Parable of a Hyperactive Child (by a Surprise Guest Poster)

My guest poster today is my fourteen year-old son. You may now be annoyed, but don't be. He wrote this personal essay for his eighth grade language arts class and it totally doesn't suck. Rowan is one of the wittiest people I know, in person and it gives me an enormous sense of pride to see that wit develop into the written word as well. 

Rowan at six in the very room where this event took place.

I was a very resourceful six-year-old. I liked to try to solve my own problems using whatever was available to me. Unfortunately, my ideas did not always work, as I discovered on one occasion when I was playing with my brother’s stuffed cheetah toy. I was living in California at the time, in a house that had very high up beams spanning many of the rooms. I was throwing the cheetah in the air and, much to my dismay it became stuck upon one of the beams. Perched up out of my reach, it called to me for help. I knew what I had to do. 

Using my highly developed power of logic, I formulated a plan and gathered the supplies I needed. Equipped with one of those ping-pong paddles with a ball on the end of an elastic string, I got ready to execute my plan. I tied the ball end of the elastic string to a nail protruding from the wall next to the living room window. I pulled the paddle back, stretching it to its limit and calculated the exact angle that would send the paddle flying to the cheetah’s rescue. It became very quiet. I took a deep breath and, without hesitation, released the paddle. It left my hand and sailed, promisingly, in the direction of…the window? 

CRASH!!! I must have made a mistake in my calculations. The paddle went through the window, sending shattered glass everywhere. The paddle hung from the nail, bouncing up and down, taunting me. It seemed to be laughing. At that moment, alerted by the sound of breaking glass, my mom entered the room. I looked at her and said, “Well, that didn’t go how it was supposed to.” 

And that’s why I always make sure to have tall friends.

What is Not Simple

"Lovely Weed"

Easy as ABC. Simple as 123.

What could be simpler than setting pencil to paper, than cutting and pasting a letter in the proper position? What could be simpler than standing and walking in line, than sitting in a seat?


These things are so easy when a child is equipped to do them, it is hard to imagine that they could be difficult for anyone. Almost as simply done as flipping a light switch, the proper instruction is given and the light will turn on. This seems to be the hope and expectation of almost every teacher.

Frustratingly, though, often we flip the switch and the room remains in darkness. The child, though obviously intelligent, sits fiddling with his pencils and the worksheet is incomplete. The temptation is to flip the switch again. Again. Again. Now the child, although he has not completed the worksheet, has still learned something new. He has learned that there is something wrong with him. The light switch is simply not wired to work in this way. It cannot be cajoled or punished into triggering. It will not light until you discover the secrets of its wiring.

Children are not simple.

I work in education and what I know of teachers, generally, is that they work harder than you know, and that they care more than you suspect. Teaching is more difficult, more draining than you think and classroom dynamics quite different than people outside of classrooms understand. The comments left by parents on some blogs I have read, criticizing teachers for what seem like completely ordinary acts of discipline–which I have observed in every classroom I have worked in–leave me puzzled. What do these people want exactly?

I have two children with IEPs and have worked in a school for five years, and I will tell you that implementing an IEP, as it is written can be extremely difficult, in a room with twenty-four other students and limited staff. Sometimes it will dictate that a student have a scribe, but there will be only two adults available to the entire class. Sometimes a student needs a quiet environment and the classroom is small and crowded. They need additional time to work, but from where should this time come? From their play time? From recess? Often IEPs are written in ideals, and when translated to reality, things look entirely different.

Teaching is not simple.

My six year old son reads at third grade level. His handwriting is illegible. He demonstrates higher order thinking skills but can't fully understand the difference between reality and make-believe. He understood how to increment a digit in hexadecimal when shown by my husband, but has trouble completing addition worksheets because...they are worksheets. His teacher knows he is incredibly bright and grasps the concepts she has taught but has very little physical evidence to demonstrate his mastery of material.

Mikalh (MEE-koll) spoke late and didn't string sentences together at the typical age. He received the services of a developmental specialist which were, at one time, almost entirely focused on encouraging him to play imaginatively. This, for a child who now, has more costumes than clothes and spends every unscheduled moment of his day involved in make-believe. I felt then that none of this "help" hurt him, but I hardly felt that the diagnosticians had really seen my child, in all his beautiful complexity, for who he is.

Development is not simple.

Throughout all of Mikalh's years of being watched and diagnosed, notes have been made on his tendency to wiggle, his inability to "pay attention", his general spaciness. To anyone reading his file, flashing red lights appear around the obvious truth that Mikalh has AD/HD. Mikalh can't pay attention. It seems perfectly obvious.

Is it?

If there is one thing you should know, it is that I am not opposed to diagnostic labels. I also am not in any way categorically opposed to psychiatric medications. I have only somewhat jokingly written that my entire family has AD/HD. Two of my children currently take medications for this condition and I am the person who asked for the team meetings at school on the subject and who asked the questions that led to these diagnoses. My intuition as a mother told me that this was the right thing to do. 

With Mikalh, I just don't feel so sure. There is, at this point, no resounding "clunk" of recognition within me when it is suggested that my youngest child has AD/HD. He may, but I don't know how much of who he is can be explained by that particular label. My intuition tells me to be skeptical but still cooperative.

Parenting is not simple.

Mikalh is so young that no one really knows fully knows what makes him who he is. He is currently being served at school for language processing, fine motor and sensory issues, and is also seeing a therapist to deal with the fall-out of his extreme emotional sensitivity. He has a high IQ and a tendency to think creatively. How all of these factors complicate what we are seeing in him is impossible to tease out.

This child, who is apparently paying no attention, will walk up to his teacher, as the other children are leaving for recess and recount for her the most interesting portions of the story she read while he wandered aimlessly around the room. After a day of completing no work on a science unit on liquids and solids, he will come home and conduct experiments in our sink, chattering happily about why the table is solid and why his soy milk is liquid. In a quiet classroom with the attention of his sweet teacher or in our own kitchen, he blooms.

My deep suspicion is that the world comes at Mikalh undistilled. He seems to be attending to the sound of his teacher's voice, to the motion of classmates in the room, to the rhythm of the noisy heater, to the graceful ballroom dance of swaying branches in the wind, visible outside the window. The world gushes into him, full of beauty and horror and confusion to attend to, and he vibrates with the sensation of its touch. The endless worksheets shift like pieces of a Rubik's Cube, meaningless as clutter. The seat beneath him confines him.

He is a song composed of golden riddles and velvet images, forged to evoke instead of explain. The world wants not music, but a simple explanation from him.

Mikalh feels intensely the softness of fleece and the hardness and scratchiness of a plastic school chair. He stops to examine the beauty of individual snowflakes. He feels, with eyes wide and full of contemplation, the pain of toiling slaves, who lived and died one hundred fifty years before his birth, and the fear and bravery of Helen Keller. He wonders why it is ethical to put an injured animal to sleep, whom we cannot heal, but not an injured person. He is fascinated by the intricate design on the back of a spider.

Who is not paying attention?

My child is not simple.

Simplicity can be the ultimate truth and essence of the world. The room free of clutter, the Japanese garden, the raw and uncomplicated gorgeousness of a sunset over mountains. A moment of quiet meditation. Many things have been written in praise of simplicity, and they are beautifully true.

But simplicity can also be a shackle. When your heart is full of poems and the world wants neat demonstrations of knowledge. When creation settles on you in a bedlam of rich color and detail and you are asked to name the thing most important, but perhaps, not most interesting. Simple plans and objectives fail the child who is a swirl of lovely chaos.

He is a rangy, delicate wildflower in a garden of orderly tulips, and I am dumbstruck by his beauty.

I do not want for him to be more straight and tidy. I want, instead, for the world to love wildflowers as much as I do and renounce its blind devotion to simplicity.

Gentle Fatty Asses

My family is different.

I have discussed this at length in the past with you, so I won't belabor it again, but suffice it to say that an unusual number of  items such as Student Assistance Team meetings, urgent parent-teacher conferences, addendum IEPs, and therapy appointments are blocked out on our family's Google Calendar. The problems seem largely to come down to an inability either to pay proper attention, to exercise proper impulse control or to render spoken language into usable operating instructions within a reasonable period of time.

The latest approach taken to this has involved the use of Omega-3s. The psychiatrist treating a child of mine, who shall remain nameless, said that studies now show that the use of Omega-3s can be effective in treating mild ADHD. In any case, Omega-3s are da bomb. They are good for joints, organs, blood circulation and may help ward off cancer and alien abduction. So, it's not like it's going to hurt him to take 1000 mg of organic flax seed oil a day. Anyway, before considering prescription medication, we are giving him these Omega-3 miracle pills.

Which is interesting, because now my dog is taking them, too. Because even our pets are special.

Besides being sort of inherently "different" due to looking like a black Lab with dwarfism and ears like a donkey, my dog Xavier also has special health needs. He suffers from a problem with his kidneys and requires a special, extremely expensive diet to treat this condition. Xavier also, it turns out, requires, one teaspoon per day of costly Omega-3 supplementation on his exorbitant dog comestible, to deal with joint pain and general health. Cost-wise, I may as well be serving him chopped frankincense with a frosting of cocaine.

When a year or so ago we first had to supplement the dog with "essential fatty acids," to combat nose and paw dryness, my then kindergartner erroneously referred to them as "a gentle fatty asses".

The name stuck.

So, at this point, setting aside the ghastly and appalling number of prescription medications and supplements I take daily to manage my fibromyalgia, migraines and Hashimoto's disease, the special diet the cat is now on  to deal with the unexplained presence of blood in his urine, and the treatments taken for asthma and allergies suffered by all human members of my family, I find myself thoroughly amused that I have both a dog and a child who require the daily nourishment of "gentle fatty asses."

And now this: The other day, when I went back to the school I where I work to collect my son from his first grade classroom, his teacher pulled me aside and explained with dismay that he had spent most of the day making animal noises and playing strange, silent games with pencils on the floor of the classroom.

So, I did what any good parent would do. I went home, cried, drank coffee, and then ran out and bought a bottle of gummy Omega-3s.

Everything is going to be just fine.

How to Work on a Sixth Grade Science Fair Project: Now with ADHD!

I am saving Part III of my pet saga for Monday.
However, I do have some useful information on how you can do a sixth grade science fair project in the most impotent and exasperating way possible, in case you are interested. (How is your Saturday going?)

1. Lose the grading rubric.
2. Ask your mother when the completed project is due.
3. Plaintively ask your mother what your hypothesis should be.
4. Sharpen fourteen pencils over the course of forty-five minutes.
5. Enter an incorrect date in your data notebook.  
6. Start crying.
7. Smack a wall.
8. Go on a long walk.
9. Give up.
10. Repeat daily until assignment is due.

Also, here is something my six year old drew. I think it is a Playboy centerfold:

I think I'm doing a pretty good job parenting. What do you think?

Letter to a child's therapist, teacher, counselor: Remember my kids.

Dear Therapist,

Dear Teacher. Dear Mediator. Dear School Counselor. Dear anybody whose job it is to labor largely unthanked on behalf of children day in and day out, trying to find some way to help the ones who no one can help, to patch up garish wounds that gape large and ugly and bleeding with small Band-Aids, to take a child with no background knowledge and no winter jacket and teach that child to read, to teach that child to think and imagine; I have to talk to you.

I have three sons. And I don't know about your children, if you have them, but mine come with some of their stitching showing on the outside. Some of that stitching is faulty impulse control, faulty attention-paying wiring, faulty mood-control, faulty auditory processing. These three boys are the most beautifully wrought works of art I have ever cast eyes on, and part of that beauty is this faulty thread-work. Like the lazy line across a Navajo rug, it makes each of them more authentic. It can also make them first class pains in the ass.

Let me tell you a story. I have to tell it so that you will understand me. It is my story. This story is the reason I am writing.

I was a gifted child. I brought smiles of indulgence to the lips of every teacher that had me, teased by the delight of having met a child who could take what they taught further than they they imagined. Teachers; you know the tickled amusement I mean. I can appreciate it now that I have felt it myself teaching, now that a kindergartener has asked me politely how to spell "ocean" correctly. It is the unparalleled delight of knowing that, for once, you are not needed, that this child has bettered you, and you can bask in the delight of their blazing unfolding.

But when I hit middle school, I moved to a cruel and image-driven community, my family suffered a divorce and alcoholism, and a flaw that lay hidden in the weft of my own stitch-work (clinical depression) was pulled. 

The thread unraveled. My grades plummeted. The child that had once been a source of delight for teachers became, when considered at all, someone to sigh over. I skipped school, spending days hiding six or seven hours under a blanket in my own bed, concealed, rather than face the confirmation of my personal worthlessness that was middle school. My English teacher would read my creative writing with pride to the class in my absence, but he didn't call my parents to ask why I wasn't there. No one pursued me into the darkness to try to get me to come out. I fell hard from great heights.

The world that had only cast its approving light upon me up til then, in expectation on my greatness, turned away from the embarrassment of my broken body on the ground. I made a lame suicide attempt, resulting in a traumatic trip to the ER, one psychiatrist visit and nothing. I made countless visits to a school counselor to tell him that I felt I was slipping off the cliff of sanity while he quietly nodded his head. Attempts to talk to talk to friends resulted ultimately in having no friends. I was twelve and I was alone in the dark, in a world suddenly changed from what it had been.

I spent six years of my life in active clinical depression, daily losing the battle fought with a darkness that consumed the edges of Truth and cast Life in shades of bloody, lonely pain. I developed drug addiction and later, bulimia. There were angels along my way who reached out to try and  do what they could, but, for the most part, the world in general was more than willing to lose me. Most of my angels were losing their own battles with Life. The people who were winning were too busy looking away to grant the gift of seeing me.

At the age of eighteen, I fought my way crawling on my stomach with my bloody fingertips to Alcoholics Anonymous and taught myself, with help, to live. I am still learning. But I have learned a lot, if only through having made such absolutely prodigious mistakes. I have recovered from problems and events that many people cannot say out loud without a shudder, and I have stitched them into the fabric of my life, so that they have made me stronger and more flexible.

I have this to say to you out of all this experience: We cannot afford to lose children. Not without fighting. We need to stop acting like it is OK or it is inevitable that children suffer unbearable pain in this world. If, in truth, we can do nothing to stop or ease this pain, we need not let them suffer it alone. If we lose them to drug addiction, to illiteracy, to mental illness, let it be only after we have unleashed the Spanish Armada on their behalf, after we have shot every bit of ammunition in our stores, after we lie out of breath, exhausted from the effort. Let it not be for lack of imagination, lack of focus, lack of compassion.

Think about the times you have suffered the greatest pain. Maybe you were injured. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you lost a loved one. I hope that you did not do this alone. I hope that someone held your hand and kept holding it, and that this person looked you in the eye and did not look away. I hope that they did not get up and leave while you were most afraid. 

Please do not tell me my child is just going through a phase. Please do not tell me that all we can do is wait. Please do not imply that their failing to reach their potential as human beings is just OK, somehow inevitable. They may be one of many to you, and you may be tired. You may have seen so many, so many that you could not help and for whom the future was lost. Their faces may pass by you in a collage of hazy images. I understand. But let my child never become an item on your calendar, a name on a  list.

I don't need you to have the answers. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are willing to fight with me, for the life of my child. It is all I have ever wanted from you, for all these years, when I stood here talking about my child's ADHD, my child's language processing problem, my child's depression. Fight with me. You may have weapons I do not know how to use. Together, we can give my child what he needs.

Remember: These boys are the most beautiful things ever wrought. They are born to inspire. They are born to be inspired. I brought them forth out of pure possibility, knowing nothing of how to parent and without a cent to my name, with nothing but the power of my unspoken promise that they would never go without a single needed thing that I could fight for them to have. They never have. And I will crawl again on my stomach, my fingers bloodied anew, for as long as it takes, to see any of them safe and empowered while there is yet breath in my body. 

I woke this morning and heard this song (below) on my playlist. Judy Collins' son killed himself in 1992 after years of alcoholism and depression. I don't know his story. She wrote this song long before his death. You can hear her trying to hope for his future in the lyrics. I can't stop listening to it. I need to do more than hope. 

Compassion and persistence are my promise to my children. Can you help me?

Sincerely,

a mother

A Ninja Christmas Brunch

My family is impossibly geeky. It should not be this much fun to use the note-assigned whistles from our traditional British holiday crackers to play "Jingle Bells". 

Victorian Trading Company

Next year, in addition to the holiday crackers we decided that we will also get a peppermint pig. It turns out the only reason anything has been going wrong for any of us is that you are supposed to get one of these and beat it to smithereens with a tiny elegant hammer then share the peppermint shards, and we haven't been doing this. Someone should have said something. I probably wouldn't even have developed fibromyalgia had I known to do this every year. 

I worked all the last two days cleaning and organizing and prepping food, then woke up early this morning. (Actually this was just because I can't sleep anymore). I prepared a brunch which consisted of miniature frittatas made with local fresh eggs, portabellas and baby spinach, home-fried potatoes with Vidalia onions, gingerbread pancakes with powdered sugar, chicken apple sausages and fresh pineapple with pink lady apples. I made a large buffet  thermos of hot chocolate from scratch with cocoa powder, sugar and fresh milk.  There were also dates and nuts in the shell. I whipped cream from scratch, and shaved bittersweet chocolate myself with a vegetable peeler into delicate curls. 

In other words, this was some bad-assed shit. NINJA brunch.

We ran out of food before everyone could get seconds, which was either really cool or embarrassing.

Of course, my husband was called to do work on-call right when we were exchanging gifts, and then one child had a personal emotional crisis and required counseling while standing barefoot in the snow, threatening to run away from home. Another child forgot to take his ADD meds and narrowly missed breaking every picture in the house while he ran around armed with multiple Nerf guns. Somebody's new Narnia shield got broken and they forgot to practice their non-violent communication when explaining their upset to the unwitting perpetrator.

It turned out I am catching a cold, so I progressively lost my voice during the gathering and by the end, when I said goodbye to my guests, I called out, "Have fun storming the castle!" in a voice like gargled cat hairs. 

Christmas is finally over. And I think we snuck up on that shit and smashed it like Silent Death smashes a peppermint pig. Even if we are all bat-shit crazy.

People who take Topomax should never do anything.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt: What are your biggest pet peeves? via Em at  http://warmedtheworld.blogspot.com/

I'll focus on one: forgetfulness!

I hate when people forget things. It makes life like this: everyone else is a cub scout but me-I'm the den mother. Did I mention my whole family has ADHD? (My middle son leaves socks around our house the way the Easter Bunny leaves eggs.)

Here's the worst part:

A couple of months ago, my neurologist prescribed me Topomax for my migraines. And it dramatically reduced my migraines. Which is a big deal, since, prior to that I had UPGRADED to an average of 15 migraine days a month.  But it made me an idiot.

The first week, I lost my credit card, forgot to pick my six year-old up from school, and tried to set fire to my house over and over again with a glue gun. Now it's a bit better. But I can't write letters backwards in the air anymore! (Shut-up. I need to. It's part of my job. I'm a reading instructional coach.)

A funny thing happened today.

I can't hand-write the addresses on my holiday cards anymore, because of my fibromyalgia, and my husband had the brilliant idea of using Excel and Avery labels to make the job easier. So, last night, I was carefully aligning and sticking labels onto holiday cards. Which I send to everyone in the goddamned world. 'Cuz I'm that good. I even wrote a cute holiday letter.

So today I'm carefully, lovingly folding each letter to include with the photo cards of my three kids and my canine-donkey hybrid dog. I've got through about thirteen when I notice they all say

"We hope 2010 finds you happy and well."

Maybe it will be construed as a joke?

Just when I was feeling really low, though, my mother, a brilliant woman and writer who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in creative writing, calls me:

Mom: "My car is gone."

Me: "WHAT?"

Mom: "It's just completely GONE. I parked it on the side street, on Bathtub Row, outside the Senior Center, and when I came out, it was just...gone."

Me: "It isn't."

Mom: "What do you mean?"

Me: "It's not gone. You just can't find it. Do you need me to come and get you and help you to find it?'

Mom: "Yes, because I'm about to cry."

Me: "OK. I'll be there in a minute."

Mom: "I'm in front of the Senior Center. I'll be the one crying."

So, I got in my car, my self-esteem having already been slightly elevated. My mother, although having been blessed with a well-honed wit, has been given short shrift in the mathematical and directional skills departments. But, to be fair, this was her first visit to the Senior Center since moving to Los Alamos.

I drove up to the square grey Senior Center building and adjacent parking lot, and came immediately upon my mother's silver Toyota Corolla, with her sunglasses perched on the hood. She was nowhere in sight.

I phoned her. The ringing ceased and a loud rustling sound commenced, which continued for about forty seconds, until I hung up. "God damn it, mother!"

I put the car in gear, rounded the corner, drove down a side street and discovered my mother standing on a snowy sidewalk outside a brown apartment building, looking expectant.  I honked.

She got in the car. "Well, I don't know where the fuck you think YOU were but your CAR is at the Senior Center."

And we both started laughing. It's good when you can laugh through the dementia.

It eases the pain.

Promoting a blog is like falling through a Portal to Hell and ending up back at middle school.

I have been trying (for maybe two whole weeks now) to promote my blog. This sounds very independent and artistic, but it turns out to be a lot more like being a door-to-door salesman for your own soul.

petesimon.blogspot.com/2009/03/salesman.html

Here are the reasons I want to promote my blog:

1. All my life I have wanted to be a writer. Even when I was two and couldn't write. Before I could scribble down my own illegible thoughts, I used to make my mom take dictation. Some of my early stuff was pretty good. It mostly dealt with the Big Bad Wolf.

But then, disconcertingly, when I "grew up", I just ended up getting pregnant over and over again, like some sort of queen termite, and producing male children with ADHD.

So I ended up not getting to be famous after all.

2. Even worse, last year, I noticed that all my children obviously regarded me as a mentally challenged maid and personal assistant.

For years, they have tended to ask me stupid, pointless questions like "What causes thunder?", "Is Uzbekistan in Europe or in Asia?", and "How do I solve this simple math problem?"

To avoid wasting my life in a flurry of Wikipedia searches, my strategy had been to refer them to my husband, and wait for them to ask something interesting that I could answer like "What do you think about the nature of reality?', "Would this sentence be stronger if I ended it here or there?' or "How much butter should I put in this cookie batter?"

Sadly, this day has never come.

I realized last winter, to my horror, that I had accidentally allowed my children to believe that I am an outright imbecile due to my total lack of interest in math, geography, physical sciences, construction, practical matters, and sports. It occurred to me that perhaps, I should begin to point out those areas in which I have actually developed some mastery. Basically, these come down to list-making and writing.

After attempting to show them all how to make lists, and giving up, due to their lack of interest and poor hand-writing, I started a blog.

Have you noticed how good I am at both list-making and writing?? I have worked both of these skill sets into this post in order to show off the diverse skills I possess at putting letters (and numbers) onto pages.

3. I seem to be suffering from some sort of Unknown Illness, something glamorous, very much like a famous author might have. This additional qualification really is a slam-dunk for me. Puts me right over the edge into greatness.

Actually, I have a very real concern that some day I might not be able to keep a job that involves walking up and down hallways, and this is my back-up plan. That might sound stupid, but if you consider that my take-home pay is perhaps less than most people who beg for change on the street of any major city, it sets the bar pretty low for my ultimately being able to replace that income.

And a low bar is just the right height for me.

So, I am trying, with the enormous support of my father, my husband, and my kids, to get people who don't know me to read my blog somehow. The idea being, I guess, that after they start doing this, they will begin sending me checks in the mail. (This part is not fully fleshed out.)

The Portal to Hell

Here is my thought on promoting my blog so far: It is very much like falling through a Portal to Hell and returning to middle school. Here's why:


1.  I am now obsessed with becoming popular with the right people. Here is a snapshot of this:
Two bloggers whom I admire greatly have followed me on Twitter. Right now it is pretty much them, my dad and eighteen hot bisexual women who want to chat with me right now spammers. The fact that one of them, the Bloggess, follows 16,285 people is a bit discouraging, but I still think she really likes me! In fact, this is all so exciting to me that I feel like a boy just kissed me.

2. Snapshot #2:
As a result of noticing that some people other than my family and friends are reading my blog, I am fighting to avoid imbuing all my writing with enormous self-consciousness, to make sure I sound clever and funny enough in case the right people are reading me. I think I will take a page from my son and begin adding "That's what she said." every few lines. It seems to impress the eighth grade boys chicks.

3. In middle school, I was riddled with angst. If there were stats I could have clicked on repeatedly to see how much people liked me now....and now...and now, I would have done that. And now I can. Thank you, Google Analytics! It's like a Popularity Index for writers with mild OCD and anxiety disorder.

Middle school was not the best time of my life. I will leave it at that, since some of my very sweet family read this blog and perhaps do not want me to recount the blow-by-blow details of that particular descent into Hades.

 In order to avoid repeating a period of my life which ended with a drug-riddled high school episode which seemed favorable by comparison, I am going to make a commitment. Two very good things came out of middle school. And, although I lost them, I later found them again on Facebook.

I am planning to address my next several posts to Lorien and Hope (my best friends from sixth grade), who always "like" my blog posts and laugh at my jokes and never take offense at my crass sarcasm. For them, and for all of the sweet friends and loving family who read my stuff, like it and remember to tell me so, thank you. 

Writing publicly from your life is like jumping out of an airplane wearing a parachute made of some idea you have called "Self-expression." Either that fucker will slow your fall or you die in a blaze of bloody glory. If I had to do without anyone telling me "Go for it!"...pretty much daily...I would have given up long ago and returned to alphabetizing my kids' socks and looking up Asian countries on Wikipedia.

So, here's to you. Thanks for slowing that hard fall, guys.

And now even my front yard has ADHD.

Image by Joe Hall

The first person in my family whom we suspected of having AD/HD was my oldest son, Rowan. This even was before he was born, when my mother began referring to him prophetically as "that ADD boy".

(Some of you are now sure that our expectations created a reality wherein my child was bound to occur as defective. Judge all you want. All the expectation in the world does not make a child violently hyperactive in an environment with no TV, video games or sugar. However, on the genetic front, my former husband was apparently once tied to a chair during his elementary education. That is all I will say about that.)

I tended to agree with my mother's suspicions. At one point, I was in the hospital thirty-four weeks pregnant with him, on bed rest for pre-term labor, when, obviously bored with the dull conditions caused by my being stuck in bed, my baby spent the afternoon going breech, head down, breech and head down again.

After he was born, we had to swaddle Rowan so tightly that he couldn't wiggle because his arms upset him. Christmas lights made him excited, then hysterical. Then, when he was six months old, he started bouncing. He would "stand" on an adult's lap, holding onto their hands, straighten his legs briefly, and a maniacal grin would cover his face as he would bounce incessantly until the adult got tired of this and handed him to someone else.

In preschool and kindergarten, this evolved into a tendency to hurl objects of all kinds across the room without malice or forethought. He delighted in sneaking up on little girls and roaring at top volume into their ears, and, later, deprived of all media but nature shows, played a game he called "Sharp-tooth Slasher". He spent quite a bit of time in the principal's office, thinking of himself as a bad person.

So I started a "Please Label My Son AD/HD Rather Than Labeling Him An Asshole" Campaign. And people thought I was weird.

I was right, though.

The thing is I liked Rowan just fine. I didn't, and don't, think there is a single thing wrong with having AD/HD, other than not being able to function according to societal expectations. Born to hunt and go to war, these kids really bog down in classrooms, and other rule-based environments. To me the label is a gift to help others understand them and get them resources. I was pushy and got my son a Section 504 under the Americans with Disabilities Act to force his school to accommodate his special needs.

Anyway, label in hand, Rowan got done with this early phase of having absolutely no detectable impulse control and a great love of all things over-the-top, and he settled in. At the age of eight, he somehow became a good student, with occasional, less than totally catastrophic brushes with authority. He was the bad kid no more.

Late in fifth grade, he elected to start taking medication so that he would stop losing his train of thought in the middle of reading a page over and over again, and be able to complete his increased workload. Now he gets straight A's.

I married ADD, too, albeit undiagnosed.

My husband, Mike, is the kind of person, though unusually intelligent, who keeps forgetting what day it is.

For example, one day I called him from work to ask him a favor. I got his voice mail, thought "Whatever", hung up. He called back, but at a time when I couldn't answer and left me a message saying, with beaming pride that, if I was calling to remind him to take Rowan to allergy shots, he was already on his way to get him. So I called back.

"It's Monday. Allergy shots are tomorrow."

"Oh", he laughs, "and I was so proud of myself for remembering".

Also, every night when he loads the dishwasher, he rinses the dishes, loads them according to this extremely perfectionistic, rigid system he has devised, adds soaps and then shuts the door and leaves. Without starting it. EVERY NIGHT.

And so on.

(People think I'm a control freak, and it's just because they don't realize I am managing a houseful of dingbats. Very, very smart dingbats.)

Anyway, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised the first time that school suggested that perhaps our son, Mikalh, who is now six, may have some attentional issues. (Typically, teachers only suggest this if your child is more or less catatonic with inattention, so I gave it some serious thought.)

I know that Mikalh has language processing issues, so it makes it hard to tease that out from attention issues in particular. How do you separate the fact that someone can't process what is being said to them 80% of the time from the fact that they aren't paying any attention to you anyway? It makes an interesting quandary. Anyway, I am taking a wait-and-see attitude on this one, given that he already has accommodations for his sensory and language processing needs. What remains seems to me to be giving him medication, and I am inclined to wait until he is older to even think about that.

Then, that leaves my middle child, whose claim to fame has been that he is the single child with no IEP living in our household. He is very bright, but does not require a differentiated program due to his IQ, and has appeared to have no learning disabilities or deficits of any kind.

Except if you watch him sit in a chair. 

Devin has actually destroyed multiple items of household furniture due to his tendency to view them either as bucking broncos or as poorly made see-saws. Then there is the fact that when directions are relayed to him, his execution of said directions resembles them just enough to be sort of a good parody. Despite, again, the well-over-average intelligence.

This last week, in sixth grade, things came to a head when he lost (not misplaced, but actually permanently lost) his lunch order with attached check, a book borrowed from his brother AND his lunch box. I helped him exhume the contents of his binder, and what followed might aptly have been titled Night of the Unfinished Assignments.

In summary, his teacher thinks that, since we mentioned it, it might be a good idea if we all took a look at his attentional capacities.

I think the lunch box may turn up, though. (Never lose hope.)

(There is something sort of simultaneously defeating and vindicating about considering the possibility that I may in fact be completely surrounded by people suffering from attentional deficits. It does explain the fact that I often find myself drifting off to sleep, hanging onto some mental to-do list like a life raft: "Must remember...to schedule...flu shots...")

So, here's the upshot:

For a few years now, in an effort to act like we are normal people, I have been planting bulbs in my yard. For two years in a row, I just bought several boxes of Dutch bulbs on impulse at Smith's while grocery shopping, and made my older children help me plant these in the yard. With the use of the proper bulb planter, this only took about half an hour per bulb.

Clay soil is a bitch.

Once, my husband came out and saw what we were doing. "This", he said, "is ridiculous."

And then, he said, "There has to be a tool."

Enter the Awesome Auger. (Don't watch this whole link. The first few seconds give you the whole gist.)

So, I am hittin' this mother fucker out of the park this year. I bought one hundred-fifty assorted tulips to guarantee me two full months of angiosperm joy all across my front yard. And with the Awesome Auger this shit would be no trouble at all.

Except that all this activity burned my husband's cheap drill out. So, he had to go get another one, and then I had to make dinner. But, no prob, he and Rowan could finish it on their own.

And they did. Bravo!

The next day, Rowan, who, as I've said is very smart, reflected  aloud, "You know, we planted ALL those tulips on the left side of the yard, Mom."

 WTF???

When confronted with this, my husband sheepishly informs me,

"Well, I ASKED you where you wanted them."

Me: "I am unable to SPECIFICALLY tell you where I want one hundred-fifty bulbs to go."

Mike: "Well, I DID ask."

Me: "Part of the problem is, you don't really LISTEN. I SAID I wanted them in GROUPS scattered across the yard."

Mike: "They are in one BIG group."

Me: "It will look like the yard has measles on one side of it. It will look like a fucking tulip INFESTATION."

Mike: "You just weren't clear about what you wanted."

Me: "If I had a normal husband, I wouldn't need to explain that I DON'T want tulips ONLY on ONE HALF of my front yard. That is IMPLIED."

And so on.

I can hardly wait for spring.