He Melted My Heart With Words

photograph by C. N.

I have this son. He is a sweet boy, a smart boy, and even a very good boy. I love  him so much I wouldn't know what to do without him. But this boy also has ADHD and drives me up the wall with his antics. EVERY DAY. He is currently getting below average grades even though he has above average intelligence. And this brings us to the real story.

He plays the tuba and really super duper wants to go to a band festival, but cannot go due to a failing grade in one of his classes-- English class of all things! (You ever heard of how a plumber's pipes are always leaky...yeah, I guess that's my story now) So to keep going, his lovely teacher said that if he can get his poetry unit turned in completed before school starts, she will let the band instructor know he is passing, and the kind band instructor agreed to this deal. Now this brings us to my role in the whole story.

I told my son that if he would work hard, I would be his assistant and type up his work so it wouldn't be messy and chicken-scratchy like his ADHD work tends to be when he is actually getting stuff done. (Give him a month on one thing and it will look fantastic!) He worked until midnight. Writing and writing, asking how to spell a word here and there, but working and writing and thinking for himself. I felt so happy. Then, he told me he couldn't think anymore and was falling asleep as he said it. I told him I would type up what he had done so it would be ready to paste on his project, then I got to work.

As I typed, I read funny poems, average poems, and some poems I wouldn't really say were poems, but oh well he actually wrote something down poems! Then, I got to his very first poem--the one he wrote while he was missing out on grocery shopping with us because I figured out he had another pile of work gone undone for English class right before we headed out to run errands. I told him he wasn't going to do anything else until he got his simile/metaphor poem done--not even go grocery shopping.

I would like to present to you his poem written in solitary confinement, under duress:

My Mom

My mom is like my heart that keeps me alive.

My mom is a sweetheart, but sometimes a little bit too sweet.

My mom is like a candy, all ways nice and sweet.

My mom is a coconut, even though she drives me nuts.

My mom is like a house which keeps me clean and dry.

My mom is a party, being crazy every day.
My mom is nice even though we fight.

My mom is like a flower that looks beautiful.

My mom is awesome, as awesome as a possum.

My mom is like a cat, gentle and all of that.

My mom is like a song, just playing along.

My mom is like a book, always filling me with knowledge.

My mom is like a soldier, helping fight all my battles.

My mom is like a medicine that always keeps me going.

My mom is the best mom and there’s no denying that!

-- Mr. [C] ADHD Middle-Schooler

What a ray of sunshine after a cloudy day this boy's poem is for me! I have felt so out of sorts, so unloved, so unappreciated. Like such a LOSER of a mom. But no, I am fifteen lines of mom-ness, even awesome as a possum mom-ness.

I say, if her son says it, a mother can claim any compliment as irrefutable fact. 

And I share it with you here in order to remind myself tomorrow, when the sun comes up and the antics start flying, how my son needs me and loves me so much that he wrote a poem about it.