From Journaling to a Novel by Lorelei Brush

The Boy With the Butterfly Mind started out with journaling in the late 1990’s. I was married to a man with ADHD, raising a child with ADHD, and working a demanding job in international development.

My life felt like chaos much of the time. Traveling internationally was actually the part of life that kept me sane, as it provided time to myself to read without interruption, sleep through the night, and reach decisions with other adults who showed up on time, had done their homework, brought all the appropriate materials, and kept to the subject in discussions.

When my husband decided to leave the marriage in 1999, I started journaling my anger, my despair, and my fear about raising my child on my own. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about child rearing up until that point. I have a PhD in developmental psychology and taught at the university level for several years. But at that time, I focused on young children’s learning mathematical concepts, not on anything like disabilities. Though writing down my feelings was somewhat helpful, it wasn’t enough. 

My husband was an ordained minister, though he had changed careers by the time we married. We attended a small ecumenical church regularly, but following our divorce, the church pastor’s wife suggested I would be more comfortable in another congregation. I was seeking solace and ended up questioning my belief in God. So, I researched local churches and started church shopping, and in a few months found a new church home. 

But that wasn’t enough. I also enrolled in a Doctor of Ministry program to explore my beliefs. I found a curriculum that encouraged the weaving of one’s beliefs into life activities. I wrote papers and then a dissertation that expanded upon my journaling, creating a “novel” that was mostly memoir. My advisor found the ending distressing. I rewrote it several times, but it still ended in the couple divorcing. After all, that was my experience.

My lesson from that experience was that I still had work to do with regard to my marriage and especially my contributions to the need for a divorce. This work took me to enroll in a series of writing courses, join a women’s writing group, take time out to write two books on different conundrums in my life that wanted resolving, deeply research childhood disabilities, and then return to tackle how a neurotypical woman married to a neurodivergent man could successfully raise a child with ADHD.

One very important part of moving from memoir to novel was picturing completely different characters for the novel. They could not have the same color hair or eyes, the same birthdays, jobs, circumstances, or siblings. I flipped through magazines looking for just the right images—and made sure to keep those pictures in my head as I began yet more drafts.

Armed with these new characters, I wrote about a family miscommunicating with each other and failing to agree on how to deal with their child’s issues. But they faced their issues (slowly and with lots of help from others), pushed themselves through the emotional troughs, and decided how they wanted to raise their son.

One advantage to constructing the final version of this novel is that I worked hard to figure out how I could have changed my own behavior to live successfully with a husband with ADHD. In building an emotional arc for my protagonist, Julie, I tried out those changes to see that, in fact, they could work.

A second advantage, I believe, is that I’ve constructed a sample case study that could be useful for people learning to work with children with neurodiversity, by which I mean those in teacher training or programs to train social workers, therapists, or pediatricians.

Because my book’s family is invented, there’s no problem in saying the diagnoses for this child are wrong, this therapist did a bad job, or the child should have taken a different medication. Such comments might seem insulting to the author of a memoir; they are invited in the questions at the end of The Boy With the Butterfly Mind.

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THE BOY WITH THE BUTTERFLY MIND

For fans of Jodi Picoult and Bonnie Garmus, an illuminating novel about a mother struggling to raise a healthy neurodivergent child with a husband worn down by depression.

When Julie Crawford’s whirlwind four-year-old is kicked out of preschool, suspected of having ADHD—likely genetic—her husband moans from his recliner that “even my genes are failures.” At work, Julie is a high school math teacher who requires her students to solve complex problems. But faced with an unsafe daycare home and no other daycare openings, a husband who hates the idea of labeling their son as a “problem,” and a supervisor who’s angry at the amount of time she’s taking off school, she’s at a loss for how to come up with a solution to this particular dilemma.

Julie’s struggle to help her son ultimately demands a number of mindset shifts: a willingness to become a student and ask for help, a humble acceptance of her errors, a burgeoning strength to reckon with a dominant father and retreating husband—and the self-confidence to trust her instincts when it comes to deciding on the best next steps for her son.

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Lorelei Brush is a college mathematics major, a former assistant professor of child development, and the parent of a neurodivergent child. The story in The Boy with the Butterfly Mind mixes elements of all three life experiences to describe the struggles and triumph of a young family dealing with neurodivergence.

Her previous novels include Uncovering, about the trials of a nurse practitioner in northwest Pakistan, and Chasing the American Dream, about the quest of a disappointed WWII spy to be a hero in 1950s Cleveland. Lorelei and her husband live in Falls Church, Virginia, with a bossy gray cat named Marabelle.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing