Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (33 page)

I started publishing 
The
 
Clark
 
Kent Chronicles
 when our real-life ADHD WonderKid
^[1]
was in middle school, absolutely the worst time of his life. I know, I’m a fabulous mother.

At first, I only posted my stories to a private family blog. My actions (and scribblings) did not register on the radar of our “Clark
^[2]
.” Actually, not much registered on his radar. One of the hallmarks of his ADHD is his incredible lack of observation skills. This serves him well at times.

I branched out. The 
Clark Kent Chronicles
 vignettes began to pop up in my Facebook statuses. Clark refused to accept my friend request, so he stayed blissfully ignorant, but other people noticed. The kid who drove me nuts, the kid I wrote funny stories about to keep from crying over, delighted my friends.

So I branched further out. By now, I had a public website with a modest following. I expanded my vignettes into essays. Readers loved him. And in a moment of soul-baring self-therapy, I pushed “Confessions of a Guilt-Stricken Mom: Loving My ADHD Son” out into the great unseen masses on the internet.

The response overwhelmed me. My maternal suffering and my attempts to laugh about it touched a nerve. Clark was the boy other stressed-out ADHD parents could read about to feel better about their own kids and themselves. He made it all OK for a lot of people who really were at the end of their endurance. Those parents were learning, like me, that no one had a one-size-fits-all-solution or perfect answer for them: not psychiatrists, psychologists, in-laws, PTA buddies, or strangers in line at Walmart. They were parenting their kids by trial and error, too, and managing, just barely, to survive it.

By this point, Clark had relented and let me into his Facebook world, although I wasn’t allowed to interact with him. Too embarrassing. (Kids!) Tentatively, I prodded him to see if he had noticed the 
Clark Kent Chronicles
 posts in his News Feed.

“Did you see I mentioned you on my blog? It was on Facebook,” I asked.

“Uhhhhh,” Clark said. Or didn’t say, rather.

“I just want to be sure you’re OK with me writing about you.”

“What?”

I clicked and opened the post “Lacrosse Gloves Make Sense to Me.”

“See?”

Clark read. He smiled, then frowned. “Do you have to do this? People will know it’s me.”

“Like I’m friends with your friends. No one knows your real first name. Plus, our last names are different.”

“OK, I guess.”

From this exchange, I intuited that he was crazy in love with me writing about him, and that he wanted me to rock on. 
Go, Mom, go!
 I’m highly empathic like that.

I launched a Facebook fan page. A budding writer himself, Clark became more interested in my writing overall. I wrote a novel, 
Going for Kona
, based partly on my feelings about my awesome husband and partly on my feelings about my awesome son. At first, he devoured it. Then he came to 
bad parts
, where Mom and Son fought, and Husband died. Big tears ran down his cheeks. He paced circles around the house in his worn-to-a-nub flip-flops. He argued with me to change it. I wouldn’t. And he refused to read another word, unable to deal with his enormous middle-school-boy emotions.

But he was proud of me. He started to read my other pieces. Sort of. For a while. Mostly he just daydreamed about his mother becoming the next Great American Author, when he wasn’t playing computer games on the sly or hiding his school progress report.

Unfortunately, it was during this time period that 
The
 
Clark Kent Chronicles
 as a body of work finally broke through his haze and into his cerebral cortex. We had a serious sit-down.

Clark pointed at a sentence in a piece called “Poo Poo on You.” “That’s not what happened,” he said.

“What? It’s pretty much what happened. If I wrote exactly what happened I would bore people with 500,000-word manifestos. It’s not a lie. I write semi-true. Isn’t that better, anyway? You have plausible deniability. You can tell people that your mother just makes this stuff up,” I said.

“But not everybody will know that.”

“The people that know you know what’s true.”

He thought about it. He suggested I use a different name for him. I considered it for a couple of seconds. I suggested I continue to use Clark Kent. He relented. Sort of.

“Just don’t embarrass me, Mom. You could ruin my life, you know.”

“I promise, son, I won’t.”

A few years passed, and here we are.

Clark, I promise, this isn’t going to ruin your life. And if I make any money at all off 
The
 
Clark Kent Chronicles
, the first thing I’ll do with it is pay for your therapy. I promise.

My son has ADHD. He is also a near-genius, hilarious, dearly loved, and the most well-adjusted member of our family. When I think of Clark, I see Niagara Falls. I smell pine trees and clear mountain air. I hear Natalie Merchant sing “Wonder.”

Clark is special. We always knew he had unique traits (don’t we all?), but we fought the ADHD label and diagnosis for many years. Instead, we would empathize with each other that he was disorganized, “his father’s child,” “out to lunch,” and “his own self.”

Type A, slightly OCD woman that I am, I just believed I could engineer a solution, that my will and need for control were stronger than anything God and Clark’s genetics could put in front of me. We employed every suggestion we could find to help him, short of medication, until he was in his teens. But no matter what we did, Clark was still the kid who would leave the kitchen with an assignment to put up his folded laundry and forget it by the time he reached the living room, then happily return to the kitchen after a few meandering laps around our house to sit down and read 
The Ranger’s Apprentice
, without understanding why his mother’s face had just turned purple.

I want to introduce you to this amazing creature, my son.

In eighth grade, Clark received a commendation in all four of the standardized TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) subjects. He participated in band and lacrosse. He played a primary role in his middle school play, 
The Naked King
. And yet he almost drove his parents crazy with constant, inexplicable Clarkisms along the way.

Back then, his counselor asked us to teach Clark responsibility for his own actions using Love and Logic Parenting
^[1]
in conjunction with the assistance we all gave him on organizational skills. The 
staggering
 amount of assistance we gave Clark with organizational skills, which he absolutely hated, whether it came from the counselor or from us. But the counselor claimed great success with the Love and Logic methodology.

We were supposed to clearly state to Clark that he is responsible for a certain behavior (i.e., turning in completed homework) and that if he chooses not to do the behavior, he is choosing the consequence that goes with it (i.e., yard work).

Logical, right?

Loving, too?

Sure . . . but it didn’t work on Clark 
at all
. Not a single bit.

It worked amazingly well with his non-ADHD siblings, though, so it was not a total waste. To give you just a taste, I offer up this very one-sided Instant Message conversation between my husband (stepdad) and me (mom). This exchange is about yard work Clark was supposed to do as a consequence for not turning in completed homework.

mom 4:39pm: i told him to go outside and start the yard work/mow at 4:10. then i took a long shower

mom 4:39pm: i started getting ready in the bathroom

mom 4:39pm: at 4:33 i heard noises in the kitchen

mom 4:39pm: it was clark

mom 4:40pm: 
“getting a snack”

mom 4:40pm: i said go back outside you should have done the snack before you started the yard work

mom 4:40pm: he said no, i haven’t gotten started out in the yard yet

mom 4:40pm: i said impossible, no snack takes 22 min

mom 4:40pm: he said he made a sandwich

mom 4:40pm: i said that doesn’t take 22 minutes, 22 minutes is a 3 course meal

mom 4:40pm: he then said he’d go 
right outside

mom 4:40pm: but he came right back in and said he had no gas so he was going to pull weeds instead of mow. i said ok. he asked me to show him which plants are weeds so i did

mom 4:41pm: he came back in 1 minute later and said there are thorns

mom 4:41pm: i said get gloves if you are concerned about thorns (as you know there were barely any stickers on those plants and no thorns)

mom 4:41pm: he went looking for gloves

mom 4:41pm: couldn’t find any (he said)

mom 4:41pm: he went back outside WITH HIS GIANT LACROSSE GLOVES ON, with the fingers that have the size and flexibility of Polish sausage

mom 4:41pm: at this point, i became frustrated

mom 4:41pm: i told him to get the gloves off and get outside

mom 4:41pm: i explained to him that it was 4:36 and that we were leaving at 6:30 for his sister’s concert and that I was dropping him at his dad’s

mom 4:41pm: because he had at least 2 hours of work to do in the yard as he had known since 
last night

mom 4:42pm: and he couldn’t go to the concert without a shower, but there wouldn’t be time for him to shower because he had to finish

mom 4:42pm: and that after this i couldn’t trust him to stay at home alone and do the yard work without supervision, so he had to go to his dad’s

mom 4:42pm: AND this was after a very difficult 5 minute conversation trying to get a straight answer out of him about his grades and what his teachers said about any need for extra credit in his classes given all the homework he hadn’t turned in

mom 4:42pm: i had to stop him over and over when he would say something nonresponsive designed to make me think he had actually talked to the teacher, and i’d say, that’s not what the teacher said, what did the teacher say, and it turned out he hadn’t talked to the teachers at all!

mom 4:42pm: so then he started crying because he wasn’t going to get to go to the concert

mom 4:43pm: and i only yelled one time, which is a miracle at this point

mom 4:43pm: and i said stop with the tears, this was your choice to waste 40 min, i told you that we had things to do that you might not get to do if you didn’t get finished so maybe you’ll learn from this but if you don’t it will be the same tomorrow

mom 4:43pm: but either way, get outside and get going on the yard work

stepdad 4:44pm: i am still here, take a breath 

stepdad 4:44 pm: LACROSSE GLOVES? you have got to admit, that is pretty funny . . . 

mom 4:45 pm: ask me tomorrow and maybe it will be funny then . . . 

mom 4:47 pm: ok i admit it, it’s funny

Besides a lack of organizational skills, another hallmark of the neuro-atypical
^[2]
mind is creative problem-solving. Solutions that don’t seem logical to the rest of us, necessarily, but make perfect sense to the child. Clark gives us lots of examples of this trait, sometimes in a dangerous way. Let’s just say you don’t want to send him out with any type of cutting implement without a clear set of instructions, a demonstration, a run-through, and constant oversight. Which begs the question: Why the heck don’t I just do this job myself, if he isn’t learning anything from it?

Ah, but he is, Grasshopper. We must be patient. Very, very patient, 
my inner kung fu master says
.

(Hold me.)

Note that it truly is a miracle that Clark survives his mother; yelling only once in this lengthy exchange was quite an achievement for me. Intellectually, I know yelling does no good, except to occasionally keep my head from exploding off the top of my neck.

Our learning from the scenario above? That Love and Logic doesn’t overcome the wiring of an ADHD brain. Some behaviors just aren’t 
choices
 for Clark. Some are, though, and one of our challenges is to keep him from gaming our system by using ADHD as an excuse for bad choices, especially as he becomes more parent-savvy.

Lacrosse gloves . . . it 
was 
pretty funny.

Click here to continue reading 
The Clark Kent Chronicles.

I am not some whacko who writes about her labradoodle Schnookums. Let’s just get that straight right off the bat. Hell, I’m practically anti-animal, and I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, either. Dogs? They shed. Poop. Pee. Barf. Drool. Chew. Bark. Cats? Ditto, except make that yowl instead of bark, plus I’m deathly allergic. That’s why currently we have only three dogs and one cat. Oh, and five fish. And I hardly even like them, except for maybe a little. We’ve cut back, too. It wasn’t so long ago the dog count was six, the cat count three, and the fish count innumerable, along with guinea pigs, birds, ducks, rabbits, and a pig. As in swine.

My most vivid memories of growing up in Wyoming and Texas are of animals. We had the normal sorts of pets, plus the absolute luxury of living in the country. I raised sheep for 4-H and rode my horse to sleepovers. We had visitors furry, feathered, and scaly, of both the hooved and clawed varieties. My husband grew up on St. Croix where the animals were different, but his wild upbringing, close to nature, matched mine. His mother tells stories of her sons bringing geckos on the plane from the island to the mainland, and finding their little skeletons outside the family’s summer home in Maine months later. Eric’s favorite photograph from his youth shows him standing on the beach holding the booby he rescued while surfing, then nursed back to health and released.

As a child, I devoured books about animals, like 
Black Beauty 
and 
Where the Red Fern Grows. 
I idolized James Herriot and Jacques Cousteau. I could never quite decide whether to be a veterinarian or a marine biologist or Shamu’s trainer. Somehow I sold out early on and became a lawyer, but that didn’t stop the animal love. There, I’ve admitted it: animal love. I ♥ animals, with a big red heart and sparkly glitter. All of them, nearly, except for maybe insects and reptiles. Also I am not a big fan of rats. But other than that, I love every one. Eric and I spend all the time we can outdoors looking for critters, whether we do it from bicycles or cars, or in the water or on our own four feet. We watch 
All Creatures Great and Small 
on Netflix. Our offspring naturally love God’s creatures, too, at least as much as they love their smartphones, and a whole lot more than they love us.

In the Virgin Islands of Eric’s youth, Christianity made plenty of room for the ghosts, spirits, and jumbies of obeah, a folk-magic religion with elements of sorcery and voodoo. The locals couldn’t comprehend why continentals like me scoffed at what was so plainly true to them, but scoff I did. Ghosts? Jumbies? As in Casper the friendly? It was hard for me to follow—until I met Eric. He and the islands opened my eyes to a world that existed just beyond the visible. Sometimes these non-humans scared me, and sometimes they comforted me. I liked my pets and the animals of the wild better, but I was captivated by the jumbies. Especially the one guarding Annaly, the house we bought in the rainforest.

When my lawyer career morphed into human resources and then I finally started writing, non-humans started spilling out of every story. Sometimes they are the stars, and sometimes they are the supporting actors. No matter their role, they always manage to steal the show from the unsuspecting humans who believe they are the center of the universe.