Excerpt from The Clark Kent Chronicles (Parenting ADHD and Asperger’s)
“My mother is ruining my life.”
I started publishing The Clark Kent Chronicles when our real-life ADHD WonderKid[footnote]At the time I wrote this book, Clark Kent had survived my parenting to reach his junior year in high school.[/footnote] 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[footnote]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.[/footnote].” 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.
~~~
Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery Page 63
