Adventures in ADHD

Happy Hump  Day Lovies. I squeezed another day off from my week for some much needed alone time.  Today is the last day of 3rd grade and Kindergarten for MiniMe and The Destroyer. The last 8 weeks or so of the school we spent testing and diagnosing MiniMe with ADHD.  We are on our 2nd dose of the first med and she seems to be doing better. the Kumon is also probably helping but only time and a whole summer of work to catch up is going to tell.   Discovering I have a child with ADHD has been an interesting emotional ride for me.  Not only are we starting the process of screening The Destroyer, but I am also putting myself through it.

I’ve asked every teacher of MiniMe’s if they thought she had ADHD.  Staying focused always seems to be an issue in her classroom,  her math foundation never got to where it should be in First Grade, after that it just builds so once  she hit 3rd and multiplication came into play her grades came crashing down to C’s.  C’s are like F’s in our family, simply not acceptable. Plus every single night of home work was an  all out battle of wills and patience.  I didn’t struggle with home work as a kid,  just did it and I didn’t get or need a lot of help.  I wanted my kids to be the same way.  After 9.5 years as a mother it is finally sinking in that my kids are not going to be “me” just because they have half of my genetic material, except when they are exactly like “me”.

Enter in ADHD screening.  As I was filling out the first set of Vanderbilt Forms it hit me pretty quickly that more than a few of the behaviors listed I could apply to myself as well as my daughter.  I was also born without the filter between my brain and my mouth, I thought I was just emotional and/or an extrovert.    I  also am slow or have difficulty getting  started on tasks I see as boring or unpleasant, I thought this was just depression/apathy/procrastination/laziness.  I have an addictive personality and a low natural threshold to impulsiveness, I thought this was just the weak parts of me that needed a stronger set of BGP applied to them.   I can never remember where I put my drink, purse, shoes, phone. I can hyper focus when reading and tune out the entire world. My number one coping mechanism for feeling overwhelmed like I can’t do something is to start shutting down, checking out in any way possible.   She totally got this from me didn’t she?  I asked Babu.   When he avoided answering the question I knew my academically lackluster freshman year of college was probably  more than too much  weed, beer and sex.

This discovery sent my mind on a processing spin  and I’m just about out of it.  I am reconciling this new information with what I already know about me to see if it sheds any light or changes any perspectives I have.   I was struggling with whether or not to just leave myself the hell enough alone because I have already have  41 years of self monitoring and course correction training,  or get tested and go on some meds only to find out that apparently things that make up a large part of “me” are in fact curable with a pill.   What the fuzzle will that even be like?  Better, mind blowing, enlightening, scary, or nothing at all.  Probably it will be a little bit of all of those things. In the end curiosity and the drive to be fearless won out and I decided to start the screening process officially.   I’ll keep you posted, promise.