ADDled Mom

My son has ADD. For the parents out there who do not have a child with ADD I'm sure what I'm about to write will sound like I spent my early parenting years riding the train to crazy town. I'll happily give away the ending and tell you that he is now 21, creative and perfect. We both survived and he gave me approval to write about him. I have a pivotal point in time that I will never, ever forget. It is the moment I realized I had completely lost control of my own reactions to the nightly homework battles and the never ending calls from teachers.

The doorbell rings at 7 pm. That's the witching hour for parents of kids with ADD. Dinner is over, bedtime is soon and the space between the two seems way too short to complete the piles of homework, get the going to bed rituals finished and make sure everything is organized for tomorrow's school day. Some of the hallmarks of ADD are a lack of focus, fidgeting, under performing and no sense of time. It would drive a normal parent mad but for a Type A, anal, over programmed and detail oriented nut case like me it was pure torture.The ADD child wants to make the right decisions but their hard wiring is routed wrong. And the Type A mom always thinks she's making the right decisions.

On this particular night I am drained. The crazy train is speeding to insanity and I'm too tired to get the damn thing to stop. I answer the door and find a friend standing on the threshold with papers for the next night's PTA meeting.She looks cute, and perky, and very, very relaxed. She has no idea that she has entered Hell.

Unaware, she steps into the madness...I mean the foyer.  It only takes a moment for her to realize that she would rather be anywhere but here. I am hoarse from yelling, my cheeks are red, the tears are flowing and she thinks someone has died. I picture my hair standing on end but I'm pretty sure that's only in my imagination. I am so caught up in the drama that I think it's perfectly normal to scream these next words..."HE HASN'T EVEN STARTED ON THE MATH HOMEWORK!" What? Math homework? I know she's thinking "who in their right mind gets this upset about math homework?" She could have turned tail and run but like a true friend she calmed me down and then sat for awhile and listened.

Parenting a child with ADD can make you crazy. It makes you crazy that even though it is such a common diagnosis, there are few teachers and counselors who really know how to deal with it. You get crazy when your child tells you the night before that he has a paper due the next day...and that it needs to be 15 pages with footnotes and a bibliography. It makes you crazy when he says it's really no problem, he'll just sit down and start writing. Is delusional part of ADD? Oh right, that's the no concept of time symptom! It makes you crazy that even though you try and stay on top of all assignments some slip through the cracks and you know you'll be up until 1:00 am scrambling to finish his paper. Yes. I know that is enabling. You get crazy when you get the one teacher who does understand all the idiosyncrasies of ADD and then you realize that she will only be the teacher for one year and the next year you have to start all over with a teacher who doesn't get it. It makes you crazy when the clueless teachers tell you to punish him by taking him out of all sports and forcing him to concentrate on school. Offense intended when I tell them you do not want that boy in your class; ice hockey and baseball were the outlets that made him manageable.

After the night of the meltdown, I had a serious talk with myself. I was over the edge and plummeting fast and if I didn't pull the rip cord now I would wallow in pain and regret. Overly dramatic? Probably. Is it what I was feeling at the time? Without a doubt.

I decided that I had to keep things in perspective. Would not finishing the math homework in 6th grade make him a terrible adult? No. Would getting a C on a paper keep him from growing up healthy and sane? No, but my constant over reaction certainly would. Through years of cajoling and prodding I believed that if he just tried harder and if I just pushed harder then this would all go away. I was wrong. I finally accepted that my creative and smart son had an abundance of wonderful traits that were being overlooked. I decided that the A Honor Roll was not the goal; the goal was to raise a son to become a wonderful adult.

And he is a wonderful adult. He has amazing powers of concentration when the task is something that interests him. The first day he picked up a guitar he was determined to be the best. Today, he is a musician who spends hours playing. He loves history. He seeks knowledge on his own. He is incredibly well read on current events and world history. He understands business and excels in those college courses. Most of all, he's a nice guy with a great group friends and he has his own plans for the future. Those plans may not have been the ones we had for him but they are so much sweeter because they are his own.

Yes, it's a good future. We're living it now.