Drives Me Crazy

Putting ADHD people together can be
like trying to lie magnets together. They resist.

In the case of my son and I it means we
bark at one another with the slightest provocation. We’re ready to
see intent where none exists. We misunderstand. We speak in
incomplete sentences. Our expectations for one another are very high,
and when they’re not met it hurts.

John has had a lot more therapy than I
did at 16. He’s gotten a lot more help. He’s given himself more help,
too, joining a church of questioning believers. Yet he has a lot more
trouble than I did dealing with people his own age.

I think it’s because in John’s life
he’s lacked peers. I mean real peers, people like him. Not just the
same age, but similar in temperament, in attitude, in intelligence
and love of learning.

That’s the lesson of my own life,
anyway.

We had tracks when I was in school 40
years ago. I spent 10 years around the same kids, and in time they
learned my quirks while I learned theirs. Not that I wanted to be
their friends when I left.

Instead I went off to a school that, at the
time, was filled with crazies just like me, a regular ADHD festival.
There I was the social one. I fit right in. Science geeks,
engineering geeks, even theater geeks. I was an academic geek. But we
were all geeks together. For the first time in my life I was
surrounded by people who were just like me, and people who believed
in me.

“What do you want to do?” a teacher
asked. I admitted I didn’t want to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a
journalist, a writer, and wasn’t certain I could measure up. “You’re
a Rice person,” he said. “Whatever you want to do, you’ll be
great at it.”

I’m not great at it. I’m good at it.
But I was fired up by that talk, and the work I do is the work I
love. It’s a happy life.

In those terms, of  just fitting in,
John has it much harder than I ever did. There’s nowhere for him to
fit.

We live in the inner city. John has
usually been the only really smart, intensely academic kid in his
school. He has no friends. He spends his off-hours at his computer,
playing strategy games, sometimes on the Internet. Those people
aren’t real. They’re what they do on the screen. When he loses he
jumps up-and-down, he pounds his fist and pounds the floor. If the
other player were with him, they’d leave.

That’s his social life. Not that we
haven’t tried other things. He goes to a wonderful camp each summer , filled
with kids like him, and there he’s a role model. He played recreation
soccer for years, but now that he’s 16 there’s no team for him, and
he refuses to play for his school, says it would take too much time
away from study. The church youth group was strong his freshman year,
but it has withered. Usually when there’s an event, a hike or a trip
to the movies, he’s the only one who signs up, and it’s canceled.

Imagine being the only one like you for
miles around. We’re in the middle of this immense city of 6 million
yet he’d might as well be in the Alaska wilderness.

The way John deals with this world is
by trying to follow the rules. Every rule. Every single one. He
believes in the rules, and believes everyone else should too. It
upsets him when anyone fails to obey the rules. It burns him up, but
he got in trouble when he used to get on them about it, and now he
just burns inside. Follow the rules, he thinks. If you follow the
rules you can’t get in trouble.

But of course you can get in trouble.
You can get in lots of trouble. If you can’t read other people, if
you don’t know how your behavior looks to them, if you’re isolated,
alone, you can get into a lot of trouble. And when he does get into
trouble, John seeks protection in the rules. It’s maddening, to him,
to me, to everyone around him. But he didn’t learn those things in
kindergarten you’re supposed to learn in kindergarten. Thanks to ADHD
those parts of his brain which are trained in kindergarten did not
exist then. They came later, and now that he’s ready to learn those
things you learn in kindergarten everyone else has moved on. They
assume everyone knows them. Those who don’t are bad. Or stupid. Or
something.

Or just brilliant? I ask myself that
sometimes.

For the last months John was working
hard as part of a Model Arab League. Some of the history students
would go to another high school for two days and compete there. He
did a lot of research. He did a lot of writing. He marshaled his
arguments. He was looking forward to it. Probably more than he let
on.

Then two days before the event his
teacher calls. There had been an incident in class. There are always
incidents. His intensity is often frightening. But this was too much.
“I’m afraid I can’t take him to the Arab League,” she said
sorrowfully. “I had to write this up.”

That scared me. When a public school
teacher “writes up” an incident, it can mean detention, it can
mean suspension. In the most recent case, which regular readers here
may recall, it
nearly got John kicked out of school. It still might. The “cover
our ass” process leading to legal protection, through what’s called
the Program for Exceptional Children, should be complete next week.
But only if the powers that be accept that John does indeed have ADHD
and it did indeed cause the incident in question will they even let
him stay in this school and challenge his mind. They’ll send him back
to another, closer school which can’t teach him anything and dare me
to sue, having covered their asses so completely I wouldn’t have a
chance.

Bastards.

So when John got home, after I got the
phone call, I was mad out of fear for him. “How could you?” I
demanded, and he “How could you?” ‘d right back. He slammed the
door. I slammed the door. We couldn’t talk about it. I dropped him
off at his bus stop next morning and, rather than waiting with him
for the bus to arrive, told him to just get out. Slam went the car
door.

There’s a therapy called DBT
I’d like him to try. It was designed for people with serious
problems,
who used to be called bipolar. There’s a woman who recently moved to
Atlanta, who wants to make her name applying DBT to ADHD cases. She
wants to set up a group.

I want John in that group.

I called the day of the phone call. Got
an appointment with, it turned out, an associate, a man  my own age,
who had moved here a year ago to associate with a college and, I
assume, this professor’s work. He didn’t promise to get us DBT
therapy. He took John’s history, and told us there was some
administrative hang-up in getting the group started. You know how it
is.

Near the end he asked about the
incident with the teacher. John repeated what I learned he had told
his mother.

The teacher wanted them to bring an
extra notebook to class. Plus some readers, some additional books. To
every class. On top of his other stuff.

“’I can’t do it,’ I told her. ‘I
can’t carry the books I need now.’” He insists he can’t get to a
locker, then to class, in the time they give him between classes.
That would violate the rules. He believes in the rules. So everything
goes in his backpack or under his arms, and gets lugged around. From
home to school. From class to class. Back home. This was the straw
that broke the camel’s back. “’I tried to reason with her. I tried
to be logical.’”

“Why not be late?” the therapist
asked.

“You don’t understand. They have hall
monitors. They’ll give you detention in a minute if you’re late. I
can’t do it. I explained it.”

“And when that didn’t work?” the
therapist asked.

“I guess I got mad,” he said. “I
don’t remember.”

He lost his chance to shine because he
wouldn’t break the rules to use his locker.

So we wait. For therapy. For a
decision. For college, perhaps some peers. And John remains isolated,
terribly isolated. Brilliant, an A+ student in the toughest
curriculum the public school system here can find, but still,
terribly, terribly isolated. From me. From his classmates. Maybe from
himself.

Life sucks sometimes.