Our “Surprise! We’re vegetarian!” B&B sat near a tundra lake. For those of you who have not seen a tundra lake, imagine a beautiful lake in a mountain clearing surrounded by tall evergreens. Picture deer drinking from crystalline waters, hear the ducks quacking greetings to each other as they cruise its glassy surface. Smell the pine needles in the air, fresh and earthy.
And then imagine the opposite.
A tundra lake is in the highlands, no doubt, but the similarity stops there: no trees, no windbreak, no calm surface, and no scenery. Instead, it’s an ice-chunk-filled, white-capped pit of black water extending straight down to hell, stuck smack dab in the middle of a rock-strewn wasteland. Other than that, it’s terrific.
Maybe it was because we were newlyweds, but somehow Eric intuited that I would love nothing more than to canoe this lake in forty-degree weather and thirty-five-mph winds, wearing sixty-seven layers of movement-restricting, water-absorbent clothing. Maybe it was because we were newlyweds, but I somehow assumed that because he knew of my dark water phobia and hatred of the cold (anything below seventy degrees), I was in good hands. My new husband assured me this lake was perfect for tandem canoeing.
So . . . we drove across the barren terrain to the lake. Eric was bouncy. I was unable to make my mouth form words other than “You expect me to get in that @#$%&&*$* canoe on that @#$%&&*$* lake?”
I promise he is smarter than this will sound. And that I am just as bitchy as I will sound. In my family, we call my behavior being the bell cow, as in “She who wears the bell leads the herd—and takes no shit from other cows.”
Eric answered, “Absolutely, honey. It’ll be great. Here, help me get the canoe in the water. I’d take it off the car myself, but with that wind, whew, it’s like a sail. Careful not to dump it over; it’s reallllly cold in there. Not like that, love. Where are you going? Did I say something wrong?”
I responded by slamming the car door. Anger gave way to tears that pricked the corners of my eyes. I stewed in my thoughts. I knew I had to try to canoe. I couldn’t quit before I started. We were training, and if I didn’t do it, Eric wouldn’t do it, and that wasn’t fair of me.
I exited the car. Eric was dragging the canoe out of the water and trying to avoid looking like a red flag waving in front of me.
Super-rationally, I asked, “What are you doing?”
He said, “Well, I’m not going to make you do this.”
“You’re not making me. I’m scared. I hate this. I’ll probably fall in and all you’ll find is my frozen carcass next summer. But I’m going to do it.”
My poor husband.
We paddled clockwise around the lake in the shallows, where the waves were lowest, and I fought for breath. I’m not sure if it was the constriction of all the clothing layers or actually hyperventilation, but either way, I panted like a three-hundred-pound marathoner. It would have scared off any animal life within five miles if you could have heard me over the wind. Suddenly, Eric shot me a wild-eyed look and started paddling furiously toward the center of the lake.
“You’re going the wrong way!” I protested.
“I can’t hear you,” he shouted back.
“Turn around!”
“I can’t turn around right now, I’m paddling.”
“Eric Hutchins, turn the canoe back toward the shore!”
And as quickly as his mad dash for the deep had started, it stopped. He angled the canoe for the shoreline.
“What in the hell was that all about?” I asked.
“Nothing, love. I just needed to get my heart rate up.”
I sensed the lie, but I couldn’t prove it. My own heart raced as if I had been the one sprint-paddling. For once, though, I kept my mouth shut.
The waves grew higher. We paddled and paddled for what felt like hours, but made little forward progress against the wicked-cold wind.
“Eric, I really want out of the canoe.”
“We’re halfway. Hang in there.”
“No. I want out right now. I’m scared. We’re going to tip over. I can’t breathe.”
“How about we cut across the middle of lake and shave off some distance? That will get you to the shore faster.”
“I WANT TO GO THE NEAREST SHORE RIGHT NOW AND GET OUT OF THE #%$&(&^%#@% CANOE.”
Now I really had to get out, because it was the second time I’d called the canoe a bad name, and I knew it would be out to get me.
Eric paddled us to the shore without another word. I’m pretty sure he thought some, but he didn’t say them. I got out, almost falling over into the water and turning myself into a giant super-absorbent Tampax. He turned the canoe back over the water and continued on without me. This wasn’t how I’d pictured it going down, but I knew I had better let him a) work out and b) work me out of his system. Looking like the Michelin man, I trudged back around the lake to the car and beat him there by only half an hour.
By the time we’d loaded the canoe onto the top of our rental car and hopped in, we were well on our way back to our happy place. Yes, I know I don’t deserve him. I don’t question it; I just count my blessings.
That night we dined out—did I mention we were starving to death on broccoli and whole-wheat tabbouleh?—to celebrate our marriage. Eric had arranged for flowers to be delivered to our table before we got there. The aroma was scrumptious: cow, cooked cow! Yay! And, of course, the flowers. I looked at Eric’s wind-chafed, sunburned face and almost melted from the heat of adoring him. Or maybe it was from the flame of the candle, which I was huddling over to stay warm. What was wrong with the people in this state? Somebody needed to buy Montana a giant heater. We held hands and traded swipes of Chapstick.
He interrupted my moment. “I have a confession to make. And I promise you are really going to think this is funny later.”
Uh oh. “Spill it, baby.”
“Remember when I paddled us toward the middle of the lake as hard as I could?”
“I’m trying to block the whole experience out of my mind.”
“Yeah, well, let me tell you, sweetness, it was about ten times worse for me than you. But do you remember what you said about falling in, yadda yadda, frozen carcass next summer, blah blah?”
I didn’t dignify this with an answer, but he didn’t need one and continued without much of a pause. “Well, you were in front of me, breathing into your paper bag or whatever, when I looked down, straight down, into the eyes and nostrils of a giant, bloated, frozen, very dead, fully intact, floating ELK CARCASS.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not. It was so close to the surface that if you hadn’t still had those tears in your eyes, there is no way you wouldn’t have seen it. You could have touched its head with your hand without even getting your wrist wet.”
“No, you did NOT take me out on a lake with giant frozen dead animals floating in it.” A macabre version of Alphabits cereal popped into my mind.
“Yes, I did,” he said, and he hummed a few bars of Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
“Oh my God. If I had seen it right then, I would have come unhinged.”
“More unhinged. I know. I was terrified you would capsize us and then you would quadruple freak out in the water bumping into that thing. I had to paddle for my life.”
He was right. I let him enjoy his moment; I’m glad he confessed. But I will never canoe on a tundra lake with Eric again. Even if I got my courage up, he would never invite me.
Cinderella, eat your heart out.[1]
Click here to continue with How to Screw Up Your Marriage.
* * *
There’s video of the tundra lake and other parts of our Montana trip on my YouTube channel, The Land of Pamelot. Sorry, there is no video of the elk. ↵
Excerpt from The Clark Kent Chronicles (ADHD & Asperger's Parenting)
"My mother is ruining my life."
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.
* * *
At the time I wrote this book, Clark Kent had survived my parenting to reach his junior year in high school. ↵
Of course, Clark isn’t his real name, but we nicknamed him Clark Kent long ago. I used pseudonyms throughout this little tome to protect the innocent, criteria which requires my husband Eric and me to use our real names. ↵
Where It All Began: Lacrosse Gloves Make Sense to Me
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 im
possible, 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
Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) Page 33