by Dawn Davies
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes. It happened so suddenly. I didn’t even have time to take him home and give him a steak or something.”
“He probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it if he was that sick.”
“I mean, it was such a hard thing to do.”
“I’m sure it was,” she said.
A few minutes later, I called my other daughter, who was walking from her dorm at a different college to an off-campus store. It was a busy road and I could hear a roar in the phone.
“Are you safe?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just the traffic. It sounds worse than it is.”
“I’ve got some bad news.”
“Shit. Okay. What?”
And I told her the version of the story I thought she’d want to hear, the no-nonsense, factual version, because that’s how she likes to hear news, and because after all, I was the soft-shelled woman weeping all over myself because of a dead dog, trying to get my act together, and stating the facts helped me to speak without my voice wobbling. When I finished, I heard a truck blast past her. Then I heard her sniffle. Then I realized she was crying and my heart broke in the kind of way that can only happen when you are listening to one of your children weep at the other end of a very long phone line.
“You’re crying,” I said.
“What do you expect? He was a good dog.” She said something else but I missed it because a car drove past.
“What?”
“I said, he was a terrible dog, too, Mom. He was terrible and good at the same time.”
“He was,” I said.
We hung up and I sat alone on the back deck, and a quick glimpse of an empty pink chenille bedroom crossed my mind. I missed my daughters and the life I lived when they were mine, and I missed my dog with his protective, slightly obsessive yard barking, his hypervigilance, his electric energy. The silence made my head hurt.
I looked around at the backyard, which had been Rocky’s world. In the canal, a fish leaped and smacked the water. Two birds initiated the mango tree, flailing up and down on a lower branch with no concern, and along the fence line, I heard a rustle and saw a glint of wily green, a flat, dispassionate eye, and the flick of a crested tail. An iguana hovered a cautious foot across the fence, looking to the left and to the right before he stepped onto our land, the borders breached, the king nowhere to be seen.
MOTHERS OF SPARTA
It is close to midnight on a Friday night and my husband and I are driving up and down a stretch of highway outside the Jacksonville, Florida, airport, cross-eyed with fatigue, looking for a motel. We are so tired that we have had trouble choosing one from the long list of lower-end motels that the tiny demon called Siri, who lives inside my cell phone, is listing for us in her impassive, slightly condescending voice: Days Inn, Ramada Inn, Holiday Inn Express. We are so tired that the choice is confusing. This one costs ten dollars more, but it has a free breakfast buffet, which would be a good deal for the three of us who will be eating in the morning. This one has a pullout couch. This one my husband had once stayed at and he reported a particularly fine sleep. This one has a gym, which we will not have time to use. Unlike my husband, who wants a nice experience, I like to stay at the cheapest motel possible, even if someone had been murdered in the bed mere nights before, even if we catch lice (which we have done), even if pimps and hos flow through the place like a stream of bloody water, all night long. In fact, I am two steps away from suggesting we sleep in the car when we pull into the parking lot of the one motel Siri hasn’t yet belittled.
In the backseat, my lanky sixteen-year-old son lies across duffle bags full of his clothing and Ikea bags full of his shoes and other gear, listening to his iPod. He is looking forward to seeing the motel room, because he likes aspects of the hospitality industry, specifically: vacationing. He is relaxed and unfettered, despite the imminent changes in his life.
We are in the process of moving him several hundred miles away from our home state of Florida for the school year, to live with my mother so he can get the kind of specialized education we cannot offer him where we live. It seems odd to me that we are driving this boy, who is beginning to resemble a man in stature—he is tall with beard hairs and a deep voice—to leave him somewhere far away from us to live, before I have finished parenting him, simply because I can’t get a handle on what he needs and provide it for him.
I have previously been a stereotypically fierce mother, a warrior who doesn’t quit on her children, one who will not allow the machine of life to toss them about while she still has breath left in her body, a mother who doesn’t leave her job to others. I am full of devotion, like most mothers are. I once shoved a man in the library because he laid hands on one of my children for wearing flip-flops that were too loud. I have also been the kind of mother who has correctly second-guessed doctors. When my son was a baby and was ill with an uncategorizable kind of rubbery diarrhea, the doctor told me it was the flu. This didn’t sit right with me, so I begged them to test him for salmonella when everyone in the doctor’s office was saying, “What eight-month-old gets salmonella?” In order to shut me up, they ran the test and he had salmonella.
I have been the kind of mother who arranged my personal and career aspirations around the needs of my children, because I knew I had one shot to do this parenting thing right. I understood that I needed quantity over quality because important, yet nearly invisible stuff happens when you aren’t trying to construct it. There are divine connections made during the mushrooming minutiae of slog that is impossible to ignore when you spend all your time with young people, the loop of events that make you want to quit life the umpteenth time you step on a Lego in the dark or they barf and don’t make it to the toilet and the puke splashes into the cracks of the baseboards. The recurring ear infections are laborious, as are the waterworks and snot and constant explanations and negotiations. But when you look back on all of it: the bone-wearying ingemination, the cumulative hours spent putting away their Tupperware drum sets, and homemade Gak, stained-glass tissue paper art that leaves dried, colored gluey paper all over the windows, and tub toys that pee cold leftover bathwater onto the clean, dry socks you just changed into, and the hours watching reruns of Full House, and the endless hamster wheel of the bedtime process where you fight to stay awake during encore readings of Stellaluna, and the hours driving them places in the car, those mundane traffic-jammed hours where they accidentally initiate quiet, critically important character-building discussions that you might have missed if you had even been talking on your cell phone. Those hours are gifts given to those who pay attention. Until now, I have been the kind of mother who starts the job and finishes it right, despite the tolls I must pay along the way. So it seems odd—not wrong, necessarily, but odd—that I am driving my son away from me to live somewhere else. It seems odd that I am about to send my son away for his own good.
SPARTA
Mothers of Sparta conceived their sons in the fine-silted dirt of the banks of the Eurotas, the same place where they scrubbed the stains from their clothing, scoured their cooking pots with sand, the same place where they would lie in the brackish, cool pebbly wet and birth the future defenders of their nation, smooth, soft waves of river water cooling the roil in their bellies. Mothers of Sparta had a duty to bear warriors, leaders, controlled savages, thieves with fleet feet and stealthy hearts, devotees of the city-state, above all else. In every culture, women desire to raise useful, self-sufficient children, but in Sparta, giving over their offspring to the state was a calling.
Although this is disputed by some historians, they say that when a Spartan boy was born, soldiers, or members of the Gerousia, a council of elders, would come to the family’s home to examine the baby. The mother would hand him, warm and soft and pliant, to the men, who would uncover him in the cool air, go over his small body with their calloused hands, their sharp eyes, and assess whether the baby was healthy enough to be allowed to live, and maybe, even at that
early age, his war-worthiness. They would look for weak eyes, crooked limbs, clefted lips, curved feet, or perhaps even a weak will or a weak mind; a baby who cried too much could be trouble, a baby who didn’t respond enough to stimuli might be stupid. They say that if the baby did not pass the test, he was thrown into a pit called the Apothetae, near Mt. Taygetus, where he would either die from the fall, or from exposure, or be eaten by animals. Imagine the sense of duty a Spartan mother must have felt to willingly open her arms and release her infant from her breast, allow the state to manhandle him, with his eyes still milky, his dusky or bright skin, his curly or straight soft baby hair, his nose that looked like his father’s, his fingerprint of a smell, still warm from the womb, to be condemned to death without understanding, a death without having a life. Imagine being the person who tossed that baby into the pit and walked away.
THE BEGINNING
My son—my final child—has autism and a form of frontal lobe brain damage that causes serious behavior problems that are not within his control. This damage may or may not be related to the autism. It may be a result of the focal seizures he has, or his focal seizures may be a result of his brain damage. Who knows? What I know is that my son didn’t take the breast at birth and he didn’t cry. I imagined, even on that day, marble statues of men with cold stone beards and togas, coming to take my son away, throwing him in the Apothetae for the weasels to pick at his remains, wondering how much of this was my imagination and how much of it was labor fatigue. Two hours after delivery, my son choked, turned purple, and stopped breathing. My parents, who were visiting my hospital room, witnessed the event and my mother went tearing out into the hallway, screaming for help. A nurse snatched my son from my arms and took him upstairs to the NICU, and I heard nothing about him for the next nine hours. I was not allowed to visit, but instead, encouraged to sleep. I could not. At four A.M. a doctor slipped into my room and told me that my son had a cleft palate, a split in the muscle of his soft palate that had been difficult for them to identify, partly, I think, because they didn’t look. I mean, all you needed to do was open the kid’s mouth and it was there. My four-year-old could see it without a flashlight. The doctor said my son had been choking on the mucus leaking down from his nose. They wanted to keep him in the NICU for a few days to monitor him and do some tests.
The next day, I went home without him. I don’t know how well they watched him. Who knows what nurse was on the phone while my son was turning purple before his monitors beeped and cued her in? Who knows how well people do their jobs when no one is watching them? Who knows how many cyanotic episodes he had, how many times his brain was without oxygen in those first few days? This is me still looking for an original excuse for the whole of it, something I have done for the past sixteen years.
THE WALLS OF SPARTA
Because a mother’s influence was seen to be weakening to boys, the state took them away to live in group dormitories at the age of seven. They began their military education by learning to fight each other, find their own food or go without, and endure beatings by older boys in order to strengthen their abilities. This helped to develop the warrior code that would allow them to become good soldiers of the state, successful members of Spartan society, “the walls of Sparta.”
The boys lived in groups under the tutelage of an older soldier, and were trained to forswear their families in favor of loyalty to their warrior community. Who knows how much blood was shed during training alone, or if any boys fondly remembered the softer lives of their early youth? Records show that these boys were trained to kill without sound, to turn on each other, in fact, ratting out those who weren’t toeing the line. There’s the legend of the Spartan boy who stayed silent and immobile of face while the fox chewed out his innards. If that’s true, that takes a special kind of discipline that you might not have gotten from a weaker baby, had he been allowed to live.
A BRIEF HISTORY
Because of his cleft palate, my son could not breastfeed or create a suction to take a bottle. Within a week of birth he was classified as “failure to thrive” and began dropping weight quickly, ounces per day. We used special Haberman feeders that cost thirty-five dollars each, to drip liquid into his open mouth, as if he were a stray kitten being fed with a milk-soaked hankie. He could manage two ounces of milk per feeding before becoming exhausted and falling asleep, but he needed much more than that to maintain his weight. I would wake him every two hours to feed him his two ounces, which would take him two hours to drink, after which point he had spent all the calories he took in trying to eat and it would be time to feed him again. He began life at eight pounds, thirteen ounces, and when we intervened with special high-calorie formula a few weeks later, he was down to under six pounds, despite the round-the-clock feedings. My then-husband was out of town for a six-week stint of work, and I was essentially alone with this baby, and my daughters, who were two and four. If it weren’t for my mother, who shared night feedings with me, I believe I would have gone insane from sleep deprivation.
By the time of his surgery at nine months, my son could not sit up on his own. Doctors said it was because cleft palate kids fall behind developmentally, but only for a short while. They said he would catch up within a year after his palate repair. They said not to worry, but to continue the regimen of interventions they prescribed: speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy for the coordination of the left and right sides of his body, which didn’t move in sync.
At age nineteen months, my son developed an inguinal hernia that needed to be repaired. During a pre-op visit, the resident noticed that I had not given him his fifteen-month-old immunizations. This was true, I had told them. I had been avoiding the doctor’s office because every time I spoke to them, they badgered me about immunizations, and my son had been ill nearly every eight weeks since he was born. A small, instinctive voice inside me had told me to postpone the shots until his immune system was stronger, and I listened. I was divorced by then, and Medicaid was paying for the surgery, so what the doctors did, what I expect they do for poor mothers all over the place, was bully me into giving my son the immunizations.
“We’re not going to do this surgery unless you give him his shots,” the doctor said.
“I’m not going to do that until he gets better,” I said.
“He’s not going to get any better when he’s dead from a strangulated testicle or a dead bowel,” he said, which scared me. After all, I was just a welfare mom. What did I know? I agreed to the immunizations so he could have the surgery. Eight hours after he received the immunizations, my son developed a fever of 105.5 and executed a series of terrific febrile seizures. We spent the night in the ER, where the nurse nonchalantly breezed in and out of our room and told me he would be fine, and that this happened all the time. That was the day something changed in his eyes, although if this inclines one to think I am an anti-vaxxer, I’m not. My kids have been appropriately vaccinated, although vaccine injury theory has made me scratch my head from time to time. Don’t condemn me. Wondering is what people do when there are no answers.
By the time my son was three, he had experienced multiple pneumonias, some requiring hospitalization, multiple ear infections, multiple emergency room visits for fevers, and three surgeries, two requiring general anesthesia. Research now suggests that general anesthesia may impair brain development in young children, another point I revisit when trying to come up with the answers that don’t exist.
By the age of four, he had still not caught up like the doctors had promised. He could only speak in echolalic phrases, repeating, like a bird, things people said to him, and asking possessive questions: That your car? That your cake? That your toy? He did not play with the toys he pointed to, nor did he play with other children. He had been kicked out of two preschool playgroups for biting. By the age of five, when he started kindergarten, I asked the school to test him for autism. They told me there was no way that, with his glowing eye contact and big smile, which worked to confound all so
rts of professionals, he had autism. When I insisted that they test him, they reluctantly agreed.
Yep, he had it.
SPARTA
Beginning around age twelve, Spartan boys would be given only one item of clothing per year—a purplish red cloak known as a phoinikis that I presume was not warm at all. Exposure to the elements helped to toughen them up. They slept in beds made out of reeds that they pulled by hand from the Eurotas River. By eighteen, scarred, strong-jawed Spartan boys became reserve members of the army and were well on their way to being full citizens, with the right to marry, own land, and fight for the glory of their nation. Though this is disputed, Spartan mothers were said to have told their sons on the eve of their first battle, “Either come home with your shield or on it.” I can imagine that these new soldiers, with blood in their eyes, didn’t look back when they left.
NOW
We move my son into his new bedroom at my mother’s house. While I unpack his bag, he sits in a chair in the bedroom and talks about technology. He is unaware that I am working while he sits, even after I ask him to help me unpack. He waxes eloquent about iPods, iPads, Android phones, cell phone chargers, and types of applications available through both Android and iOS operating systems. He talks about technology and his desire to own it, play with it, and explore it, nearly constantly, without the ability to see that it bores the pants off everybody else. He talked about it the day I came home after a serious hospital stay without asking me how I was, he talked about it through a migraine headache I once had, he talked about it immediately after getting in trouble for using technology inappropriately. He talks about it constantly, even though he is under strict restriction from its use. He will talk about it five minutes after being reminded of why he is no longer allowed to use technology unsupervised. He never stops talking about it. He asks, “Do you think I can get a smartphone so I can keep in touch with you when we are apart?” “I’m not sure,” I say, which is what I say when I don’t know what to say.