Sarah Mitchell Facebook ad: “My son asked me which version of him I love more”

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My husband asked me to write this twice before I agreed. He's not a man who asks for things twice. I think that's what finally got me. He kept saying, "If one mom catches this before we did, it'll be worth it." I didn't think anything was worth what we'd been through. He told me it was worth what we hadn't been through yet. So here. Last spring, late on a Tuesday night, I got up for water. The hallway was dark. The bathroom light was on. I pushed the door open and my eleven-year-old son was sitting on the floor. He was holding his medication bottle. Just looking at it. Just holding it and looking at it. The clock on the bathroom counter said 11:47. I'd checked the kitchen clock when I got up. It had been 11:07. He had been sitting on the bathroom floor with that bottle in his hands for forty minutes. His feet were bare. The tile was cold. I could feel it through my socks. I asked him what he was doing. He didn't look up. He said, "Mom, which version of me do you love more?" I sat down on the bathroom floor next to him. I could not answer the question. I'm a child psychologist. Fourteen years in practice. I have answered every question a parent could ask me about ADHD, about stimulant medication, about developmental concerns. I have a notepad in my office with the most common questions printed at the top so I can find the answers quickly. I had spent eighteen months telling myself we were making the right trade. My son had been sitting on bathroom floors at midnight asking himself a question I had not dared to ask out loud. It wasn't his diagnosis. He has ADHD. I diagnosed him myself before I let the pediatrician get involved. It wasn't his prescription. The medication works for school. His teachers send me notes about how engaged he is. He's in the gifted program. He's reading three grades ahead. It was the version of him that the medication wasn't keeping safe. The version that came back in the late afternoon without anything to come back to. The version that went to bed at 9pm not because he was tired but because he didn't have the energy to be awake anymore. It was what nobody had told me a developing brain needs underneath years of stimulant medication just to stay itself. Millions of moms are making the trade I made. We follow the doctor. We trust the prescription. We watch our kids do better at school and tell ourselves the rest of it is a normal trade-off. It is not a trade-off any of us have to make all-or-nothing. I did not know that until last spring. It started getting worse the winter before. Not all at once. Just one Tuesday afternoon that turned into two Tuesdays, and then it was every weekday. Most afternoons I would be at the stove somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30, making rice or pasta water, depending on how late the appointments at the office had run. I would hear the front door open and my stomach would do this little drop thing before I had even seen him. He would walk through the kitchen without saying hi to me. Walk past his sister. Put his face into the couch cushions and stay there until I called him for dinner. Around dinnertime his sister would try to show him something on her tablet. A video of a cat. She would hold the screen up to him and say his name. He would tell her to get away from him. She would cry and look at me and I would not have anything to tell her. He would not even look up. That winter I started keeping a chart in the Notes app on my phone. Just for me. Five questions every day. Did he eat dinner. Did he sleep through the night. Did he say something kind to his sister. Did he laugh at anything. Did he ask me for a hug. A high score was good. A five was a kid I recognized. For most of those weeks the score was a zero or a one. A two was a decent day. A three was a Saturday. The first time a day hit a four, it was a Saturday in early spring. I was on the laundry room floor folding his clothes when I saved that score to the Notes app. I cried into the folded laundry. That four was the first time in three months that I had seen my actual son. At his checkup that spring, his pediatrician told me "this is the normal trade-off." He was nice about it. He always is. He has a calendar of dog pictures on the wall. We've been with him since my son was a baby. He said, "Increase the dose if he's not focused enough. Decrease if he's not eating. Add a sleep aid if he can't fall asleep. Stay the course." I sat in that office and nodded. Because what else was I going to do. I drove home from that appointment and I cried in the driveway before I went inside. My son was at school. My daughter was at preschool. The house was empty. I sat in the car with the engine off and I cried because the man who had been my son's doctor for eleven years did not have an answer for what was happening to him. I had tried everything that mom-friends had ever told me about. The first bottle was magnesium from CVS. The orange one. Three months. Nothing. Then I went to the small pharmacy on Maple. The pharmacist there has gray hair and reading glasses on a chain. She talked to me for twenty minutes about magnesium forms. She told me oxide doesn't absorb. She told me glycinate does. I bought the glycinate. Took it home. Six weeks of crushing it into his orange juice. By the end I could not honestly tell whether it had done anything at all. Then melatonin. He fell asleep faster. The afternoons did not change. Then fish oil. The brown bottle the pediatrician's office had a poster about. He gagged on every dose. Eight weeks. Nothing. Eventually the shelf in the pantry had nine half-used bottles on it. The CVS one. The Maple Street one. The brown one with the gagging. The expensive one a mom on the school WhatsApp had sworn by. I had not thrown any of them away. My husband asked me one night what I was doing in the pantry. I told him I was organizing the bottles. I was not organizing them. I was sitting on the floor looking at them. They felt like proof of how hard I'd been trying. Throwing them away felt like admitting I had failed. I had started reading at night. After my son was asleep. After my husband was asleep. I would go down to the kitchen, sit at the table with my phone on the dimmest setting, and I would read. Pediatric neurology journals. ADHD parenting forums. The threads where adults who had been put on stimulants as kids would come back twenty years later and write about what it had done to them. There was one post I bookmarked. A woman, thirty-one, who had been on her medication since she was nine. She wrote: "I am thirty-one. I have a job. I pay my bills. My mom thinks I am fine. I have not told her that I have not been able to fall in love. I have not told her that I cry on Sundays for reasons I can not explain. I have not told her that I do not know if there is a version of me underneath this. She still thinks she made the right call. I do not know how to tell her she did not." I read that post three times in a row the night I found it. Then I closed the phone. Then I opened it and read it again. That post followed me everywhere for months. I would think about it at red lights. I would think about it in line at the grocery store. I would think about it watching my son do his homework and wonder if he was going to be the one writing the post in twenty years. The night I found him on the bathroom floor, I went back to bed and I did not sleep. At 2am I got up. I went down to the kitchen. I made coffee. I sat at the table with a yellow legal pad I'd grabbed from his backpack and I wrote down everything I knew was true. He needs the medication. That's true. He is losing pieces of himself somewhere between the late afternoon and bedtime. That is also true. I can not quit the prescription. The school year is in session. He would fall apart. I can not keep doing this without something underneath. I would fall apart. I sat with those four lines for a long time. Then I wrote one more. I wrote: "What is being lost — and what protects it?" That sentence was the answer to my son's question. I just did not know it yet. The next morning I called Dr. Anderson. He's a pediatric neurodevelopment specialist about thirty minutes from us. I had been referring parents to him for fourteen years. We had had coffee twice at conferences. I had never been his patient. I asked his receptionist for thirty minutes between his patients, as a colleague. He had a 9am slot the following Tuesday. I was there at 8:45. I asked him what stimulants do to a developing brain over years that nobody tells the parents. Dr. Anderson is a man who chooses his words carefully. He always has. That's part of why I had been referring parents to him for fourteen years. He paused before he answered me. He doesn't usually pause. He said, "Honestly? We don't fully know. We know they work for symptom management. We know the cell-level question is more complicated than the prescribing literature is making it sound right now." I asked him what he told the parents who asked. He said, "I tell them the truth. The medication is doing what the medication does. What we don't talk about is what the brain underneath needs to keep being itself through years of being on it." I asked him what it needs. He said one word. He said it slowly. He said, "Mitochondria." Mitochondria are the tiny engines inside every cell in my son's brain. They make the energy his brain runs on. Without them his brain cells can not do their work, can not grow properly, can not recover from stress. Years of stimulants put a developing brain under a different kind of load. The medication helps him focus. That's real. But the brain underneath is working overtime, every weekday, for years. Dr. Anderson said, "If you want to give him something, give him something that protects what those engines need. There is one compound that does this better than anything else we have. It is called PQQ." He held up a hand before I could ask him where to buy it. He said, "I have to be careful here. I do not vet supplement brands. I do not have the time. Most of what is on the market labeled as PQQ is dosed homeopathically, single-digit milligrams, sometimes less. That does nothing. You want a product with a clinical dose. Twenty milligrams. If you find one, that is what you want." I wrote PQQ on a yellow sticky note. I wrote 20 milligrams under it. I had never heard of either. I drove from his office to the biggest health food store in our city. I went to the kids' supplement section. I read every single label. PQQ was not in a single one of them. Not in the magnesium products. Not in any of the kids' brands with the cartoon animals on the labels. Not in the fish oil. Not in the ones the mom-friends had ever recommended. I stood in that aisle for forty minutes. Then I left without buying anything. I sat in the car in the parking lot and I researched why. PQQ comes from one very specific source. It is produced through a bacterial fermentation process that a Japanese chemical company spent more than a decade developing. There is essentially one production source in the world for the pharmaceutical-grade material that has the bioavailability the body can actually use. It is harder to produce, more time-consuming, and ten times more expensive than the cheap fillers most kid supplements use to pad their labels. If a supplement company is optimizing for shelf-margin, they do not put PQQ in their formula. They put cheap magnesium oxide that does not absorb. They put a sprinkle of L-theanine far below the clinical dose. They put a long ingredient list of things that sound impressive but cost almost nothing and do almost nothing. The supplement industry is not designed to give my son's brain what it needs. It is designed to keep me coming back, buying another bottle, while the cheap ingredients keep almost nothing happening. That is why PQQ was not in the cabinet. That is also why I had to look outside the cabinet. That evening my sister came over with a casserole. She had been calling me twice a week for two months. I had been telling her I was fine. She put the casserole on the counter and looked at me. She did not say hello. She said, "You are not fine." I sat down at the kitchen table. I tried to find the version of my voice that would tell her I was. I could not find it. So I told her instead. I told her about the bathroom floor. The forty minutes. The question my son had asked me that I could not answer. I told her about the chart in the Notes app. The zeros. The post from the thirty-one-year-old that I had read three times in a row. The bottles in the pantry. Dr. Anderson. The compound he had told me about that nobody in the supplement aisle was selling. I told her I did not know what I was going to do next. I told her all of it sitting at my own kitchen table with my hands flat on the wood because I did not know what else to do with them. She did not say anything while I was talking. She just listened. She has two kids on the prescription. Both of them. For years. She has been further down this road than I have. When I stopped talking she reached into her bag and put a white bottle on the table. She said, "It is called Velaxen. PQQ at the dose Dr. Anderson would have wanted. I have been giving it to both of mine for six months." She did not say anything else. She did not look up from the bottle. I looked at her. Her eyes were wet. Both hands were wrapped around her coffee cup, even though it had been empty for a while. I had never seen my sister look afraid to tell me something. She was not trying to sell me anything. She was just trying to help me. I am going to be honest. Fourteen years as a child psychologist, I have seen every supplement pitch in existence. After my sister left, I sat at the kitchen table with that bottle and I asked myself three questions before I would let my son take it. First. If this was real, why had my pediatrician never mentioned it. The answer was the one Dr. Anderson had basically given me that morning. Pediatricians prescribe what they were taught to prescribe in medical school. PQQ was not in the curriculum twenty years ago. It is not in the curriculum now. There is a gap between what the research knows and what your doctor's office is going to tell you, and that gap is where my son had been sitting. Second. If this was real, why was I learning about it from my sister and not from the supplement aisle. I had already answered that one in the parking lot. The aisle is built for margin. PQQ kills margin. Third. Was it safe for my son. I read the ingredient panel six times. I checked every single dose against the clinical literature Dr. Anderson had referenced. PQQ has been studied for over twenty years. The supporting ingredients are all natural compounds at doses Dr. Anderson and I both knew were safe. Then I read the supplement facts panel one more time. 1,485 milligrams of actives. Twenty ingredients. Every single dose disclosed. Zero proprietary blends. PQQ at 20 milligrams. The clinical dose. Exactly what Dr. Anderson had written down for me. L-Theanine at 75 milligrams. The dose that actually does something instead of just appearing on the label. Magnesium glycinate at 50 milligrams. The form that absorbs. And seventeen other natural compounds working underneath those three. Every. Single. Dose. Disclosed. That is not how this industry operates. That was the signal that told me this was different before he had even taken his first dose. Week one I noticed his sleep first. He went up to bed on a Wednesday night at 8:43pm. I did not ask him to. He just got up from the couch, said goodnight to his sister, and went. He got into his bed by himself. I went to check on him at 9:15 and he was already asleep. He stayed asleep until morning. I checked on him at midnight and again at 3am. I am the kind of mom who checks at 3am. Week two he ate breakfast on a Tuesday. He had not done that in over a year. He poured his own cereal. He used the milk. He sat at the table and ate it. Week three he came home from school on a Thursday and started telling me a story about his music teacher. He was three minutes in before I realized something was different. He was finishing his sentences. Three months earlier he would have lost the thread halfway through and given up. Week four he laughed at the dinner table at something his sister said. Not a polite laugh. The kind of laugh he used to do when he was seven, with his head thrown back. The kind of laugh I had not heard in over a year. I went into the bathroom and I cried with the door locked. My husband knocked. I told him I was fine. I was. I had to know it wasn't placebo. I am a child psychologist. Skepticism is my profession. After four weeks I could not shake the feeling that maybe I was just hoping. Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see. About a month after he started, on a Saturday, I did not give him the Velaxen. I gave him his prescription as normal. I gave him nothing else. I told no one. By 4:30 that Saturday afternoon, he was different. Not bad. Just different. He picked at lunch. His mood was flat. At 4:38pm I asked him how he was feeling and he said his head felt fuzzy. He used the word fuzzy. I wrote it down in the Notes app I still kept open. Sunday morning I gave him the Velaxen again. By Sunday dinner he was back. He told a story about a kid in his class who had brought a hamster to school. That is the moment I knew it was not a placebo. His body knew the difference. He knew the difference, even when no one had told him anything was different. And nothing else on the supplement aisle could survive that test. Most of the bottles in my pantry, I could stop giving them for a week and nothing would change, because nothing had ever been changing. PQQ was the only thing that left a fingerprint when I removed it. I went back to see Dr. Anderson at the three-month mark. Same exam room. Same dog calendar on the wall. I told him what we had been doing. I showed him the chart from the Notes app. The zeros and ones had become regular fives. He looked at the chart for a long time. He pulled up his notes from our first conversation. Shook his head slowly. He said, "If I had known what was on the market, I would have told you about this two years ago, before you started him on the medication. I am going to start telling the parents in my practice." That is when I knew I needed to write this. I told my best friend Rachel two weeks ago. Her daughter is nine. She started her on Velaxen the day after I told her. She called me last Friday afternoon and said, "I didn't realize how much I had given up on her dinner-table version until she came back." I have started telling the parents in my practice who I knew were stuck where I had been stuck. Three of them have started Velaxen. Two of them have called me crying. A woman I went to graduate school with — her name is Karen, her son is twenty-six now — came to see me last month. She brought coffee. She sat in the chair where my patients usually sit. She said she had been thinking about my situation since we had spoken in the spring. She said her son had called her on Mother's Day this past year. He told her he loved her. Then he told her something that has stayed with her every night since. He said, "Mom. I love you. I am not calling to blame you. I want you to know that. But I started this medication when I was nine years old. I am twenty-six. I have never been in love. I do not remember the last time I felt joy. I cannot tell anymore whether that is because of what I take every morning or because of who I was always going to be. I just thought you should know." Karen sat in my office and she cried. She said, "I am fifty-eight years old. He told me on Mother's Day that he has never been in love. I cried in my car for two hours after that call. I have not stopped thinking about it since. I keep wondering, if I had known something to give him underneath the medication when he was eight, would he have been able to feel things by now. I am never going to know. That is what I am living with." I have been thinking about Karen every day since she came to see me. I found this in time for my son. Karen did not. The distance between her and me is eighteen years and one casserole on my kitchen table. That distance closes a little every day my son is still developing. I am writing this because I want the mom reading this to be on my side of that distance, not Karen's. --- I do not want you to be Karen. If your son or daughter is on ADHD medication and you are watching them lose pieces of themselves between the front door opening and the bedtime light going off. If you have tried magnesium and fish oil and melatonin and the cabinet has nothing more to offer. If you have read the retrospective threads at 2am and not been able to fall back asleep. If you have a shelf in your pantry you cannot bring yourself to clear off. Then you need to know what I now know. There is one formula that contains PQQ at the clinical dose, sourced from the original Japanese fermentation process, with L-Theanine and Magnesium Glycinate at clinical doses underneath it, plus seventeen other natural compounds, every single dose disclosed. It is Velaxen. Velaxen comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee. If you do not see a difference in your child after two months, you get every dollar back. Keep the bottles. They do not make you send them back. The bottles do not matter. The two months do. There is a window. A developing brain is developing right now. The frontal cortex finishes developing sometime in his twenties. After that, the window for protecting what is still growing is closed. There is no later. There is right now, and there is too late. My sister came back. My son came back. Three patients in my practice have called me crying because theirs came back too. Karen's son did not come back. He is twenty-six and his mother is fifty-eight and she will spend the rest of her life replaying a phone call. Don't wait until your son calls you fifteen years from now and tells you he has never been in love. Don't wait until you cannot remember what his real laugh sounded like. Don't wait until your daughter stops trying to share her tablet with him because she has learned that he will not look up. Don't wait until you are the mom on the bathroom floor at 11:47pm asking yourself when it became too late. Get Velaxen now. While he is still developing. While there is still something to protect. → https://velaxen.shop/products/velaxen-cognitive-support — Sarah Mitchell, M.Ed., Ph.D. Child Psychologist, fourteen years in practice Mom of a son who came back to the dinner table

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My son asked me which version of him I love more

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