The Magic Pill (part 1)

My kid has ADHD.

It’s taken about five years to get to that relatively simple statement, or ten, if you’re counting from when he was born instead of when he went into school. He was severely premature– “No Way He’s Gonna Make It Without Intervention” premature. It took drugs and surgery and a team of doctors and his Mom in the hospital for a month before they could even get him to the point where he’d have a chance, and then more surgery to get him born, and then more drugs and an incubator and a lot of tubes and another month or two in the Natal Intensive Care unit to get him home. And then a heart monitor and a steroid fogger once he was home, to make sure that he didn’t hold his breath while he was sleeping and kill himself, or that his lungs didn’t close up when he got a cold and make him pass out because he couldn’t breathe. So mostly we’ve just always been glad that he’s alive, and that he has all his fingers and toes, and that he isn’t brain-damaged or crippled. If he was a little off socially and perceptually, we figured, well… so are we.

People who aren’t his parents, however, tend to have a different viewpoint on this “off-ness”, especially in group settings, where there’s a finite amount of attention and resources that need to be distributed equally among everyone involved, or a need for collective action. The Wagnerian sagas of his attempts to participate in team sports have already been documented in this space. His experiences in public school have hewed to the same kind of pattern. I thought it was amusing when his preschool teacher stared at me dourly over her folded hands and explained that he displayed “a total indifference to the approval or desires of authority figures”, because I could remember him urinating on his nurses in retribution for sticking him with needles less than 24 hours after he’d been born. It wasn’t so amusing when his first grade teacher said similar things and elaborated on them, or when his second grade teacher did, or his third grade teacher, or his fourth grade teacher, by which time we had gotten to: “He’s a great kid, wonderful personality, really adds a dash of style and originality to the class– but he’s disruptive, doesn’t pay attention, is working at two grade levels below what he could be achieving because he’s missing core concepts by NOT paying attention, and he’s completely out of synch at any given moment with both what everyone else is doing and what HE should be doing.” How do you reconcile that description of your child with the behaviour you see him displaying at home, where he can remember the names and stats of every Pokemon in seven different DS games, and make up stories with you in bed for hours by candlelight?

The Sewcrest Gifted Society evaluations were uniquely demonstrative in that regard. He was enrolled in two Saturday enrichment classes, Mind Games and Architecture. Mind Games revolved around math and geometry puzzles, and was a bust from Day One, as I discovered when I escorted him into the classroom for his second session. The teacher, a bald, rotund man in a plaid button-down shirt, heard the two of us talking, and wandered over from his cardboard box full of pamphlets to hover, like a cargo ship drifting into berth. “So… this is Jack,” he said, just a touch too neutrally.

“Yyyyyes?” I replied, raising an eyebrow slightly. And you’re confirming this, for some reason? “I’m his Dad.”

The teacher didn’t bother to acknowledge the information. “We had a talk last week about what’s expected of him in class,” he added. Which of course is Teacher-Speak for, Your kid’s a behavioural problem.

I cut to the chase. “Are you misbehaving?” I asked Jack, frowning down at him where he sat at his desk. But he never answered; by the time the teacher had finished his second sentence, Jack had already assumed his defocused, I’m Not Here and Can Therefore Not Acknowledge That You Are Discussing Something I Did Wrong defensive look. He just kept playing quietly with his erasers.

“We’ll discuss it,” I remarked. And we did, for all the good it did. But neither his enthusiasm nor his conduct ever improved. Much later in the session, I watched a little Asian girl half his size, who was also in the class, whirl on him outside in the hallway and hiss ferociously, “You shouldn’t make noises in class, because it distracts other people who are trying to learn.” And all he did was stare at her with that same blank expression, as if she was a foreigner speaking a different language, or an animal making meaningless sounds at him, threatening him for some reason he couldn’t understand. I wasn’t surprised when the review of his performance was flatly negative.

Architecture, on the other hand, was what he waited all week to do. The curriculum there involved designing buildings and gluing models of them together out of pieces of foam core, plus embellishing the models with items and cool flourishes, activities he’s always loved. He would literally RUN to get there from the Mind Games class (sometimes before he was allowed), bring anything he made in it home to show us and keep it to play with, plus talk about what he did in it afterwards for days– a decidedly cheerful situation. Imagine our surprise then, when we opened the review from THAT teacher, expecting a list of positives– and it was even MORE negative and scathing than the review from the Mind Games teacher, so much so that the Architecture teacher went so far as to suggest that Jack shouldn’t even be in the school! That proof-positive example of an activity where there was no way his behavior could be attributed to lack of interest or engagement single-handedly rewrote the book on what it seemed necessary to consider.

[continue to the next part]