Single and looking for sanity in those ADHD teen years

I usually only post thoughts about my son, but I guess it’s time to peel off some of the so-called protective layers and reveal a little about myself.  I am a single mom with two teenagers, a 13 yr old daughter and a 14 year old ADHD son.  I left my marriage not only because I had lost myself but also because I was beginning to realize that all the calls from school regarding my son were starting to add up to something real and despite the doctors and the diagnosis my husband would not admit that there was a problem with our son.  I saw the writing on the wall and realized that if I didn’t get ‘myself’ back there wasn’t going to be any one there to make sure my son got what he needed to make his way through his life.

Don’t get me wrong, my ex-husband wasn’t a heel or a dead-beat, he just didn’t get it.  So, we now share parenting of the kids with the new addition of his OCD wife……which is a total pain but does lead to some pretty good stories. On a good day it’s humorous to the point of making the families in the hit TV show Modern Family appear functional compared to what is going on in my house, and on bad days it horrendous and lonely and I find myself fluctuating throughout the day between chugging cups of coffee while simultaneously taking little bites of a xanax tablet which in and of itself is kind of insane since the two are diametrically opposed in what they have to offer my body.

Being a single mom with an ADHD kid is beyond challenging.  It was one thing to try to control the chaos when my son was little, but once he surpassed me in height and strength it’s a whole new ball game.  His frustration (and mine) lead to these crazy fights where “because I said so” doesn’t even begin to cut it. The language that comes out of his mouth towards me just blows me away, and the language that comes out of mine leaves me feeling awful and deflated long past the arguments end. What lacks the most in my house is a male voice that would rise above the argumentative words to say that age-old phrase, “DON’T YOU SPEAK TO YOUR MOTHER THAT WAY!”  It’s just me and I look like a fool when I try to take on that stance.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking, why don’t I go out and get a boyfriend??  That’s an easy one to answer……..who the heck would ever want to enter into this dysfunction willingly?   It’s hard enough to get past a first date on my own merit, I can’t imagine bringing someone into a house where a request to put the bottle cap back on the gallon size bottle of orange Gatorade that is sitting in the middle of my new white carpet results in a negotiation of global proportions.  Honestly, how would I ever explain to some poor unknowing soul, yep, this is what it’s like around here, grab a dictionary, dust off those debate club skills, brush up on how much your co-pay is for therapy and jump right into MY life.  Hmmmm, don’t see that happening for a while.

Parenting my son in his teen years is one of the hardest things – yes, I’m going to say it…IN THE WORLD – because being a teen is all about needing your own space and wanting your parents to take a back seat…….and we’re talking the WAY back.  Having ADHD and going through the teen years is a total paradox.  They don’t need us any less, in fact with the increased and more important school work (because it is now part of their permanent record) they need us even more, but everything I do is looked at as the ultimate intrusion.  Even asking the simplest of questions like, “would you like a Gatorade or water in your lunch today” gets a reply of “OMG, YOU’RE SO ANNOYING NO WONDER YOU’RE MIDDLE AGED AND CAN’T FIND ANYONE TO LIVE WITH YOU EXCEPT FOR THE TWO CATS!!”  Unfortunately both of his points are spot on,  but really a very over the top response to the question that was asked……not to even go into just plain rude on his part.  Then there’s the social aspect.  It seems like I spent so many years worrying about how he didn’t have any friends except for the ones he was speaking to remotely on his XBox 360, and now that some friends have arrived into the picture, let’s just say none of these guys would ever have been picked anywhere near the beginning of a pick up game.  I just try to smile as they load themselves into the back seat of my car without it ever dawning on them to say hello or utter a word about where they live so I can drop them home…..needless to say it makes for an interesting ride and a lot of U-turns.  The whole thing is really quite a mess and takes up the majority of the space in my mind trying to find the proper balance.

Like I stated before it’s a constant battle and the highs are really high and the low days feel like a very slippery slope straight into the very long and reaching fingers of depression, but I have discovered one truth along the way.  As much as I don’t know what I’m doing from day-to-day, and as much as I yearn for a normal relationship with my son I have learned that despite years of trying all kinds of “new” things to engage him and win him over I have found that the best gift I can give him is a healthy and sane mom.  On some of those bad days I realize that my thoughts keep revolving around my behavior and how or what I could have done better, just plain beating myself up. But you know what, just like all of us moms of ADHD kids out there I did the best I could with the information I had at that particular time.  So my goal now is to just disengage a little bit more, remind him as often as he’ll allow me that I love him and will always be here for him, and then give myself a little bit of credit and get on with the business of trying to find my inner happiness because if I’m happy maybe some of it will rub off on him and happiness is my ultimate wish for this kid.

The lucky recipient of a box of chocolate truffles

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.

Is this the way the world feels to an ADHD kid?

Mother’s Day – No Different Than Any Other ADHD Day

reprinted from May, 2010

Well, what was I thinking! Did I really think that my son would rein in his behavior for one afternoon with me because it was Mother’s Day?

Spoiler alert here……..this story ends in tears. Yep, tears on Mother’s Day, and not the “tears of joy” kind.  Since it was my ex-husband’s weekend with the kids, I was only going to have them for two hours to grab a Mother’s Day bite to eat with them. So, let’s see, only 2 hours and add on the fact that it’s Mother’s Day……didn’t see a huge opportunity for disaster, I was actually feeling quite optimistic about the approaching afternoon.

Let me just put the following 2 hours in bullet points for you to save us all some time……

• son repeatedly flying his arm across the table with his french fry (that he had just licked) to dip it in his sister’s ketchup instead of his own.
• a huge glass of milk spilling everywhere due to one of the french fry ‘fly overs’.
• running a butter knife over the concave surface of a Snapple lid so that it made the most annoying sound EVER, and the very real moment when the man two booths over almost lost it on my son.
• son CONSTANTLY degrading his sister even a “I wish you would die” uttered much to the next table’s horror.
• went to book store after disaster meal only to have son go to kids section where they sell hand puppets which he proceeded to put the majority on at the same time just to terrorize his sister with until we were pretty much asked to leave.
• constant ‘drumming’ on EVERY surface possible.
• the on-going non-awareness of his own personal space which meant never was he not leaning on me or pushing up against me, etc.

But all this aside, what blew my socks off was that after a good hour and a half of me just trying to pretend none of this was happening and doing my best to keep everything pleasant, the drumming and hand puppets finally got to me and I started in on the list of what he had “done wrong” and “why couldn’t he behave” for just the few hours he was with me that day?

Then came my most favorite line of his “why are YOU always getting me in trouble?”  Is it just me or is that some screwed up logic right there?  In his mind it wasn’t HIS actions that led to him getting in trouble, it was ME.  Instead of being aware of HIS actions, he could only fall back on something that his sister had done back on March 3rd of 2004, or something that I might of, or could have done that would have made him into what he is today.  WHAT?????????  What kind of logic is this, what kind of brain thinks this was?  (I know the answer to that question is the ADHD brain, but really, after all of this I, myself was now not thinking too logically either.)

Oh my God, I had only been with him for a short while and already everything was a mess because of this horrible misbehavior, yet, he honestly did not see that he had done anything wrong. Could this possibly be true?  Was this child a budding sociopath or just a genius at deflecting blame.  Of course, I knew the real answer, I had just been trying to forget………..oh yeah, my kid has ADHD. Later that night, after my tears had dried, I ran across this article in one of the ADHD publications that talked about how ADHD people actually have no awareness of their behavior.

“Individuals with AD/HD are unaware of the behaviors that provoke negative reactions in others.

They are aware, however, that others hover around them nagging.  The connection between their

behavior and this nagging response remains opaque.  The white noise of nagging becomes an

ever-more-distant hum, which the patients tune out; meanwhile, their families turn up the volume,

becoming even more angry and controlling.”

So if I buy into what they’re saying, then he’s not just trying to get to me, he actually doesn’t realize how he’s acting.  Well, I don’t know about you, but that is a very hard concept as a parent to process.  So, just what the hell are we supposed to do as parents?  Allow, excuse, or overlook the bad behavior?  Honestly, once again I am baffled as to where the parenting line is supposed to fall for ADHD kids.  When do you discipline and when do you default to the diagnosis?

The kicker in all of this for me is that I will spend the next 12 hours beating MYself up for my behavior towards him. Inevitably when all calms down it’s MY behavior that I question……could I have done something better, been more understanding, etc.  I end with this question to all of you…………what do you do??  How much of a pass do you give your kids bad behavior because of the ADHD, do you feel like giving up and just using the syndrome as an excuse for not disciplining?  I don’t know about you but this is question is what is making me beyond exhausted and feeling really freaking old.

Please let me know your thoughts………

+credit to CHADD magazine for quote+

Control Issues

If I can’t control this child at least I can master this bush.

That will make me feel better………..right?  right?  hello?

The Therapy Session

I decided to do a joint appointment with my son at the therapist’s office tonight.  I

had given up on him seeing the therapist alone because he refused to talk to her.

Instead, he had decided what he would take from these meetings was a running

tally of how much we were spending for each appointment where he did nothing

but just sit there and not talk. Then, later whenever he would ask for me to buy him

something and I would say I couldn’t afford it, he would say, “my point EXACTLY,

if you hadn’t paid for those 9 appointments @ $175 each then we would not be

having this problem, and I would have the X-box game I want.”  At these moments

I don’t know whether to applaud his multiplication skills, reprimand his smart

mouth, go for the never successful quoting of the life lesson that there is more to this

world than just “his needs”, or to simply grimace and grit my teeth which have

already become nubs from always defaulting to this decision.

Anyhow, since my current dealings with him were reaching new volume levels and

starting to incorporate swear words (on my part), I decided that we could both use

a little therapy. In my optimism (misguided thinking) I thought that if I laid down

the  gauntlet by admitting in front of him that my ‘swearing & yelling’ was not right,

perhaps my son would be willing to make a team effort along with me to improve

our home life.

As we walked into the therapist’s office I took a seat on the couch leaving the cozier

looking chair for him.  Just as I was getting situated he lopes over and proceeds to sit

on top of me and refused to move.  We’re not talking about some cute cuddly way, it

was alarming actually.  I wasn’t expecting it so I hadn’t moved my hands quickly

enough and he ended up sitting on my hands and due to him being bigger than me I

couldn’t get any leverage with any other parts of my body other than to just sort of lift

my “lap” up and down trying to knock him off.  He had pressed his back onto me so

my face was squished making it impossible to speak much less even see the therapist.

From her perspective it must have looked like some strange animal mating scenario.

Horribly embarrassing.  I’m surprised she didn’t yell out that she didn’t do this kind

of therapy.

After I was finally able to shake him off me, he then proceeded to lay on the couch,

take his shoes and socks off and go to work on some long standing toe jam.  What

the heck!!  (See, I said heck where another word here would have been much more

soothing to me, but I’m trying) I had never seen him act this way in public.  The

entire appointment he used this strange baby talk.  As all of this was going on I was

wondering if I should correct him, ask him to sit up,  put his shoes back on thus

risking coming across as the kind of mom that is controlling, therefore, undoubtedly

becoming the “reason” for his behavior, or did I just sit there maintaining eye

contact with the therapist thus being deemed either the cool mom who doesn’t get

hung up on the small things or would I become the other end of the diagnosis,

“no-wonder-your-child-is-impossible-you-do-nothing-to-discipline-him” kind of

mom.  You know what I’m talking about, right?

So, instead of dragging you through any more details of this appalling appointment,

let me just share with you what I learned. DIS-ENGAGE, yes, that was the big lesson.

Just step back from the behavior.  Not saying to ignore it because then you are still

engaged due to your effort to ignore.  Disengage meaning it has nothing to do with

you, let yourself mentally release yourself from having any responsibility or duty to do

anything about your kid’s behavior.  And you know what?  The more I try it I realize it

works!  The therapist was right.  By disengaging I can get MYSELF back.  I separate

and put distance for myself from the irrationality of his behavior.  Once I allowed

myself to do this it gave me an amazing sense of freedom.  It made me feel strong and

capable because it was MY decision to put the distance there.  Another plus of this

new paradigm was by gaining this distance I then saw how that put the onus on him

to become more responsible for his actions.  It was nearing the end of the session and

the therapist gave the signal by standing and saying, “okay, then”.  I said, “OK, can

you put your shoes and socks back on now” to my son.  Not surprisingly, he opted

instead to start to play with the flexible arms of her floor lamp, instead of swooping

down and repeating his name numerous times and then lower my voice to an animal

like growl to put his shoes on, I simply said “I’m going to the car” and I turned and

walked out.  I heard him say, “mama” in a really small voice as I exited the room.  In

that moment I realized that by “dis-engaging” I gave him the gift of being embarrassed

by his own actions, because there was no audience except for the person whose

property he was hurting, and thank God at least most of these ADHD kids are smart

enough to know they don’t want to look stupid, and standing there twisting someone’s

floor lamp into a topiary he was looking pretty stupid.  So, he put his shoes on

lickety-split and off we went.  Unfortunately we’re  not riding into the sunset where we

live happily ever after, we are  inevitably only off to our next battle which will most

likely be happening within the next hour.  But for this moment, in this particular day,

chalk one up for mom.