The Cleverness of Me

“Oh, the cleverness of me.” (Peter Pan, Barrie 1911)

In Peter Pan, after teaching Wendy and her brothers how to fly, Peter proudly declares, “Oh, the cleverness of me.” It’s a line that sparkles with the joy of discovery but also reveals the limits of his childlike perspective. Peter delights in his own ingenuity, yet he lacks the maturity to see the risks or responsibilities that come with it. That mix of brilliance and blindness captures both the wonder and the danger of living only in the moment.

I am constantly amazed by my son’s ability to devise clever creations. He often comes up with inventive workarounds to the challenges he faces, ideas that make me marvel at the way his brain works.

He made a custom case for his phone using cardstock and markers. He created a marble run by tracing pieces of track on paper and taping them together. He taped a “lock” on his door so that he could use the key that Santa gave him. And he finds clever ways to win the games of skill at the arcade.

But like Peter, he doesn’t always have the executive processing or life experience to recognize when those solutions carry risks or could be dangerous. He figured out how to use my wife’s devices to disable the screen time and parental controls on his devices. He installed different browsers on his computer when he was blocked from visiting inappropriate websites. And he finds interesting places to hide the evidence from a candy binge.

Eventually, though, he gets discovered and we have teachable moments as I expand the ways I need to monitor his behavior as he expands his bag of tricks. In these instances, his behavior is generally age-appropriate, although the technology makes it easier for him to have access to inappropriate content.

But it also makes it easier for him to find himself in dangerous situations. The websites he visits are also full of predators and scammers looking for teenagers to manipulate and extort, and the reality is that my son is more susceptible than a typical teenager. His emotional immaturity and challenges with executive functioning often prevent him from fully understanding the dangers associated with using his cleverness to bypass the safety measures that we put in place.

It’s a reminder of how thin the line can be between brilliance and vulnerability, and how much he still needs us to guide him.

However, I struggle with striking a balance between celebrating his cleverness and protecting him from dangerous things, and celebrating creativity when he lacks the maturity to recognize its limits. Most of the time, I lean too heavily on protectionism, and it feels as if I am constantly criticizing him or pointing out the flaws in his creativity. I tell him how his idea won’t work, or how to make it better. I don’t spend enough time encouraging him to experiment with his ideas and continue trying to figure things out.

He will need that cleverness to adapt to a world that wasn’t built for him. He will need that ingenuity to navigate challenges that most people will never have to face. My job isn’t to stifle it in the name of safety but to help him learn how to use it wisely, to guide him as he figures out when to leap and when to look first. It’s not easy to let go of protectionism, but I know that if I can nurture his creativity instead of only policing it, that cleverness—the same spark that sometimes gets him in trouble—might one day be the thing that helps him fly.

Friendship and Resilience: One Link at a Time

I’ve never been good at maintaining relationships beyond the present moment.

I know people who have maintained friendships since grade school. Grade school. They became friends before they were teenagers and still talk to each other twenty or thirty years later.

I know other people who do yearly trips with college friends. Trips. They board an airplane and fly to another location to play golf, gamble, or whatever it is that friends who have known each other for twenty years do.

These are such foreign concepts to me.

After each move in my life, I started over. Friends from our first apartment in Connecticut became memories once we moved across town. When we moved to Florida, it was like starting over, except for periodic visits from family to keep that connection alive.

After I walked across the stage to get my high school diploma, the four years of bonds that I built were broken and discarded. At 19, I joined the Army and left Florida behind, too, once I left for basic training. I spent my entire enlistment overseas, and trips home were infrequent. Since my neighborhood friends were away at college, they, too, became artifacts of a different time.

The first person who spanned multiple stages of my life was my friend from the Army who looked out for me when I arrived in Germany. She was pregnant when I arrived, and when she had her daughter, I became a de facto godfather and uncle. She left the Army and returned home before I did, but after my enlistment ended and I returned to Florida, I would visit her and her family periodically.

For the few years I spent in Florida after the Army, I started another life as my professional career began. I was part of a group of young, single professionals, and we became friends and spent time together outside of work, too. There were friendships, community, and dating, but I set those aside when I took the opportunity to leave the heat behind and move to Colorado.

Colorado was another opportunity to start over. I didn’t know anyone, but my friend from the Army became a flight attendant, and Denver was a hub for her airline. We were still in contact, and when she had a layover in Denver, we were able to see each other. I still occasionally visited her family and also joined them on a trip to China.

Eventually, though, even that relationship started to fade. She would get married, and so would I, and I was grateful to have her at my wedding before our lives went in different directions.

After my son was born, I felt like things might be settling down. I had a group of friends who were married and starting families, and we developed solid friendships as the kids grew up together. For a few years, especially with one of the families, it felt like the kind of lifelong bond that I have seen others have. But a job offer across the country pulled us from that life and dropped us into a new one where we knew no one and had to start over.

Leaving our friends this time was tough, both because of the connection we created and because we were alone and isolated when my son began having seizures. For a few years, every relationship was transitory. Doctors, nurses, and staff were the most consistent people in our lives. My son struggled to maintain regular attendance at school, which left him as a constant outsider as the other children formed bonds. He longed for his friend in Colorado, the last stable friendship he had. We were lucky for a few years to travel back to Colorado and spend time with them, but it wasn’t the same.

Even after he was more stable, his health and the constant appointments made his attendance spotty, further impeding his ability to form friendships. It seems as if just when we would find a sense of routine and normalcy, the universe would use its cosmic hand to shake things up.

The pandemic hit and separated the world. The move to an online school, separate from the public school his friends attended, created more distance. Finally, as the world opened up and we found a school we believed was right for him, we left the city for the suburbs, and those tenuous relationships we struggled to maintain eventually faded.

In some ways, this latest iteration of our life feels settled. The teachers and community at my son’s school provide structure and consistency, which helps form strong relationships. However, on a personal level, at a smaller scale, it feels temporary.

Transitory.

The people I see every weekend at tennis disappear when the courts close until we pick it back up in the spring. We see similar faces every summer during baseball season, but only during the games and never beyond the playoffs, while most of the players attend the same school and have a year-long connection. It’s wonderful to have those circles to return to, but they are scattered rings rather than connected links in a chain.

More and more, it feels like those links close as they fall off the chain, preventing them from ever being reattached. My son is done with baseball, forever removing that link from the chain. He’s had close classmates ghost him after leaving the school, damaging those links beyond repair. His best friend from the past two years is transferring to a public school, so they won’t see each other every day, which leaves that important link hanging precariously close to being disconnected.

But maybe the goal isn’t to build one long, unbroken chain.

Maybe what matters is the ability to keep adding new links — to connect with the people who come into our lives when they do, to hold onto them for as long as we can, and to be grateful for each link while it’s there.

My son already knows how to do that. He connects deeply, he feels the hurt when a link breaks, and then he finds a way to add new ones. In his own way, he’s building resilience — and showing me what it looks like to keep building a life, one link at a time.

A Song of His Own

“Dad, I made a song.”

That was the first thing my son said to me when I got home from work.

“That’s cool, pal!” I responded, thinking he had jotted down a few lyrics to show me.

“Do you want to hear it?” he asked.

Hear it, I thought. Interesting. “Of course!” I said, following him to his room.

I sat on the corner of his bed as he went to the computer.

“Ready?”

I nodded.

He hit play, and from his speakers came an actual rock song. Drums. Bass. Electric guitar. And a vocalist singing about the Colorado Avalanche (my son’s team) defeating the Tampa Bay Lightning (my team) in the NHL Stanley Cup Finals in 2022, the year we were in Colorado and went to a finals game. A game that, as my son constantly reminds me, the Avalanche won 7-0 on their way to hoisting the cup.

As I listened to the song, I watched the smile on my son’s face, especially when the lyrics touched on the game we attended, continued to widen—the smile of pride, connection, and love. It’s the single best sight that I will ever see.

Tampa’s thunder tried to fight,
But Colorado owned the night.

When the song finished, I stared with my jaw dangling open, which caused his smile to grow even wider.

“How?” I asked.

And he walked me through his process, prompting an AI tool with styles, themes, and concepts until he had a completed song.

“Well,” I said. “This has to be on Spotify.”

“Really?” he asked, his voice caught somewhere between disbelief and excitement.

“Really,” I confirmed. “I’ll figure out how to get it distributed so that everyone can hear it.”

For all the challenges my son has, his creativity and ability to figure things out are truly inspiring. When my wife and I were discussing her next book, my son decided to write a Fortnite Tips book, complete with an illustrated title. He gets inspired by videos of his favorite players and builds giant arenas and stadiums in Minecraft—sometimes following tutorials, other times just experimenting until it works. And now, he figured out how to make a song.

It could have been so easy for him to let obstacles define him. To look at the world through the lens of what isn’t possible. But he doesn’t. He assumes everything is possible, and then he goes and proves it. As a parent, it’s more than I could have ever wished for him.

A few weeks later, I went into his room and showed him my phone. I had the Apple Music app up and, ready to play, was the hit new song from the artist neurodefender titled “Avalanche Rising.”

We sat together and listened to it again. He gave me the same look and smile as the lyrics recounted the Avalanche victory. He grabbed his phone and pulled the song up on Spotify, replaying it for the rest of the night. When he joined his friends online, I could hear him telling them about his song, too.

And in that moment, I realized something: no matter the struggles, no matter the setbacks, my son keeps finding ways to make his voice heard. Sometimes literally. Always beautifully. And I’ll never stop listening.