This morning I think I experienced what most people do……a normal morning with children.
It was quite fantastic and above all so manageable. I haven’t revealed this before but I am a divorced mom. I only have my kids (ADHD son and non-ADHD daughter) part time. Due to traveling schedules between the kid’s Dad and myself I had not had my kids for 4 nights, however, last night would begin, what I refer to as my “call of duty” of 7 days and nights straight with my kids. Their Dad had to go on a week long business trip. I was excited to have them to myself for an extended period but also was having trepidations about not having any support around for the inevitable “episodes” that always occur with my explosive son. I had planned everything out in the hopes of avoiding any conflicts. House was clean and tidy (my son’s favorite way to ‘bust’ me). I had to work yesterday which meant there would be a time period of 3 hours between them arriving home from school and my arrival home. When I came home I had bags of Chinese food in my hands so that we could go straight into dinner thus hopefully avoiding the additional unstructured down time for my son while I was cooking dinner. I really thought this would be a good idea, allowing me to focus more on him without having to deal with cooking dinner and clean up. There was only a one hour window to eat and chat before he had to go to an event at school. I had also called him a few times while I was still at work to make sure he was getting all of his homework done before dinner so we wouldn’t have that added pressure. Each time we spoke he assured me that he was working on his homework.
Well, I’m a fool. When I got home he was plopped on the couch glued to the TV and had a vast array of containers, wrappers and Gatorade bottles strewn about and his backpack was by the door and had not even been unzipped. In other words, he flat out lied to me about doing the homework. My choice was either to make my first encounter with him a confrontation about the lie or to just point out that I was disappointed that now he would be rushed to get everything done before he had to leave again. I opted to go the mention/disappointment route thinking that to start with a confrontation would be a sure recipe for a bad night. I tore the bags of food open and we began to eat. The insults to his sister began immediately (let’s just summarize by saying it was full of things that you just don’t say to people) it made any conversation impossible. Then he threw his chopsticks like daggers at his sister, was mean to the cat, took a jar of vitamins (don’t know why he had those in his possession and slammed them into the rice which caused his sister to freak out because the rice was now “contaminated.” I literally said, “start your homework” at least 30 times to him while his sister and I finished our food. The child COULD NOT get himself to even open his backpack. He would go into the room where his backpack was and then come back a few minutes later with no idea that he needed to start his work. There was absolutely no connection for him as to what he needed to do. Starting to teeter very close to the edge myself I was trying to not lose my temper, but finally I had to yell which made a little bit of difference, at least it got the backpack opened.
On a side note, I’m in the middle of reading Buzz, by Katherine Ellison. In some of her research she found that the ADHD brain craves stimulus when it can’t find it, and I’ve come to notice that the re-entry to my house from the kid’s Dad’s house is creating some anxiety that may be the reason for my son to create havoc on that first night that I have him back to my house. It got me to wondering if that was the reason behind my son’s behavior, did he need me to yell because it was stimulus for his brain? God, that is screwed up if that is true.
But, I digress, so I finally got him out the door only to have him return 2 hours later to stir up even more dramatic chaos….not to bore you with the time line I’ll just tell you it involved, spilling graham crackers crumbs used for baking ALL over my brand new shag rug (I’ll never get all those crumbs out), throwing a scarf that toppled over a plant, dancing in front of the TV so now we’re not quite sure which girl didn’t get the rose from The Bachelor (sadly, huge in my book), again terrorized the cat, and the grand finale right at bedtime, throwing a potted plant at his sister (thankfully fake so no dirt to deal with) and causing a large bump on her knee which, of course, then gave her the platform to create gigantic proportions of bedtime drama.
I was beside myself. Who acts like this at his age? I started in on him, “Why do you do this?” “What are you thinking?” “How can you possibly think this kind of behavior is acceptable?” “Five year old children do these kinds of things, not teenagers!” “Do you really not have control of your actions?” At this point he looked at me and just said, “No, I don’t have control of myself, I don’t know what is going on.” That made me stop, was that a break through or just a tactic to get mom out of his face? Then as I stood there glaring at him I noticed he had what looked like black lip liner on. It turns out that he had opened a huge box of truffles that someone had given us for Christmas that I had hidden away, but he had found while home alone yesterday. He had eaten half of the box during the afternoon and that night. As stupid as this sounds, it was the first time that I really made the connection between how the sugar was affecting him. We had a small conversation about it and he seems to actually be aware that the chocolate may have sent him over the edge.
This morning he woke up without any issues, asked me to make him breakfast. I also turned on the TV which I usually don’t allow during breakfast wanting to see if the stimulus would help out. He sat quietly eating his breakfast and at one time when I was trying to tell him he needed to finish getting ready for school he was totally zoned out on Sponge Bob, when I said his name and said, “hey you were totally zoned out” he just laughed instead of the usual insult towards me, got up and finished getting ready. When we were in the car, I told him how amazing his behavior was this morning and how it really made me happy. His response was, “well, you didn’t feed my all that sugar stuff for breakfast.”
Of course, it’s always my fault. But, in the bigger picture, if I’m going to read all this information about ADHD perhaps I should start to follow a little more of it, shouldn’t I have figured out the sugar element long ago?? Meanwhile, that stupid little squirrel that I’ve been battling with all winter is going to be one happy fellow today when he discovers a years supply of chocolate truffles in my trash can.
life and adhd 
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