, and Navid would soon hang a crown of thorns around our cross. He would remind me that though we celebrate with Easter lilies and resounding trumpets, the Resurrection took place in a dark cave. God and darkness had been friends for a long time. I was not alone here. I need not fear. I was part of a grand and beautiful plan, to soothe the human ache with a steady, inconvenient love. How dare I see it as anything less? And as spring began to peek up around the tree stand of the Christmas cross, I was finally able to sit beside it and offer up that second type of prayer.
Thank you.
THE GRADUAL RETURN of gratitude was rooted in the sense of love that my faith had infused in me during my teen years. I willfully called that love to mind now, and those memories served as spiritual keepsakes that anchored me. They restored me. And they made me wonder if my intensive micromanagement of Leroy and Dartanyon had muddied their assurance of my affection for them. Had I communicated their faults more often than their value?
I began calling Leroy and Dartanyon in moments free of crises, to simply say hello. I asked about their friends and movies they had seen. On weekends, I found them playing online video games against one another, over headsets. At first my lighthearted inquiries were met with reticence from Dartanyon in particular, who was waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I resisted the urge to correct during those calls. We needed to laugh again, like we did early in our relationship. We needed to heal. In sum, I told them that I loved them more than I told them what to do.
I also forged closer relationships with the boys’ local support. Alicia, in Phoenix, drove Leroy to appointments and invited him over for Sunday dinners. Afterward, she called me with encouragement and insights into his state of mind. And when Dartanyon spent his schoolbook money on a PlayStation 4 and dodged his new tutor, Ed Liddie and I allied to drop a bombshell on him.
“If I hear you miss a single tutoring session or a single class, you don’t travel,” Liddie told Dartanyon. “Judo don’t last forever, and it ain’t gonna make you rich. Listen to Lisa, and get your education.”
Dartanyon fell in line, for he had fallen genuinely in love with judo. His exposure to international competition and the path to Paralympic qualification lit a spark within him. In blind judo, players earn their spots in the Games by amassing points at three qualifying events: World Games, World Championships, and the Pan American Games. Athletes who finish in the top twelve in their weight class qualify that spot for their country. Each nation then holds its own Paralympic trials to determine which of its athletes will represent that weight class. Dartanyon had missed the World Games, mending his broken ankle. He’d finished ninth at the World Championships in Turkey that year. He needed to medal at the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, in November 2011 to have a chance at securing the −81kg spot for the United States.
Instead, Dartanyon dropped three straight matches, against the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Argentina. He bowed out of his final match with a suspected concussion and retreated into a corner with a sandwich and a juice box, looking scared and overmatched. “Everyone at that tournament had decades of experience,” Liddie said. “We hadn’t crammed enough in for Dartanyon to be competitive at that level yet.” Dartanyon called me from the airport, tears streaming. Though we knew his chances of qualifying were slim, the defeats stung. “I don’t feel like I should even be doing judo,” he said. “I lost bad. Like real bad. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if Ed just tells me to go back home, that I’m done.” I listened, saddened by his loss while at the same time feeling fortunate to be the shoulder on which he leaned.
As a result of Dartanyon’s poor showing, the United States could not send anyone to the Games in his –81kg division. But the US did qualify in the –90kg spot, where Denver-based Ryan Jones seemed to be a lock to win the bid to London at the April 2012 team trials. Liddie suspected Ryan was beatable, though, and had by no means given up on Dartanyon. In January 2012, Liddie sent Dartanyon to Finland for the Pajulahti Games. This was a smaller tournament than a World Cup, yet it was still represented by a handful of advanced European players. Dartanyon took gold. With the medal came a renewed sense of confidence and a hint of Dartanyon’s vintage swagger. Moreover, the win in Finland gave him the international points he needed to challenge Ryan for his number-one seed—if, and only if, he could first win the US Nationals in Ryan’s higher weight class. Liddie worked Dartanyon over that spring, force-feeding him as much judo as his body could withstand. “He’s starting to get a rhythm for the sport,” Liddie told me three days before the tournament. “His throws are looking better.”
Feeding off that optimism, I called Victor. My pregnancy had kept me from taking on any projects since leaving ESPN, but Victor and I kept in touch periodically. I begged him to send a film crew to the US Nationals, hoping that if Dartanyon won, ESPN would follow him to London.
“So let me get this straight,”
Victor said. “Dartanyon has to win four straight matches against guys twenty pounds heavier than him, and if he does that, he then earns the right to fight the number-one seed in a best two out of three. And if he wins those, then he goes to London?”
“Correct.”
“Is it common to win six judo matches in a day?”
“No. It’s very difficult.”
“And so after getting smoked in his own weight class in Mexico, you think he’s going to pull this off in an even heavier weight class—why?”
“Because he sounds stronger when I talk to him, and he doesn’t see obstacles like we do,” I said. “Dartanyon wrote ‘Destined for Greatness’ on his papers as a homeless kid. I don’t feel like his story ends here.” I had that hunch, just as I did when Dartanyon and Leroy lured me to Cleveland from the newspaper page in 2009.
“Have a nice trip to Texas,” Victor conceded once again. I scrambled to book the crew—only this time I would not be able to join them. Navid was at a conference in Atlanta. My mother was visiting for her birthday, and I couldn’t leave her with the two clamoring babies while I flew to Texas to be with Dartanyon.
On the morning of his matches, Dartanyon’s voice sounded flat. “Everyone else has family here,” he said. “I wish you could have come, even though I understand why you couldn’t.”
“I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll never miss another one.”
Minutes before Dartanyon’s first match, Liddie was still squeezing judo lessons into him out in the open concourse. “Nope, pull this way. Circle your guy this way and then throw,” Liddie instructed. “Create momentum and then turn him. And you can’t have a straight back. If you do, he can counter you.” Liddie’s mantra was “one match at a time,” and he promised to text me after each round. The first message: Dartanyon won first match fast. Looked good.
