I read this post by Sarah Kendzior expecting to find some really dark, depraved shit in Liza Long's blog excerpts:
Long has written a series of vindictive and cruel posts about her children in which she fantasizes about beating them, locking them up and giving them away. In most posts, her allegedly insane and violent son is portrayed as a normal boy who incites her wrath by being messy, buying too many Apple products and supporting Obama.Except...no.
The excerpts cited are in no way abusive or violent. Please, humorless hand-wringers, read the TONE. It's clearly light-hearted venting, she clearly has affection for her family (if not for her husband, and who would blame her if half of what she said about him is true), and she is clearly trying to be funny. It's the kind of stuff I would say to a friend if I had kids who were driving me crazy, and the kind of playfully hyperbolic thing you write when you're trying to be entertaining to others about the little things that drive you nuts every day, but always with background affection for those driving you nuts. Her "my son is driving me nuts" post is actually really cute, I think--to me it reads, "This kid is brilliant, but he's a fucking teenager, and I am laughing at that fact even while banging my head against the wall." I challenge you to find me a mother who has never offhandedly said "I want to throttle my kids." Plus, when was the last time you said you wanted to throttle someone and actually intended it as a threat of violence?
The SINGLE blog excerpt I grant reads disturbingly is the one about Abraham and Isaac, but it's far less so in context. The harrowing climbing journey she recounts actually having those thoughts during is with her climbing buddy Nate, NOT her son--the hike with her son makes her recall the hike with Nate. And then the following paragraph, which the other blogger also omits, is a meditation on faith and desire that springs from the story of Abraham that makes clear she's a believing Christian. When I discussed that story in Sunday school as a believer, it was always about sacrifice, not filicide. And then this part: "To give up something that you value greatly for those you love is to know the meaning of sacrifice in the Biblical sense." "Something that you value greatly," here, is climbing the mountain (which corresponds in the Biblical story to Isaac's life, messed up as that metaphor is). Those you love, here, is her kids (God in the Biblical story).
Now, I DID find her Adam Lanza post troubling because it "outs" her son, and because of the assumptions it makes about his condition and what he might do to others in the future. Her son sounds a lot like my bipolar cousin when he was young, but he is now in college and doing really well emotionally and socially. And Lanza wasn't LIKE that as a kid, best we know. He was one of the quiet ones. They almost always are.
However, I think her post started an important conversation about the miserable paucity of mental health treatment options in America. And I believe it came from an honest place of love for her son and fear from her future.
