Random Note Number 1:
Somebody asked whether maybe I should choose a somewhat less derogatory name for this here undertaking. I can see the point, but the reason I’m writing this is to get across what living undiagnosed with this has meant for me. And it’s made me feel like an addled screwup. I don’t want to suggest that everybody who deals with this is an addled screwup. Hell, for all I know, I’m not even an addled screwup myself. But it sure has felt that way all my life, so I’m sticking with it.
Random Note Number 2:
I go to a meeting for people with ADD once a month. I like meeting the people, and, well, maybe this is less than charitable, but I like knowing that there are people who have failed at things that I haven’t failed at. I’ve never been able to earn enough to live on my own, which kind of eats away at my soul to even write, but it’s true. But I have been married for almost 14 years, happily so, and we have two wonderful little girls, and I seem to be doing all right bringing them up. So often I’ll hear somebody at a meeting who has a job and can earn enough to live on, often more than enough to live on, but they’re on their third marriage, and their children aren’t speaking to them. So, it isn’t that I like hearing that they have these problems; but it is kind of nice to hear that there’s at least one thing I seem to be doing all right.
Random Note Number 3:
This was going to be Random Note Number 2, but that one got away from me, so now it’s Random Note Number 3. At the meeting, the guy who runs it will often bring up that if you’re going to have a mental condition, this is the one to have, since there are some advantages that come with it. That is to say, there are some things we ADDled people seem to do better than the normals. I’ll go on more about that later, but one thing that struck me today, when I saw that some of the people had said that the last post was well written, is that when I write, I write one draft and that’s it, and it almost always comes out ready to run. Even in graduate school, I’d write one draft and hand it in. I might change a word here or there, or shift a paragraph up or down a little, but sometimes I didn’t even do that much. And I got complimented more than once on my style of writing, so I guess I was doing something right...
So, I don’t know if this has anything to do with ADD or whether it’s some other, unrelated gift I just happen to have. I did wonder about it, though, so if anybody who knows more about this than I do, especially any neurologists or psychiatrists (I’m thinking of you here, Dr. Kent) might have any thoughts.
Here end the Random Notes.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Friday, April 10, 2015
When We Were Very Young
I guess that if I were a better planner, I might have chosen another time to write my first post, rather than right before I went to Honduras for a week and a half. But I’m a bad planner, so, here we are.
I was thinking that I’d begin with my story at the beginning, and work through up to now, and that seems like a good way to go about it. I do, however, withhold the right to veer off down any side roads that look fun, at any time, for any reason, for as long as I feel like wandering along them. If you don’t like it, then find yourself some other addled screwup whose musings you’d rather read.
So. Ready? Let’s begin.
My early life was fairly idyllic, truth to tell. I grew up on a farm in the middle of a somewhat run down industrial suburb of Philadelphia, as odd as that seems. I had all I could ask for. Trees, woods, a creek, a wheatfield, some meadows, the ruin of the wall of an old barn, a big, creaky old stone farmhouse with all kinds of fun rooms and attics and cellars and such. We had a dog and a cat. My father took me for long bike rides in a little seat on his bike. We’d stop at playgrounds and I’d swing and play on the slides. When I couldn’t have been much more than three, I fell in the mud, trying to show off my swinging prowess to some girls. (That was long before bullies and assorted assholes at school taught me to be shy and awkward around girls.) When the weather was warm, my mother made coddled eggs for me, and I ate breakfast outside under a big sycamore tree.
And I had friends. Not a lot, but enough. We lived in about a third of the house that was walled off from the other, bigger part. My parents rented our part. There was a little cottage on the grounds, rented by a woman with a little girl about as old as I was. The family that owned the house had four older boys, and they played with me in the summer, when they were home. The father taught at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, so they rented out the big part of the house while they were gone for the school year, and one year there was a girl about as old as I was living there, too.
When I was four, my parents bought a house a few miles west, near Media, the county seat. I was pissed to be leaving my wonderful little farm, but once we moved, I made out all right, as we had more children nearby to play with, and woods behind the house. Everything went well until I went to school.
For some reason, the school wanted my parents to send me to kindergarten when I was four. Looking back, this was unwise. I was half a year or more younger than most of my classmates, and unready for school, and school became a wretched ordeal for me until they held me back a year after fifth grade. I was a bully magnet, younger than most of my classmates, skinny, I had a weird name and I was mild to the point of being passive. And there was the ADD.
Nobody knew about it yet, and wouldn’t till I was 40 or so, but it made schoolwork hell. This might not have been so bad, only the social life of school was no fun to give me some relief. We had a weird setup in our district in which some classes had more than one grade in them. In first grade, we had first, second and third graders, and I was already younger than all my other first grade classmates. It was like I was a kindergartner in a class with other kids one, two or three years ahead of me.
So I struggled. I forgot to do homework. I lost homework. I daydreamt in class. I was an unending frustration for my teacher, though at least I was well behaved. I came to school without anything to write with more often than not, or so it seemed.
There’s one thing I still recall from that year that wraps up my whole school career neatly in one little episode. My mother and father went to some school event one evening and left my sister and me with a baby sitter. They came back home embarrassed and angry, and wanted to know why I hadn’t done any work on my organ. All I could think of was that they were talking about a musical organ, but we never even saw any organs in music class. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, and said so, but they didn’t seem to believe me.
What had happened is that for a week or two before, our class had been learning about organs of the body. Everybody had chosen an organ and written a little blurb about it and maybe drawn a picture, that kind of thing. And I hadn’t. I didn’t even know anything about it. It seems that I had sat in the class for a week and a half while the class worked on this project, and somehow, I missed the whole damned thing.
I bring this up because it kind of sums up what ADD can be like. To somebody who doesn’t have it, or know anybody who has it, a story like that seems beyond belief. Hell, I lived through it firsthand, and it still seems far fetched to me a little. I mean, how checked out can even a first grader be to sit in school for two weeks and never know what the hell is going on? It happened, though.
I don’t know when the trips to the child psychologists began, but if I had to guess, it would have been fairly soon after that. It makes sense, at least. I recall going to psychologists a bunch of times. There was a guy out near West Chester I went to a bunch of times. There was somebody nearer to home I went to one evening, I’d guess it was in Swarthmore. We went to somebody up near Wayne or Paoli, and somebody way out down the Baltimore Pike, in Kennett Square or even farther out, I’d guess.
I don’t know what kind of tests they gave me other than the one I really liked, where I looked at a design on a paper and had to put the same design together with colored blocks. That one was fun. The tests all showed that I was smart enough to be getting good grades, but I wasn’t doing the work. That’s when Lazy Bum Syndrome first began to kick in. People kept asking me why I didn’t do my work. Didn’t I care? Why didn’t I try?
The choice of words made all the difference. It was always, “Why didn’t I?” Never “Why couldn’t I?” By asking why I didn’t do the work, it became clear to me that, however much I might have though otherwise, I was choosing not to do my work. I was choosing to leave homework or pencils or books at home. I could have been as responsible as all the other children in my class, I just didn’t want to be.
I was thinking that I’d begin with my story at the beginning, and work through up to now, and that seems like a good way to go about it. I do, however, withhold the right to veer off down any side roads that look fun, at any time, for any reason, for as long as I feel like wandering along them. If you don’t like it, then find yourself some other addled screwup whose musings you’d rather read.
So. Ready? Let’s begin.
My early life was fairly idyllic, truth to tell. I grew up on a farm in the middle of a somewhat run down industrial suburb of Philadelphia, as odd as that seems. I had all I could ask for. Trees, woods, a creek, a wheatfield, some meadows, the ruin of the wall of an old barn, a big, creaky old stone farmhouse with all kinds of fun rooms and attics and cellars and such. We had a dog and a cat. My father took me for long bike rides in a little seat on his bike. We’d stop at playgrounds and I’d swing and play on the slides. When I couldn’t have been much more than three, I fell in the mud, trying to show off my swinging prowess to some girls. (That was long before bullies and assorted assholes at school taught me to be shy and awkward around girls.) When the weather was warm, my mother made coddled eggs for me, and I ate breakfast outside under a big sycamore tree.
And I had friends. Not a lot, but enough. We lived in about a third of the house that was walled off from the other, bigger part. My parents rented our part. There was a little cottage on the grounds, rented by a woman with a little girl about as old as I was. The family that owned the house had four older boys, and they played with me in the summer, when they were home. The father taught at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, so they rented out the big part of the house while they were gone for the school year, and one year there was a girl about as old as I was living there, too.
When I was four, my parents bought a house a few miles west, near Media, the county seat. I was pissed to be leaving my wonderful little farm, but once we moved, I made out all right, as we had more children nearby to play with, and woods behind the house. Everything went well until I went to school.
For some reason, the school wanted my parents to send me to kindergarten when I was four. Looking back, this was unwise. I was half a year or more younger than most of my classmates, and unready for school, and school became a wretched ordeal for me until they held me back a year after fifth grade. I was a bully magnet, younger than most of my classmates, skinny, I had a weird name and I was mild to the point of being passive. And there was the ADD.
Nobody knew about it yet, and wouldn’t till I was 40 or so, but it made schoolwork hell. This might not have been so bad, only the social life of school was no fun to give me some relief. We had a weird setup in our district in which some classes had more than one grade in them. In first grade, we had first, second and third graders, and I was already younger than all my other first grade classmates. It was like I was a kindergartner in a class with other kids one, two or three years ahead of me.
So I struggled. I forgot to do homework. I lost homework. I daydreamt in class. I was an unending frustration for my teacher, though at least I was well behaved. I came to school without anything to write with more often than not, or so it seemed.
There’s one thing I still recall from that year that wraps up my whole school career neatly in one little episode. My mother and father went to some school event one evening and left my sister and me with a baby sitter. They came back home embarrassed and angry, and wanted to know why I hadn’t done any work on my organ. All I could think of was that they were talking about a musical organ, but we never even saw any organs in music class. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, and said so, but they didn’t seem to believe me.
What had happened is that for a week or two before, our class had been learning about organs of the body. Everybody had chosen an organ and written a little blurb about it and maybe drawn a picture, that kind of thing. And I hadn’t. I didn’t even know anything about it. It seems that I had sat in the class for a week and a half while the class worked on this project, and somehow, I missed the whole damned thing.
I bring this up because it kind of sums up what ADD can be like. To somebody who doesn’t have it, or know anybody who has it, a story like that seems beyond belief. Hell, I lived through it firsthand, and it still seems far fetched to me a little. I mean, how checked out can even a first grader be to sit in school for two weeks and never know what the hell is going on? It happened, though.
I don’t know when the trips to the child psychologists began, but if I had to guess, it would have been fairly soon after that. It makes sense, at least. I recall going to psychologists a bunch of times. There was a guy out near West Chester I went to a bunch of times. There was somebody nearer to home I went to one evening, I’d guess it was in Swarthmore. We went to somebody up near Wayne or Paoli, and somebody way out down the Baltimore Pike, in Kennett Square or even farther out, I’d guess.
I don’t know what kind of tests they gave me other than the one I really liked, where I looked at a design on a paper and had to put the same design together with colored blocks. That one was fun. The tests all showed that I was smart enough to be getting good grades, but I wasn’t doing the work. That’s when Lazy Bum Syndrome first began to kick in. People kept asking me why I didn’t do my work. Didn’t I care? Why didn’t I try?
The choice of words made all the difference. It was always, “Why didn’t I?” Never “Why couldn’t I?” By asking why I didn’t do the work, it became clear to me that, however much I might have though otherwise, I was choosing not to do my work. I was choosing to leave homework or pencils or books at home. I could have been as responsible as all the other children in my class, I just didn’t want to be.
~~~
Now, I’m no psychologist, and even having lived through this, I don’t altogether understand how it affected me being told over and over (even if only indirectly) that however much I might believe I was doing my best, I wasn’t. I don’t really know, but I can guess. After a while, it eats away at your confidence. It eats away at your faith in yourself. It leads you to doubt your own mind. It sucks.
I want to say at this point that I don’t blame anybody for this. My mother and father were only trying to help me, only trying to get me to do my work. So were the teachers. I guess that back then, people knew much less about ADD than they do today, especially the inattentive kind, which is what I have, since we almost never made any trouble. We didn’t do anything. We didn’t run all over the room or shout or bother anybody; we just sat there, doodling or looking out the window. It was only when the work didn’t get done that anybody took any note of us.
Everybody just misunderstood. And I can’t bear any grudge for that. It made life hard, and left all kinds of scars that even now I’m only beginning to understand, but it wasn’t anybody’s fault. That’s something I want to make clear here. I’m not writing this to bitch about how my mother and father screwed me, or about how my teachers were all assholes. I’m writing it to help me understand better what happened to me, so I can deal with it the best way, and to help other people better understand any children they might know who have ADD.
I guess that’s about enough for tonight. Who knows when I’ll next feel spurred to put something else down, or whether it’ll logically follow this or be some delightfully (or not) whimsical tangent? I don’t even know myself. But I guess we’ll all find out sooner or later...
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