Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  Worse than this, I was afraid to tell my husband, or anyone else. I was afraid that they would take my children away from me, or put me in the nuthouse, so I managed it by force of will, with the irrationality of it bleeding outside the lines of normalcy like a stain.

  During this time, the monster of my hypochondria reared its nasty head, like it does when I have troubles of any sort; I also became obsessed with the beginning of my own end. I began to prod my breasts for lumps. Every day I found several—I was breastfeeding after all, and the ducts were impressively lumpy because they were full of milk, not tumors. These lumps would cause a spinning fear that would take over and ruin, several times per day, whatever I happened to be doing—coloring with my older daughter, watching the baby make funny faces, reading, hanging laundry, stirring a sauce. When this happened, I had a sensation of falling that made me break out in a sweat, and called for me to grab on to things.

  I compulsively inspected my skin for mole changes, felt my groin and armpits and clavicles and jawline for swollen glands. I was exhausted from being up in the middle of the night with a new baby, but hormonal logic, an oxymoron if there ever was one, told me that it must be leukemia, or lymphoma, or lupus, and not simple exhaustion. Every headache that developed was a brain tumor, but not a minor-league, benign one—a mac daddy astrocytoma that would leave my daughters to one day button up their own wedding dresses. I did not know to diagnose myself with what I really had, although I did learn to stop sharing my feelings with my husband. I was too embarrassed, and my husband had no room for crazy in his marriage.

  “You’re too sensitive,” he would say when I tried to bring it up, which is what everyone in my life has always told me. “You have two perfectly healthy daughters and all you do is worry about ridiculous things. I don’t understand.” I would try to explain how I felt, but when I did, he stopped responding to me. He would turn his back on me in the kitchen, or in bed, and I was left alone with my thoughts, embarrassed and ashamed of my weakness. Besides, I did have two healthy daughters and a nice life, and I felt guilty for having these thoughts.

  I would read Goodnight Moon to the girls before tucking them in for the night, weeping quietly in their dark bedroom because I was about to lie down for the night myself, and I might get a blood clot in my sleep, because Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, had died from a blood clot after flinging her leg in the air while abed. At night, I would crawl into my bed afraid that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning, and what was worse, my daughters would be raised by a man who wouldn’t say nice things about me to them after I was gone.

  One night, when the baby was almost twelve weeks old, I awoke with a strange pain in my abdomen that caused me to think suspiciously about the obscene mound of baked cauliflower I had eaten for supper. Cauliflower usually ignites in me a prodigious, occasionally debilitating gas factory that I freely use as a weapon against others, but if this were gas, I had outdone myself. Although there was nothing vague about the pain—it was acute and very real—I could not pinpoint its origin. It was high enough to be a pancreas or gallbladder, yet low enough to be an appendix. In my misery, I executed my German grandmother’s trick of lying on your stomach with the buttocks in the air—the gas rises and you soon have the relief you are seeking, at the expense of anyone else in the room—but in this instance, nothing helped. I switched position, and took a deep breath. Nothing changed. I shook my husband awake.

  “Something’s wrong,” I told him. “I have to go to the hospital.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have a pain in my side. It’s bad.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What do you want me to do, drive you?”

  “I don’t think I can drive.”

  “Well, we can’t get the girls up in the middle of the night, and we can’t leave them alone.”

  “Something’s really wrong. I’ve got to go in. Where are the keys?”

  “On my dresser.”

  I crawled over him, and pulled pants on under my nightgown, hunched, unable to stand up straight, or even place my feet on the ground without pain shooting through me.

  “I have to leave for work by eight.” He rolled over toward the window before I left the room.

  Real pain will quickly eclipse any sentimental thought of suffering and death. I was in too much pain to cry, in too much pain to worry that my husband didn’t seem concerned, and in too much pain to worry about dying. In fact, the pain was so severe that I quickly began to believe that death was a better option than feeling the way I did. I drove down the dark, empty, shiny Boston streets, hollering out loud in agony, the echo of my voice filling the empty car. My goal was to stay in the right lane and not crash. I followed the subway tracks to Beth Israel Hospital, pulled up to the emergency room main entrance, left the car running, and walked in through the double doors, where I managed to notice a terribly shiny measure of seafoam tiles and chrome chairs. For some reason I had time to think, I don’t want to die here; it’s too reflective, before vomiting all over the waxed tile floors and passing out.

  I woke up on a gurney in a room to the smell of rubbing alcohol. A thick, red-bearded man bent over me to start an IV. I thought he was Jesus. I rolled my head and vomited off the gurney.

  “Am I dying?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh, God, would you please kill me then?” The pain would not allow me to sit still, so I tried to crawl up the back of the gurney. I draped myself over the top and vomited again.

  The nurse pushed a button and an intercom came on. “Page housekeeping, please,” he said. “Hold on there, little mama, I’m going to give you some morphine as soon as we get some information from you.”

  The next five hours were spent giving blood and getting tests. I would sleep in a lovely morphine stupor filled with crystal snowflakes rotating and falling, then turning, without warning, into sour faces that bit out at me. I would wake periodically to revisit the pain, retch into a pan, then fall back to sleep, only to feel like I was falling backwards, headfirst off the gurney, before the snowflakes started up again. The nurse came in periodically to check on me. A CT scan had identified a very tiny stone in my right kidney. It was my job to pee it out, they told me, and they gave me several quarts of IV fluids and a strainer. I hobbled up every fifteen minutes to either throw up or whizzle bloodred urine into the toilet. Around sunrise I peed out a grain of dark sand, which, when I looked at it closely, looked like a jagged, knife-edged moon rock with an evil face carved in it. I had a hard time believing this was the stone.

  “That’s it?” I asked the nurse. “It’s a speck.”

  He peered into the strainer. “Looks like it. Lucky you.”

  “So I’m not going to die?”

  “Why, do you want to?” He winked.

  “Sometimes,” I said, and he stopped what he was doing and looked at me. Maybe the morphine had loosened my tongue, but I told him about the perseverations, about the fears I had of accidentally killing the baby, about crying every day, about how I spent the previous afternoon in the rocking chair holding the baby with two hands, the house getting dark in the early-spring light, my older daughter playing in the cold fireplace with a shovel and a bunch of ashes. I told him I was afraid that the house would burn down when I turned on the stove, and that when I sat quietly, I could feel the Earth spinning on its axis, and that if I let go of the girls, they would fly off and fall into space.

  “How old is your baby?” he asked.

  “Three months.”

  “You probably have postpartum depression, sweetie. Women get it all the time. You’ll get over it when your hormones regulate, but you need to tell your doctor. Call them as soon as you get home. Will you do that?”

  I drove myself home, against the doctor’s advice, in a morphine haze, just in time for my husband to meet me at the door and hand me the baby.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Kidney
stone,” I said. “And postpartum depression, I think.” I handed him back the baby and went to lie down on the couch. Aftershocks of pain shot through my flank and down my leg, and I was weak and shaking. The baby started a low cry that rolled into a full boil within fifteen seconds.

  “Is it out? Good. Here, can you nurse her? She’s about to blow.” He handed her back. She screamed in my arms and rooted for my breast.

  “I can’t. They gave me morphine. I have to pump and dump for twenty-four hours.”

  “There’s a bottle on the counter. Sorry, but I have to leave.” And he did have to leave. I knew this. He was very dependable and took his work deadlines seriously, and to my recollection, never missed one.

  I cried when he left, grateful that there was a name to what I had, and oddly happy to know that I wasn’t the only one it happened to. If there were others, I thought, I could find them. I could tell a doctor and they wouldn’t take my children away from me. Maybe my husband would understand. I slept randomly and dangerously throughout the day. I woke once, during lunch, with my head on the kitchen table, to my two-year-old trying to see if a green bean would fit inside the nostril of her tiny sister, who was at least in the baby swing, and not out in the yard somewhere. And most important, I called my doctor and made an appointment.

  My husband and I made it three more years and one more baby before we said the word “divorce,” and though we both tried hard to make it work, we were terribly ill-suited for each other. I think the beginning of the end was that day on the airplane when I was so afraid of falling out of the sky, of losing control. The day I showed the vulnerability that comes when you give birth, the vulnerability that comes when your body takes over by creating a baby inside of it, then turns you inside out, then rights itself again, as if it had been through a storm. What my husband could have done that day was ask me why I was afraid. What he could have done was hug me, and tell me we weren’t going to fall out of the sky. What he could have said was, “You’re not going to die, hon. You’re scared because this is new. You’re a little kooky because your hormones need to get back to normal. We’re going to have a great life. Besides, it’s not the falling that kills you, silly. It’s the landing. Here, hold my hand.”

  FM D&R—1-10.06

  Field Manual—Divorce and Remarriage: Suburban Ops Headquarters: Department of Suburbia, USA

  Distribution Restriction: Distribution authorized to the DOSA (Department of Suburban Affairs) and DOFF (Department of Fractured Families) contractors only to maintain operations security. Other requests for this document must be referred to HMFMWIC (Head Motherfucker Mom What’s in Charge), US Suburban Ops Combined Arms Center 1 Rue de Cul de Sac (Building X), Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301.

  Destruction Notice: Destroy by any method that will prevent disclosure of contents or reconstruction of the document.

  PREFACE

  PURPOSE

  This Field Manual establishes doctrine for nonmilitary operations in a divorce and remarriage (D&R) environment. It is based on existing doctrine and lessons learned from recent combat operations. Additional D&R doctrine is being developed.

  SCOPE

  To make this text useful to agents involved in D&R operations regardless of where these operations may occur, the doctrine contained herein is broad in scope and involves principles applicable to various D&Rs. This FM is not focused on any region or country. Most divorces have some common characteristics, but their ideological basis may vary widely. Fundamental to all D&R operations is the need to help local agents establish safety, security, and stability, because divorce thrives on chaos and instability.

  APPLICABILITY

  The primary audience for this manual is conventional-force leaders at division level and below. It supports Suburban Ops Education System instruction on the theory and conduct of D&R operations.

  1. THE DETONATION OF BOMBS

  1.1.   It was the day after Halloween and I was still finding green greasepaint in the ears and neck folds of my two-year-old, who swore she had wanted to go trick-or-treating as a witch, though when she saw her Hulk-green face in the mirror she scared herself to tears. It was raining hard outside and I was exhausted from being up nearly all night feeding the four-month-old, who, due to his cleft palate, ate every two hours around the clock. My husband had gone to work and to class, and I was looking at a long day alone with the kids in a tiny apartment. I sat down at the computer and moved the mouse. The screen opened up to a series of e-mails from my husband’s coworker, who I realized, after reading the e-mails, wasn’t simply his coworker, but perhaps the love of his life. It explained a lot. When he got home that night I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything the rest of the week. I didn’t say anything for almost a month, until Thanksgiving week rolled around and he had decided to stay in town for a few extra days while I went home to South Florida. I told him I found the e-mails and we had the conversation that started it all and ended it all at the same time, the conversation that wrapped the children up in little duct-taped bomb vests, set the timer, and began the countdown.

       “It’s either her or us,” I said. “Your choice.”

       “Her,” he said simply. Three. Two. One.

       Boom.

  2. MANAGING THE DECOMPOSITION OF CASUALTIES AFTER BATTLE

  2.1.   We had moved to Florida for my husband’s graduate school, which I suspect was a last-ditch attempt at keeping the marriage together, and we were living in married student housing provided by the university. So many times, right before a couple breaks up, they either move to a new place, or, if they have means, they renovate or have a house built, as if this fresh start will wipe the slate clean of all the war crimes committed in the name of love and jealousy and immaturity and misunderstanding, as if a move across the country, or the building of a custom home, will take the weight off the big one that is poised to detonate.

       Over Christmas break, my husband moved to another apartment the university had temporarily allotted for our breakup, and one night, after I had gone to bed, he came over and packed his half of our property, and his own clothes and personal belongings, in liquor store boxes. This made sense, I thought, as I listened to him bang around. He had an early flight the next morning, back up north for New Year’s Eve, and had likely wanted to pack before he left.

       The baby woke me at sunrise the next morning. I lifted him out of his crib, and carried him into my room, where I changed his diaper and kissed his little feet. Then we went out to the kitchen for breakfast, where I noticed that before he left, my husband had stacked all of the packed boxes nearly to the ceiling, blocking the front door and the front windows, effectively barring us inside. I couldn’t even get to the door. Everyone knows divorce makes people do things they would not ordinarily do. I called my mother, sobbing.

       “He blocked us inside the apartment, Mom,” I said.

       “Jesus, who does that? Come home for New Year’s,” she said.

  2.2.   We left for my mother’s right after breakfast. During the five-hour drive, I fantasized about pulling over on the side of the road for a long nap. Whenever the girls talked to me, I could think of nothing to say, so we put in CDs and sang all the songs we knew. When I got home, I handed the baby to my mother and lay down on the living room floor, where both my mother’s dogs and my other children climbed on top of me.

       “God help me,” I said through the pile.

       “It’ll be all right,” my mother said.

       The next day I stretched out on the couch and cried whenever the kids weren’t looking.

       “Why don’t you go take a shower or something,” my mother said, when she saw me stifling a sob into a couch pillow.

       I sat down in the middle of the shower and let the water run over me until I could catch my breath, then put my head on the bathroom tile and watched a row of sugar ants
walk a complicated path of grout line, and out a tiny crack in the sliding glass door. I thought, I could die right here and it wouldn’t matter. I would be a simple war casualty. People would absorb the kids. They were young. They would get over losing me. I lay there and waited for the sugar ants to find a hole into my brain and jump-start the decomposition process by carting my parts back to their place. Eventually, my mother knocked on the bathroom door.

       “Are you okay?”

       “No. I think I’m dying,” I said.

       “I’m coming in.” She opened the door and helped me sit up. I sat there wrapped in my towel, too spent to cry, and she sat next to me on the floor and held my head.

       “You’re not dying,” she said. “You’re just going through a divorce. It’s not the end of the world. You’ll see.”

       “I don’t believe you,” I told her. “What am I going to do with these kids? They’re wrecked. I’m wrecked. No one’s ever going to love me.”

       “Sure they will.”

       “I’m never getting married again.”

       “Sure you will,” she said. She laughed and patted my arm.