April 30, 2004

• Rest - Rested  - Resting - With ADD

  
  

  I slept last night.  Deeply and long as I could.  Things look much better today (although, I still love that cummings poem ... )  Rest is a prized commodity for me.  I never needed so much rest when I was younger, and even now, when things get really cooking in my life, I'm known to spend many early morning hours awake and staring into the darkness while I think through my life.  My kids have inherited my sleeplessness.  I've learned that this tendency to sleep little is a normal feature of Attention Deficit Disorder. 

  
  

  My day starts early every day.  My kids rarely sleep in past 5:30.  I have trained them to at least stay in their room until they hear me up, but they aren't always quiet about it.  We leave the house in the morning between 7:30 and 7:45.  (7:30 allows us to be leisurely about it, 7:45 will get us there on time and is the point of "I don't care if you can't find your homework we have to go NOW.")  Between 5:30 and 7:30 I have time to do three loads of laundry, vacuum a room or two and usually clean the bathroom.  I also make breakfast for the kids most mornings although lately they've been telling me they want to make their own.  

  
  

  After I drop the kids at school, I clean the kitchen, check my email, and make my list of things I have to do that day.  I work off the list because I have to.  If I don't have a list, things just don't get done.  Let me tell you about my Monday morning.  Not because it's so unusual, but because its very typical of my life.  Tucker had a Dentist appointment at 7:30.  That's 7:30 my time, the Dentist's office is located in a different time zone so the appointment card said 8:30.  This was the third week in a row for him to have an appointment at that time, this is the first week that we've actually made it on time because I kept forgetting about the time zone thing. 

  
  

  After the Dentist, I had to stop in at Walmart for trashbags, fruit, bread, and gas for the car.  I forgot the trashbags even though they were clearly written on my list.  I remembered to buy a Walmart card so I could get the 3 cent discount.  I forgot to stop at the gas pump to actually get the gas.  I didn't remember it again until we were 20 miles away and Michael said, "Mom, you should put gas in your car today you're about out."

  
  

  One thing about having ADD, we all three have things that we just can't remember, and we all three have areas where we are hyper organized.  Michael is great at knowing what we need, I know what we have, and Tucker knows what he wants. 

  
  

  I just went through the process of meeting with school personnel to plan Individual Education Plans for my kids for next year.  The school people know we are moving, but this way there is a record of the testing, the interventions and the progress that's been made I can take with me to the next school.  I got a lot of positive feedback on both my kids.  They are apparently well-liked by their teachers and peers.  Tucker has been using that to his advantage, playing "baby" and getting the other kids to do chores for him.  Don't tell me that kid can't figure out social situations ...

  
  

  I've also learned that ADD is an inherited condition.  Like many adults of my generation I first heard that I might have ADD when the doctor suggested testing for my kids.  Beginning to understand that ADD is a reason not an excuse was a major point of growth for me.  But even when I first heard it, I didn't realize that there were specific means of compensation that would help me now.  I thought of it in terms of a disorder that primarily concerns children and school performance.     

  
  

  It's amazing the difference between the experience my kids are having and the one I remember from being in elementary school.  As I was packing things earlier this week, I found the box that contains the report cards from Smith Elementary which I attended for five excruciating years.  Every card was filled with remarks from the teachers about how I was a discipline problem.  I was impulsive, lacked self-control, refused to participate, and/or unmotivated.  Time after time the card said, "Terri has such potential if she would just apply herself."  Nowadays, any school person seeing that kind of report would immediately say "ADD" and there would be options and interventions to help.  Back then, I was labeled a discipline problem.  Reading through those cards brought back memories of being punished at home for those reports and my father lecturing to me about his disappointment in my inability to "behave" myself.  I grew up thinking that my problem was a character problem, that I was a bad person.

  
  

  But I also remember what it felt like in those classrooms.  Material that was so boring that I literally ached to be doing something, anything else.  And more than once when I was trying so hard to be good, I would fall asleep.  (Sleeping in class also showed up on the report cards.)  When something engaged me, I would move like lightning through the material, but if I was bored, trying to focus on it was like being dragged over rough gravel.  Halfway through my third grade year, reading "clicked" for me.  My Mom bought me a Trixie Belden book and I was hooked.  Not only hooked, but I found my salvation.  From that point on I was never without something to read.  I got a library card and pestered my Mom to take me every week.  I would check out stacks of books at a time.  I would read in class.  The teachers didn't always appreciate my habit, but what could they say?  Whenever they called on me in class, I knew the answer.  So I was left alone.  My friend, Ruby - and you know I REALLY need to call her - says that the thing she remembers about me from our school days together is that I carried three times as many books as anyone else.  By the time I was in Junior High school, I was reading Shakespeare and Aristotle because that was the only way I could make it through geography class without crying. 

  
  

  Packing my house has also been an interesting exercise in noting the way that ADD affects how we live.  ADD doesn't mean that we are less intelligent or that we are more active (Tucker tends to lean toward the hyperactive side of ADD but Michael makes up for that by being extra slow in his own movements.)  ADD manifests itself in my house in organization.  Everything here is either super over-organized, or it's chaos.  My pantry is organized with shelves devoted to different food groups and on those shelves the items are arranged in alphabetical order.  Apple pie filling to Very Cherry fruit cocktail on the fruits shelf.  Atrichoke hearts to Yams on the veggies shelf.  My books (before they all went to live in boxes) were arranged topically by the Library of Congress system and then in alphabetical order by author.  Ditto my music.  The clothes in my closet are sorted by the type of garment and hung in order of color - each section from red to indigo.  (This makes it sound like I have a lot more clothes than I do, all my stuff hangs on a rod about three feet long and includes things like my nighties that I understand "normal" people put in drawers.)

  
  

  On the other end of the scale, my kitchen had dishes in three cabinets, pots and pans scattered in two cabinets plus the center island, there were glasses in two cabinets ... it was disorganized chaos.  My bathroom was a similar disaster.  I noticed as I was cleaning out "my" drawer that I had six unopened toothbrushes because I could never find one so I always thought I needed another.  

  
  

  When I've talked about living with ADD, I've heard the critique that "we ALL do those kinds of things ..." I've heard the suggestion that ADD is a "manufactured" disorder being pushed by pharmaceutical companies who hope to bolster their bottom line.  I understand where these critiques are coming from, truly I do.  ADD is one of many spectrum disorders that range from manifestations that everyone has in some degree to symptoms severe enough to impair life function.  The thing that I think most "normal" people don't understand is how painful it is to want to focus and have everything scatter just out of reach.  I can't speak to the effectiveness of meds, because I'm one of those people who tries to stay as far away from prescription treatments as possible so I haven't tried them. 

  
  

  But if you're going to have some kind of disorder, ADD isn't a bad way to go.  One of the guys who wrote books that many people read about ADD in children has a saying that I love.  "Living with ADD is like trying to leash-train a dragon.  It will drag you around for years, but once you master it, you own all that power and magic and energy for life."

  
  

  Because the person with ADD thinks and organizes things differently than most people, we see patterns.  I loved math because math is nothing more than short hand for patterns.  We make the connection between the unconnected dots and we find creative solutions because we don't know how to think inside the box. 

  
  

  So I've been thinking about ADD this week.  And I've been packing, and cleaning, and cooking, and checking the kids homework, and reading bedtime stories, and going out for more boxes and packing ... and today, I'm tired.  I know it isn't the weekend yet, but I'm taking today off from packing.  My shoulders hurt and I need the rest.  So if you're looking for me, the best place to start would be my bathtub where I just may be soaking under a mound of bubbles where I'll be focused on resting my body even if my mind won't slow down.

  • 11:23 am
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