Turtles and Scurvy

Here's part of another essay from my manuscript on parenting with ADHD.  

 Turtles and Scurvy

Today my kids had chocolate covered almonds for breakfast. They were the kind that are dusted in cocoa powder, not slathered in actual chocolate, so that was sort of okay. (Pro parenting tip:  Things that are sort of okay are usually sufficiently not bad.)  While driving to school, I took the bag of almonds from them (at a stoplight) and passed back a container of fresh raspberries I’d snagged on our way out of the house.

“Hey!” they said. “Give us back the almonds!”

“Eat the raspberries first.”

“But we don’t want raspberries!” they said. I have to use plural pronouns to attribute their speech because I can’t remember which kid said what. Their collective sentiments are a whiny blur. To whit: “Why are you trying to make us eat raspberries?”

“I think you know why.”

“Because you’re mean?”

“Try again, dumbass.”

Because I was irritated and concentrating on driving, the irony of this statement slipped past me and smacked them silly. (Thank you, irony.)

“Sorry,” I said. I believe apologizing to your kids when you mess up is good parenting, and I give myself lots of opportunities to be a good parent. 

We spent the rest of the drive to school snorting and laughing. I taught the kids that raspberries are full of Vitamin C, just like citrus fruits, and we need Vitamin C to stay healthy. Also, I told them that long ago, British sailors were called limies because they took hundreds of limes with them on long voyages. 

“Hence this well-known aphorism: A lime a day keeps the scurvy away.”

“That’s not how it goes, Mom.”

“Sure it is. Those sailors lived on limes and turtles for months.”

We laughed more as I told them about tortoises on the Galapagos Islands and how sailors used to raid the place like a 7-11, taking on a few dozen tortoises like modern travelers grab donuts and Coke. The tortoises could stay alive, unfed, for a very long time, which was important because refrigeration had not been invented yet. Sailors rolled them into the hold and stored them upside down. Later, the sailors cooked them in their own shells.

“Poor tortoises!”

“Why didn’t they run away?”

“Because they’re tortoises, dum— darling.”

More laughs. They pretended to be tortoises set upon by sailors, using stuffy-nose-sounding voices and slow-motion profanity.

“Nooooooo…..!  Run awaaaaaaaaay…..!”

“Oh, they got meeeeee….!   Fuuuuuuuuuu—”

“Hey.”  I had to interrupt that potentially profane tortoise. We were pulling into the drop off lane at school. I stretched my neck toward an imaginary captor just past the windshield, saying in a turtle-voice, “I will bite your faaaaaaaaaace…..!” I slowly opened my mouth, trying to look fearsome, pulling in my lower jaw to suggest a reptilian, beakish overbite. The kids laughed more. I pretended to gnaw on the steering wheel. Just then I locked eyes with a teacher who was directing traffic.

She glanced in the backseat. By the way her face relaxed, I could tell that whatever long-standing questions she had had about my kids’ behavior had just been answered. 

I dried the steering wheel with my sleeve and dutifully pulled forward. Now it was time for the kids to get out. I reminded them not to ride the bus home because I would pick them up after school and take them to theatre class. Lionel hopped out of the car, but Annabelle began to cry. She had been crying off and on since last night, worried about her math test, friendship drama, and the cretins (her word) who talked loudly in her sacred refuge, the library. I gave her a pep talk.

“I know what you’re trying to do, Mom!” she growled.

“Have a good day, honey.”

“I hate you!”

“I know.”

After she got out, I found a parking place and emailed her teacher from my iPhone. “…Just wanted to let you know that Annabelle is feeling anxious about her math test today…trouble making a friend…feeling fragile…”  Her teacher and I would exchange a few messages that day. She’s a kind person, caring about her students’ emotions as well as their learning. For now, though, I watched Annabelle wipe her eyes and stomp to the school doors. I sat in the car, worrying about her, hoping her day would improve, feeling like a hard-hearted parent for making her go to school when she was upset. “You will regret this choice!” she’d said before slamming the car door. But I didn’t want to set a precedent for staying home when upset; that would quickly lead to a lot of absences.

I sat there a little longer. I saw a police car pull over a driver who had been speeding in the school zone. Then I drove to the town pool. I was looking forward to swimming some laps, but I never got out of the car. I just wasted an hour playing SET on my phone. It’s a game of pattern recognition with no words, very relaxing to look at shapes and colors. Before I knew it, lap swimming time was over. I betook myself to my office (Starbucks) to work with words.

After school, I inched through the maze of orange cones the teachers had set up in the parking lot so the traffic could snake around the school and get off the road. Annabelle called me from her kid-phone—“Where are you?!”—“I’m in the line, honey.”—and after about ten minutes of crawling forward behind a herd of minivans, which left me barely enough time to get to theatre class, I finally picked up the kids and…. Oh, dear….

Only the kid without ADHD was there. The other kid had apparently forgotten about theatre and boarded the school bus as usual. So I inched my way to a parking spot, got out, and ran with Annabelle to the other side of the school, hoping to find his bus before it left. I would step onboard and use my teacher-voice to shut the kids up and my Jedi thought-powers to pluck my kid from his seat. But Annabelle was tugging on my arm, saying how embarrassing that would be. 

“I’m not embarrassed,” I assured her.

“I know. Pleeeeeeease don’t do it, Mom.”

We were too late anyway, and I had to drive home behind the darned bus, kids pointing at me out the back windows, to fetch Lionel.