Earth to Emily

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  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 (Parenting ADHD & Asperger's)

  "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 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.

  * * *

  Techniques to help parents have more fun and less stress while raising responsible kids of all ages, from the Love and Logic Institute. http://www.loveandlogic.com/. ↵

  For purposes of this book, neuro-atypical will describe people on the autism or ADHD spectrums. Conversely, I will use neuro-typical to describe people that have neurological development and states consistent with what most people would think of as normal, particularly with their executive functions and their ability to process linguistic information and social cues. ↵

  Excerpt from Puppalicious and Beyond (Animal and Nonhuman Stories)

  I am not a whackjob.

  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.