Saving Grace (Katie & Annalise Book 1) (31 page)

I am a planner. I plan and schedule and plot, much to the delight of my engineer/triathlete husband, who loves to live by a plan. Even more, he loves for me to make the plan and then for us both to live by it. And what he loves most of all is when the plan I make and we live by includes a healthy dose of us bicycling and swimming together. I believe a plan is a structure to make reasonable changes in, while Eric casts his plans in cement. Obviously, I am right, so there usually isn’t much of a problem.

But I did not plan what happened to us in the Good Old Summertime Classic, a sixty-nine-mile bicycle ride along some of our most favorite cycling roads anywhere. The bike route runs in and around Fayetteville, Texas, and includes the tiny old town of Roundtop. We had trained for it. We had talked about it with joy and reverence. Eric even accidentally went to get our packets a full week before they were available for pickup. (Don’t ask.)

The night before the race, I developed a PMS
^[1]
/hormonal migraine. Because it was the middle of the night, I took one of my gentler migraine prescriptions, hoping that this pill plus sleep would be all I needed. But when I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the mother of all migraines, I caved in and went for the elephant tranquilizer. When morning came, I was so nauseous that I couldn’t eat. My husband, a man of immense patience and even greater kindness, suggested we stay home. But we had made a plan, so I got in the car. I theorized that I had no idea now how I would feel in two and a half hours—but I kinda did know, and just didn’t want to admit it.

I should have listened to my husband.

On the way to the race, driving in the dark, the unthinkable happened. I had my head on Eric’s shoulder, sweetly sleeping (make that “snoring and drooling under the influence of the elephant pill”), when he let out a tiny swear word. Actually, I believe it started with an F, and was preceded by the word “mother,” and that his voice blasted through my cranium and echoed madly inside my impaired brain.

“What happened?” I screamed, heart pounding, hand clutching throat, eyes sweeping the road for signs of the apocalypse.

“I hit a cardinal.”

OH MY GOD. HE HIT A CARDINAL.

Since the time he could speak, my husband has proclaimed himself a fan of the Chicago Phoenix St. Louis Arizona Cardinals football team. His screen saver at work has always been a giant Cardinal head logo, until very recently when he finally switched it to a picture of us, under teensy-tinsy little applications of subtle pressure from me. He watched their 2009 playoff game at 2:00 a.m. from his hotel room in Libya through a webcam picture of our TV on his laptop. He collects cardinals and Cardinal paraphernalia and insists on displaying them prominently in our bedroom, which is painted Cardinal red.

Despite his lifelong obsession, Eric had never seen an actual live cardinal bird until we moved to Houston. Growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he’d caught glimpses of them on TV, and he pictured them as red, fierce . . . and large.

One day while unpacking boxes in our new house, I saw a male cardinal through the window. Nonchalantly, I called out to my sweetie, “Hey, Eric, there’s a cardinal in our bird feeder.”

Eric, whose physique looks like you would expect it to after twenty years of triathlon and cycling, pounded into the living room like a rhino instead of his usual cheetah self, wearing an expectant grin and not much else.

“WHERE IS IT?”

Lost for words, I pointed out the front window and prayed the elderly woman next door was not walking past our house.

“It’s awfully small.” (That was Eric that said that, not the elderly neighbor.)

He was crestfallen. The mighty cardinal was a tiny slip of a bird.

Back to the car: ear-splitting expletives and wife under the influence. “Honey, I didn’t feel an impact. Are you sure you didn’t miss it?” I asked.

“They’re awfully small birds,” he said.

Ahhhh, good point. We drove on, somberly. We arrived at the race. I stumbled off to the bathroom. When I came back, Eric was crouched in front of the grill of our car. I joined him, confused. He held up a handful of tiny red feathers.

I swear it was the drugs, but I burst out laughing. “You, you of all people, you killed a 
cardinal
?”

He glared at me as he picked out the brightest of the small feathers and tucked it reverently into the chest strap of his heart monitor. “I’m going to carry this feather with me in tribute, the whole way.”

So we got on our bikes: me, wobbly, cotton-mouthed, and somewhat delirious; Eric, solemn and determined. This, the ride for the cardinal, would be the ride of his life. Sixty-nine miles to the glory of the cardinal.

I made it all of about two miles before I apologized. “I’m anaerobic, and we’re only going twelve miles per hour on a flat. My neck and back are seizing up. I don’t know if it’s drugs or hormones, but I’m really whack.”

“You can do it, honey. We came all this way. Now we’re riding for a higher purpose.”

I gave it my best, I really did, but a few miles later after a succession of hills where going up with a racing heartbeat was only slightly less awful than cruising down with a seriously messed-up sense of balance, I pulled to a stop. “I’ve never quit before, but I can’t do it today, love.”

A beautiful male cardinal swooped across the road in front of us. Eric bit his lip. “I understand. Do you want to flag a SAG [support and aid] wagon?”

“I can make it back if we just take it easy. I’m sorry, honey.”

My husband treated me like a princess that day, but all the excitement had drained out of him. This race was not to be, and a teacup-sized bird had sacrificed his life in vain because I’d overdosed on Immitrex and ruined the plan. The waste of it all, the waste of a day, the waste of a life—it was hard to overcome. But Eric tried; I’ll give him credit for that, the man really tried.

That night, after we did a make-up ride on the trainers while we watched 
We Are Marshall
 (interrupted occasionally by Eric’s sobs, because the only thing worse than a dead cardinal is a dead football player), I pulled our sheets out of the drier and brought them into our room. Eric, wearing his new Fayetteville Good Old Summertime T-shirt, helped me put the warm, clean cotton on the bed.

As we hoisted the sheets in the air to spread them out over the mattress, a tiny red feather shot straight up toward the light and wafted down slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until, pushed by the soft breeze of our ceiling fan, it landed on the pillow on Eric’s side of the bed.

Above: Actual cardinal feather on Eric’s pillow.

Steeling myself for the worst, I shot a glance at him to see if he had noticed. I did not exhale. Maybe I had time to brush it off quickly? Too late—he was staring at the feather. “Is that damn bird going to haunt me for the rest of my life now?” he asked. But he smiled.

Now I could breathe. And tease. “Probably. You did senselessly murder a cardinal, Eric.”

And he laughed.

Click here to continue reading 
Hot Flashes And Half Ironmans
.

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.