ADHD Dad Blog

Better Late Than Never

Archives: May 2009

Drinking Down the ADHD

My ADHD son just turned 21 and promptly spent all of his birthday money on alcohol. Now I can't help but worry that my own struggle with attention deficit-fueled alcoholism might trickle down to him.

Holy cow in a cab stand, this has been a lousy / stressful / confusing / incomprehensibly insane-making week. Yeah, I know everybody has them, and attention deficit disorder is no excuse for feeling sorry for oneself just because life can be hard, and for god’s sake there are people in the third world with real problems like starvation and murderous militias outside their doors, but still – after a ridiculously small house at the Sunday performance of my ADHD show, and then getting lost in L.A. again on the way to a meeting over drinks – which for me, an alcoholic, means diet coke or at the most a fake beer, and then losing my flash drive that has every single thing I need to communicate and survive including drafts of the play, draft posts of this blog, contacts, numbers, that I have nowhere else because I’m too stupid to back up and I can’t afford a laptop yet because we’re pouring every dime into this show that’s getting very good reviews but nobody is coming to although the people who do come tell me how great it is – but then why don’t they call up every person they know in the universes to stop their lives and come to the stupid thing, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because even though there actually might be some interest from a New York producer, I just see that as impossible because I’m so frantically worried about my aging parents, my wife’s struggles with her company, my ADHD daughter’s struggles with a bully in school, that I feel I can’t help anyone, because I’m stuck in a city I don’t live in anymore doing this show for reasons I can’t remember and yesterday I lie down on a couch and say, "I need a drink."

That, of course, is the last thing I need. And really, even though the words popped out of my mouth in the exhausted whimper that used to presage a three-day bender, there’s not a chance that I’ll take a drink now. I spent years self-medicating with alcohol and though it turned down the noise in my head, it just about destroyed me and my life in the process. I can never forget the damage cocktails and I did together, so I’m not interested in adding to that stinking wreckage.

But my ADHD son just turned 21, and he’s trying out drinking - Pina Coladas, Schnapps, other sweet vodka and rum drinks. He and his friends partied for the whole week of his birthday, and he spent all the birthday money he got from relatives on booze. We did everything we could to make sure he was safe and that nobody was drinking and driving. My wife, despite the work she’s swamped with, even put the whole gang up at our house one of the nights. Par-tee! Woo-hoo! Though I want to be a supportive husband, I am glad I wasn’t back home for that.

The weird thing is this – I’ve talked to my son and daughter about alcohol and drugs openly. We’ve talked about ADHD and substance abuse. Plus, Harry especially remembers when I got sober, and he’s proud that I am. He brings it up to friends and parents of his friends. But here he is walking to 7-11 to spend the last of his birthday cash on peppermint schnapps, then the other night coming home and throwing up.

Part of me wants to see this as how he’ll learn. Part of me wants to laugh and shake my head at his youthful excess. But the largest part of me looks at my son and the challenges he’s facing in life and I’m terrified for him. To his credit, he says that now that he’s tried it, he’s done with getting drunk. I hope that’s true. But I remember how many thousands of times I said that before I stopped blowing apart my life and finally got sober. So I’m still terrified – and no matter how confused and stressed I get in my life, if he thinks I’m going to back-off and keep my nose out of his life, he’s crazy. Maybe I won’t be able to keep my son and daughter from repeating my mistakes, but I’ll keep talking and listening to them and maybe they’ll at least have an idea what’s coming.

The ADHD Book Worm

Reading shuts off the noise for me, and opens a calm world inside my attention-deficit head. My dyslexic daughter is the same way. But my ADHD son? Not so much.

"If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid immense confusion?"
- Seng–T’sen (from Sanctuary by Ken Bruen)

"You really need to live your life, and not just zoom in and out of it. Otherwise you never know what’s going on."
- Nick Hornby (from Slam)

The quotes above are from a couple of books I read recently. I included them here because they resonated with the way I experience my life and ADHD. Especially how difficult I find it to “settle” my mind and be in one moment without obsessing into minutiae or checking out and spinning off into time and space.

But what sparked my thinking about books and reading was a conversation I had with a psychiatrist who came to see my ADHD play and stayed to talk to me afterward. She treats ADHD adults and, as we talked, she mentioned that most of her ADHD patients don’t do well with reading. And that got me thinking about how differently ADHD affects each of us that have it.

See, I read a lot. Okay, obsessively. I devour books. Always have, from a way early age. Except when I was drinking - then I read words that were absolutely necessary, like “Kettle One,” “olives,” and “Emergency Room.” Getting drunk and staying drunk for extended periods takes time and dedication and leaves little room for other leisure pursuits.

Back to the point - Sober now for over eight years, I go through three to five novels a week. Reading shuts off the noise for me, and opens a calm world inside my head. Story provides structure, meaning, and well-being. I get panicky if I don’t have a book I’m reading and at least one in the wings.

My 13-year-old ADHD daughter’s dyslexia kept her from reading until she was ten years old – but thankfully after tons of work by my wife and the school, something switched on in her brain and now she reads past her grade level and recently tore through all the Twilight books in a couple of weeks.

But I can’t get my 21 year-old ADHD son to crack a book to save my life. He finds reading to be an irritating, punishing chore. He’d much rather chill by watching TV crime dramas. When I talk of what he’s missing by not reading and the fascinating world he could open in his head by reading a Walter Mosley novel, he rolls his eyes at me and says “Yeah, Dad, maybe another time.” I want him to get what I get out of books. Watching TV can’t possibly be as beneficial as reading. He’s rotting his brain, and on and on I obsess. My wife says to cool it and let it be.

One night a month or two ago, my wife was on the computer in the living room, my daughter and I were on the couch with our feet up and our noses happily in books, and in the background I could hear my son watching a “Bones” episode in his room. The well-being seemed to radiate equally from everyone. So yes, we’re all different, whether we have ADHD or not. But what’s interesting to me is that I’m finally beginning to accept that difference in others. I’m starting to see that we’re all way too complicated and individual to be grouped and labeled in any way that completely says who we are and what we need. Which means…? I don’t know what, exactly. Maybe it’ll come to me when I’m reading a book.

The ADHD Fail-Safe Coat

Screwing up and disappointing others is so much a part of the everyday ADHD life experience that I think, by the time we’re adults, many of us have fashioned a cushioned protective coat around us as one of our principal coping or survival skills.

Rehearsals for my solo ADHD play kept going through April and although I’d taken my daughter’s thoughts to heart, it was still difficult for me believe that anything good was going to come out of all the work Margaret (producer & wife), Mark (director & friend), I (writer, actor, and chump change loser mental case) had put into the project. Because, at the core, whatever was going to happen really depended on me.

Screwing up and disappointing others is so much a part of the everyday ADHD life experience that I think, by the time we’re adults, many of us have fashioned a cushioned protective coat around us as one of our principal coping or survival skills. Stitched together out of all the myriad failures that we catalogued and kept, its insidious message is simple and debilitating: Of course we’ll fail. Look at the evidence. What else did we expect?

This protective fail-safe coat’s negative message is warm and comforting because we can step back from ourselves, look at the evidence and stand on the sideline with all the other smart people we imagine judging us and shake our heads and say “See? I told him he should have stayed home and kept his mouth shut.”

Imagining success when you know you don’t have a prayer is impossible.

I was thinking about quitting, it was easy to imagine failure – been there, done that – when one day in the middle of a mid-rehearsal self-questioning stammering fit it hit me: I don’t know I don’t have a prayer. I don’t know anything. One of the many things ADHD has taught me is that the only thing certain is uncertainty. That’s when I started pulling off the fail-safe coat. It hit me that without ADHD I wouldn’t be doing this play at all. And when I realized that no matter how my ADHD, hypomania, alcoholism, word-retrieval and short-term memory issues, and a stammer that can come on like a freight train when I get at all tense might have limited me in the world, they’ve expanded my world a million times more. These disabilities, disorders, or whatever you want to call them, are not things I’d wish on someone else, but they’re mine, and fine by me.

And as a dad, if there’s anything I can pass on to my two ADHD kids from my experience it’s this: As long as you accept them and use them as an integral part of yourself, ADHD and any of its comorbid pals won’t stop you from doing anything in life you want to do, they’ll just make it a lot more interesting.

My Daughter's ADHD Insight

Tonight, my daughter reminded me of what I've taught her - not to hide behind the ADHD; not to use it as an excuse when you're tired or scared.

After beating back the panic attack and checking the map, I make it back to my friend’s home and have carne asada and homemade salsa with her and her family. We talk and play with the dog, and I find myself getting used to what I will have to do to get the job done here in L.A. before I get to go home.

My work goes a little better in rehearsals – still not great, but I’m resigned to the feeling that there’s nothing I can do to keep my ADHD, hypomania and the other comorbid disorders from sabotaging and destroying this project in the end.

Whoa – talk about negative. But here’s what’s weird – well everything seems weird right now – but here’s what’s most weird: I’m going around cheerfully doing what I’m supposed to do in rehearsals and in the business dealings with the theater, etc. Outwardly, I seem energetic and cheerful and positive. But I know this is all just me going through the motions because it’s what’s expected, and that in the end I’ll at best pull off a mediocre show, which is also what’s expected because after all, I’m a stammering brain-scrambled nut-ball.

This kind of self-reduced expectation vortex can suck you down into a kind of safety zone where you feel better because you’re all comfy in a lowest common denominator baseline existence. You don’t ask much of yourself because you and everybody else knows you’re not capable. No disappointments because you don’t really try. And you’re smiling and pleasant the whole time.

So, this is how I’m operating when I get a call from my daughter back home, who’s thirteen and who also is ADHD. She says she just wants to chat.

She tells me that she’s trying harder in PE, especially in volleyball. She forgot about a report for English, and so will have do it this weekend and turn it in late which stinks because that means no sleep-over.

In math, a boy next to her keeps grabbing at her pencil when she’s working because he wants her to “totally lose it,” which she is famous for doing when pushed enough. But she said today she switched seats with a friend. She’s still behind in math, but she’s thinking the new seat will help, and she’s still got that A in art.

Then she says, “How are you doing, Dad?”

“I’m okay,” I say, “I’m just rehearsing. You know, doing the same things over and over.”

“Sounds boring, when you put it like that, Dad.”

She’s right, of course. No wonder I was so unhappy. The one thing the ADHD brain cannot tolerate at all is boredom. “But your play isn’t boring.”

I thank my daughter for the compliment, but she’s not praising me, she’s reminding me that I’ve always told her not to hide behind the ADHD. Don’t use it as an excuse when you’re tired or scared, I told her. She reminds me what I said to her - don’t join up with the crowd that wants to label and defeat you, they don’t need any help.

Tonight I tell her good night and thanks – I’ll quit making excuses and try harder tomorrow. And we’ll chat again tomorrow night, our voices going back and forth on the two-way parenting street.

My Own Worst Enemy

Going 60 on the freeway is not a good place for a full-blown panic attack, so I pull off at an exit, pull into a gas station, and begin yelling at myself - out loud.

After the first rehearsal of my solo ADHD show, I’m driving back to the friend’s house where I’m staying while I’m in L.A. During rehearsal, my memory kept shutting down, and I couldn’t remember my words or what I was supposed to be doing on stage physically. And now, in the car on the freeway, I’m beating down any self-worth to make room for a full fledged panic attack.

"You don’t try hard enough – you’re lazy – you’re incompetent, immature, and untalented…" On and boring on – I’ve heard this all before but it’s still surprisingly effective and demoralizing.

Sari Solden, in a terrific self-help book that actually helps, Journeys Through ADDulthood, calls this kind of tape playing in your head, “Negative Expectations.” And although I know intellectually that these kinds of messages are echoes from the past and have no real weight, it’s too late. They’ve flattened my self-worth nicely leaving an open field for panic’s fires to roar in. Panic attack equals racing heartbeat and all that other junk on top of the fire burning through your self-respect screaming “You’re worthless!”

Going sixty on the freeway is not a good place for this to be happening. So I cross lanes ignoring horns and interesting gestures from other cars and pull off at an exit and stop in the parking lot of a gas station / mini-mart. I’m breathing slowly with my eyes closed – too little too late, but it helps anyway and I know I have to do what I’d always rather avoid, and face this debilitating self-destruction head-on.

This, of course, involves talking out loud to yourself in a parked car, which due to cell phones doesn’t look as weird as it could these days. But, then again, at this point, I’m yelling at myself. I am, if nothing else, dramatic. My luck holds, though, and aside from a couple of odd looks, no one interrupts me hollering “Stop it!” and “Listen to yourself!” at the top of my lungs. A little later, a little calmer, I go into the mini-mart and get a can of double-shot mocha as a reward for 1) putting down the panic attack, 2)regaining enough self-regard to not give up, and 3) not crying.

I am lost, however. So I get a freeway map with my double-shot, sit back in the car and try to figure out how to get home.

Knocking Back My ADHD Panic Attack

This ADHD hypo-manic alcoholic is going to mess-up big time. You just watch.

I’m in L.A. and somehow I made it through the opening weekend of my solo ADHD play, so I’m back – Better Late Than Never, as they say.

But, although I’m not a big fan of linear thinking or timelines, I’m going to pick up near where I left off in ADHD and My big Trip Part 4, because, well, I’m trying to make sense of some things, and maybe you’ll relate. We’ll see, I guess...

I’m freaked-out about leaving my family back in Honolulu, and freaked out about doing this play all alone in L.A. – what a stupid stupid stupid embarrassing idea. I’ll never pull it off. This ADHD hypo-manic alcoholic is going to mess-up big time. You just watch.

I land at LAX and head into the unnerving, unbelievable chaos super-focused on the baggage claim signs and arrows, and chanting baggage claim five, baggage claim five, baggage claim five, over and over to myself. This is the point in travel where I tend to get distracted, forget something and then panic and screw things up even worse. Or the fear of getting distracted and screwing up gets so intense that I trigger a panic attack without any outside stimulus at all. So, I’m going down escalators, into blank over-lit tunnels, standing on people-mover strips, pushed through revolving no-backup or alarms-will-sound-you-idiot doors, dumped out looking for number five, five, don’t see five – did I have it right? Breathe. Breathe. Then I hear my name called, and once again, realize how lucky I am in my life. A family friend of many years is there to pick me up and take me to her home to stay with her and her family for two months in a modest suburb, far enough from Hollywood and what I’m doing there to be sane.

The lurking panic suddenly doesn’t even have a crack to find a toe-hold as I sit in the living room and catch up with her and her husband, mom and kids, with pictures of her kids and my kids together back when they really were kids, looking down from the walls. Maybe everything has a chance to work out okay.

The next day I wake up missing my wife and family and the nagging feeling that I shouldn’t be here - but the generosity of our old friends around me pushes it back again, and I drive into Burbank to start rehearsing with my director. More generosity comes my way - we’re rehearsing in his living room so I don’t have to rent a space. We start work and it is rocky. The panic is coming back, rising slowly like that goop in lava lamps. All the ingrained deep fears about exposing my mental, um, weirdness… okay, okay - my ADHD and other pronounced co-morbid disorders - those fears are boiling over and making it hard to concentrate or to even focus at all.

So over and over we try one part or another and I can’t remember the words. I can’t remember any of my lines – which is problematic, considering that the play is two hours of just me talking and acting out all the parts. My director looks sympathetic as we once more try again and I mess up again. Now he’s starting to look worried. And the lava lamp in my head is bright red, bubbling, and about ready to break the glass.

NEXT - Part 2, I pull off the freeway and take panic to the mat.