ADHD Dad Blog

Better Late Than Never

Archives: June 2009

ADHD Supergirl

Facing a tidal wave of impossibility, my daughter, unaware she was doing it, pulled out the ADHD secret weapon – hyperfocus.

In my last blog post my daughter, Coco, found herself in the middle of an ADHD Perfect Storm of missed assignments, overdue work, broken promises, and looming deadlines on the night before the last day of her 7th Grade school year.

She had spaced a Social Studies report and PowerPoint presentation on the history of Norfolk Island. And she had told her teacher (who’s opinion of her really mattered to her) she knew how to make a PowerPoint presentation, when in fact she didn’t have the first clue. And it was 6pm at night, and the whole mess was due first thing the next morning.

Coco is understandably in despair, lashing out in panic when her mom tries to help, and trapped back in the barriers of constant expectations of failure that many ADHD and other LD’s know too well. And, doubly frustrating to me, I’m hearing this in dramatic installments from both her and my wife, Margaret, over the phone from three thousand miles away in Los Angeles. I try to do what I can to help keep this from being a defeat that defines the end of this school year for her, but being a Dad over the phone is not the same thing as being a Dad that’s there by a long shot. I have to hang up and wait to hear how it will turn out.

Three hours later I get a call from my wife and daughter. Facing a tidal wave of impossibility, Coco, unaware she was doing it, pulled out the ADHD secret weapon – hyperfocus.

After finally allowing her mom to show her how to make a basic PowerPoint page Coco demanded to be left alone to figure out the rest, do her research, write her report, and make her presentation. Over the next couple of hours she typed and moused away, never leaving the computer in the living room, never taking her eyes off the screen, mumbling and musing to herself over interesting things she’d found or new ideas she’d come up with as she worked. Never once did she get distracted or bored or even notice anything in the world except her Social Studies project.

And with self-doubt and second-guessing banished due to some kind of emergency decree in her head, she blazed through it.

Margaret said it was an amazing thing to witness. Coco didn’t see what was so amazing, but she was proud and happy that her report was done and the PowerPoint was safely tucked onto a flash drive for school in the morning. The self-hatred and panic banished, she and her mom were now going to have some ice cream and then get some sleep. We’ll keep working on the organizational and other skills to deal with the procrastination problems, but this time Coco’s ADHD hyper-focus saved the day, and by the way, she got an “A.”

With all the sometimes overwhelming challenges that ADHD presents to children and adults, it seems only fair that it also can give you an awesome positive ability to pull out when we need to bust through the barriers and realize we’re not stupid, lazy, or crazy after all. We might even have super-powers.

My Daughter and The ADHD Perfect Storm

Kids with ADHD sometimes get so worn down with the immense effort it takes to do what they expect of themselves, that when an ADHD perfect storm of missed assignments, overdue work, broken promises, and looming deadlines hits them they call themselves stupid and lazy and worse before anyone else can.

"And you can't win against them no matter how hard you try, because they've got all the breaks and even whipping them isn't going to change that fact."
- S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

Picking up from my last post about reading, writing, and communicating creatively with ADHD where I meant to talk about my 7th-grade daughter’s Social Studies melt down and instead went off on a tangent about my own 7th-grade Social Studies difficulties. Being ADHD and keenly self-absorbed, I tend to wander off on paths that usually wind up circling my navel.

So, my apologies, and on to my daughter’s night of homework hell – Now, besides ADHD, my daughter, Coco, also has to deal with other LD’s (learning disabilities) like pretty severe dyslexia and some comorbid memory issues that are similar to mine. Consequently, for years it seemed as though she’d never be able to read or write. In second grade she still couldn’t recognize letters. It was a daily frustrating and heart breaking struggle for her as she worked at it at home with us, in school with her teachers, and after school with tutors. There were days where she’d seem to get it – recognize letters and words and how sentences worked, and then the next day it’d be gone again.

"I can’t do this! I can’t! I’m too stupid,” she’d cry, imprisoned by the constant defeat. Each time we’d continue the patient encouragement, always reassuring her that she wasn’t stupid at all. We told her that soon she’d be able to understand, though we too were beginning to lose faith that that day would ever come.

Then, when she was eleven years-old, Coco somehow put it all together, and seemingly overnight, made a startling breakthrough in reading and writing. Of course it wasn’t overnight. Breaking through this barrier was the cumulative result of the years of her hard work combined with the mystery of the growing adolescent brain. Now, at thirteen, she writes for school assignments, and also writes stories about her life. She’s also able to read at school above her grade level and also reads like crazy for enjoyment - going through books from the whole “Twilight” vampire series to the juvenile delinquent classic, “The Outsiders” to the death and disaster-filled “The History of Shipwrecks.” She likes her reading enjoyment with a little edge. But the point is that Coco had worked hard and had busted through a huge barrier not only in reading and writing, but also a barrier of defeat that had held her confidence and hope hostage to an unrelenting internal judge constantly denigrating her self-image. She broke that pattern when she accomplished what had for so long seemed impossible, and she reawakened her natural curiosity and openness as well.

Then came the end of this spring’s semester. Despite our help and her dedication to checking her planner during the semester, Coco had lost or not completed overdue homework in Math, English, and Science. But she buckled down in the last couple of weeks, went to study hall and managed to get it all turned in.

Then at the end of the last week of school, the night before the last Social Studies class it hits her that she’s completely spaced her final project and class presentation on the history of Norfolk Island that’s due tomorrow and she hasn’t even started it. And she’s supposed to do as a Power Point presentation in front of the whole class and then it also hits her that, despite what she’s told her teacher, she doesn’t have the first idea how to make a Power Point presentation.

Now, unlike me and my 7th Grade Social Studies teacher, Coco loves her Social Studies teacher, but paradoxically that only makes things worse.

“She’ll hate me!” she yells, tears welling, “I can’t do this! I can’t! I’m too stupid! Everybody knows I’m stupid. She’ll hate me and give me an F!”

When my wife, Margaret, tries to help her, Coco lashes out, throwing her planner down, “Leave me alone, you don’t know anything. I can’t do this – It’s impossible!”

Everybody, and certainly every junior high school kid, has faced a similar landscape of possible defeat. But sometimes my daughter and the other kids with ADHD and comorbid LD’s face that landscape knowing that no matter what they accomplish there are so many land mines of demoralizing surprises ahead of them that defeat and failure seem preordained. They get worn down with the immense effort it takes to do what they expect of themselves, that when an ADHD perfect storm of missed assignments, overdue work, broken promises, and looming deadlines hits them they call themselves stupid and lazy and worse before anyone else can. And then they fall back inside the barriers they’ve worked so hard to break down, and are once again trapped – but protected inside their low expectations.

These are the times that try kids’ souls.

In the next blog – Coco attempts the impossible.

Reading, Writing, and ADHD

ADHD affects each of us differently in often small but profound ways. But the barriers we all face to getting our stories out sometimes seem insurmountable, especially when we’re young.

The posts in response to my earlier blog about reading and ADHD got me obsessing in my typically circular rant fashion about not only the way those of us with ADHD read but also about the different ways we approach writing as well as the other ways we have to creatively reach out and communicate with other people.

The stories in the responses to my blog varied from a doctor refusing to believe a child had ADHD because she was an avid reader, to another ADHDer whose difficulty with reading lead to seeking help, to another who finds peace in another world when she reads (as I do,) but has trouble retaining what she read.

Once more it seems to me that ADHD affects each of us so differently in often small but profound ways. But the barriers we face to getting those stories out sometimes seem insurmountable, especially when we’re young. And if we don’t break through then the barriers get stronger and stronger until they seem permanent.

Of course by the time you reach my age you realize that nothing is permanent. Not even permanents are permanent. Okay, cheap joke, but come on, the whole idea of using a word synonymous with eternal and everlasting for a hair treatment which is by it’s nature temporary is completely nuts, and worse, it seemed to me when I was twelve, it’s a big fat lie that all the grown-ups went along with just to make words mean nothing.

I spent much of my early teens being indignant over how little the reading and writing rules I’d been trying to nail down in my brain since first grade mattered in the adult world. Cripes, my seventh grade Social Studies teacher who every day took pains to let me know what an idiot he thought I was, ended every other sentence in a preposition, and insisted emigrants meant the same thing as immigrants (he was against them.)

Funny how, like the “peace in another world” poster I mentioned above, I sometimes have trouble retaining the stories I read, but I remember in detail some ding-bat teacher I had in junior high. But I don’t think it’s because the teacher was a real-life event. In truth, I’m sure I remember as many fictional events I’ve read as actual events I’ve lived. And occasionally get them confused. The reason the junior high incident sticks in such detail I think is because it represents one of those barriers that can keep us from reaching out and communicating.

Anyway, my point, I think is about my thirteen year-old ADHD daughter and her freaking out the other week about a Social Studies presentation she had put off preparing until the last minute. But, I’ve gotten a little off subject so I’ll have to pick the thread in my next post.

My ADHD Drinking Delusions

For me, drinking turned down the chattering voices and nerves of my ADHD and hypomania. It helped calm my impulsiveness, and the chattering switched off completely by drink two. The problem was that I always wanted more and more.

Last week, I went on a typically circular tear about my 21-year-old ADHD son’s experiments with drinking and my fear that he’d fall into a self-medication substance-abuse trap. After rereading the blog entry I asked myself what exactly – specific incidents - in my past with alcohol made me so sensitive to what looked to everyone else like normal 21-year-old behavior.

Now, I’m 60 years old and I’ve only been sober 8 years, and diagnosed with and treated for ADHD 11 years. As far as the ADHD goes, my psychiatrist says I had developed complex coping strategies and skills that kept me functioning at some level until my engine block seized up and burst into flame when I was 49. One big problem was that alcohol was an integral part of those complex coping strategies. So I stubbornly held onto drinking hard for 3 years as I was trying to cope with the new perspective on the how and why of my sputtering brain and the new anti-depressants and stimulants that were prescribed to help.

It wasn’t working out. I was headed for another even worse burn out because, even though I accepted the new ADHD diagnosis, I couldn’t accept the plain old dark fact that I was an alcoholic. It’s the story we’ve heard a billion tomes but never think is our story – I never had one drink – or if I did it was a quadruple. I drank because I was happy or because I was sad or because I was tense or because I was loose or because I won, or because I lost. But the biggest new stories I told myself was that I needed to drink to calm my endlessly chattering ADHD brain. I told myself I needed to hold onto alcohol to cope with my mental disorder.

Totally desperate dumb delusional baloney - but I kept my fingers wrapped around the kernel of truth inside the justification until the morning I realized that if I kept my hold on alcohol I would lose my hold on my family for good. And I finally said okay, I’m a drunk. No more alcohol for me, fine, good, yippee. Well not yippee, exactly, or at all, really – just rigorous honesty and very hard work. Not two of my favorite things.

So then I latched onto ADHD as the reason I was an alcoholic. Nope. And here’s where things get dicey. The percentages are higher for substance abuse with those of us with ADHD, it’s true. And I’ve talked to therapists who think impulse control is part of the reason, or the battle with depression or other comorbid conditions as contributing factors.

For me, drinking did turn down the chattering voices and nerves of my ADHD and hypomania (that kernel of truth I mentioned above.) I really, really loved that profound feeling of peace that surrounded me when I had that first drink at the end of the day. It helped calm my impulsiveness, so that wasn’t the problem. And the chattering switched off completely by drink two, so that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I always wanted another drink. I always wanted more and more. Because I’m an alcoholic – and that is separate from being ADHD. I know that one aggravates the other and add to the difficulty with handling things, just like hypomania and depression get in there and muck up the works. But for me these days, it’s vital to look at what I’m facing without excuses. ADHD might add to the difficulty of staying sober – but a million things make staying sober difficult, including wind, rain, and bad TV. And if you’re not an alcoholic and a drink helps your chattering – god bless you and I’m so jealous I can’t even describe it.

I hope this isn’t another circular rant, but here’s the thing – I worry about my son because I know how tough it is for him to deal with his ADHD sometimes and if he turns out to be an alcoholic I know how tough staying sober is. I guess I just want him to see all of his challenges in life, whatever they are - internal and external, as separate entities instead of huge combined forces too immense to deal with.

So divide and conquer, my son, and face life without excuses. And I’ll keep trying to do the same.