Where It All Began: Lacrosse Gloves Look Good to Me
My son has ADHD. He is also a near-genius, hilarious, dearly loved, and the most well-adjusted member of our family. When I think of Clark, I see Niagara Falls. I smell pine trees and clear mountain air. I hear Natalie Merchant sing “Wonder.”
Clark is special. We always knew he had unique traits (don’t we all?), but we fought the ADHD label and diagnosis for many years. Instead, we would empathize with each other that he was disorganized, “his father’s child,” “out to lunch,” and “his own self.”
Type A, slightly OCD woman that I am, I just believed I could engineer a solution, that my will and need for control were stronger than anything God and Clark’s genetics could put in front of me. We employed every suggestion we could find to help him, short of medication, until he was in his teens. But no matter what we did, Clark was still the kid who would leave the kitchen with an assignment to put up his folded laundry and forget it by the time he reached the living room, then happily return to the kitchen after a few meandering laps around our house to sit down and read The Ranger’s Apprentice, without understanding why his mother’s face had just turned purple.
I want to introduce you to this amazing creature, my son.
In eighth grade, Clark received a commendation in all four of the standardized TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) subjects. He participated in band and lacrosse. He played a primary role in his middle school play, The Naked King. And yet he almost drove his parents crazy with constant, inexplicable Clarkisms along the way.
Back then, his counselor asked us to teach Clark responsibility for his own actions using Love and Logic Parenting[footnote]Techniques to help parents have more fun and less stress while raising responsible kids of all ages, from the Love and Logic Institute. https://www.loveandlogic.com/.[/footnote] in conjunction with the assistance we all gave him on organizational skills. The staggering amount of assistance we gave Clark with organizational skills, which he absolutely hated, whether it came from the counselor or from us. But the counselor claimed great success with the Love and Logic methodology.
We were supposed to clearly state to Clark that he is responsible for a certain behavior (i.e., turning in completed homework) and that if he chooses not to do the behavior, he is choosing the consequence that goes with it (i.e., yard work).
Logical, right?
Loving, too?
Sure . . . but it didn’t work on Clark at all. Not a single bit.
It worked amazingly well with his non-ADHD siblings, though, so it was not a total waste. To give you just a taste, I offer up this very one-sided Instant Message conversation between my husband (stepdad) and me (mom). This exchange is about yard work Clark was supposed to do as a consequence for not turning in completed homework.
mom 4:39pm: i told him to go outside and start the yard work/mow at 4:10. then i took a long shower
mom 4:39pm: i started getting ready in the bathroom
mom 4:39pm: at 4:33 i heard noises in the kitchen
mom 4:39pm: it was clark
mom 4:40pm: “getting a snack”
mom 4:40pm: i said go back outside you should have done the snack before you started the yard work
mom 4:40pm: he said no, i haven’t gotten started out in the yard yet
mom 4:40pm: i said impossible, no snack takes 22 min
mom 4:40pm: he said he made a sandwich
mom 4:40pm: i said that doesn’t take 22 minutes, 22 minutes is a 3 course meal
mom 4:40pm: he then said he’d go right outside
mom 4:40pm: but he came right back in and said he had no gas so he was going to pull weeds instead of mow. i said ok. he asked me to show him which plants are weeds so i did
mom 4:41pm: he came back in 1 minute later and said there are thorns
mom 4:41pm: i said get gloves if you are concerned about thorns (as you know there were barely any stickers on those plants and no thorns)
mom 4:41pm: he went looking for gloves
mom 4:41pm: couldn’t find any (he said)
mom 4:41pm: he went back outside WITH HIS GIANT LACROSSE GLOVES ON, with the fingers that have the size and flexibility of Polish sausage
mom 4:41pm: at this point, i became frustrated
mom 4:41pm: i told him to get the gloves off and get outside
mom 4:41pm: i explained to him that it was 4:36 and that we were leaving at 6:30 for his sister’s concert and that I was dropping him at his dad’s
mom 4:41pm: because he had at least 2 hours of work to do in the yard as he had known since last night
mom 4:42pm: and he couldn’t go to the concert without a shower, but there wouldn’t be time for him to shower because he had to finish
mom 4:42pm: and that after this i couldn’t trust him to stay at home alone and do the yard work without supervision, so he had to go to his dad’s
mom 4:42pm: AND this was after a very difficult 5 minute conversation trying to get a straight answer out of him about his grades and what his teachers said about any need for extra credit in his classes given all the homework he hadn’t turned in
mom 4:42pm: i had to stop him over and over when he would say something nonresponsive designed to make me think he had actually talked to the teacher, and i’d say, that’s not what the teacher said, what did the teacher say, and it turned out he hadn’t talked to the teachers at all!
mom 4:42pm: so then he started crying because he wasn’t going to get to go to the concert
mom 4:43pm: and i only yelled one time, which is a miracle at this point
mom 4:43pm: and i said stop with the tears, this was your choice to waste 40 min, i told you that we had things to do that you might not get to do if you didn’t get finished so maybe you’ll learn from this but if you don’t it will be the same tomorrow
mom 4:43pm: but either way, get outside and get going on the yard work
stepdad 4:44pm: i am still here, take a breath
stepdad 4:44 pm: LACROSSE GLOVES? :-) you have got to admit, that is pretty funny . . .
mom 4:45 pm: ask me tomorrow and maybe it will be funny then . . .
mom 4:47 pm: ok i admit it, it’s funny
Besides a lack of organizational skills, another hallmark of the neuro-atypical[footnote]For purposes of this book, neuro-atypical will describe people on the autism or ADHD spectrums. Conversely, I will use neuro-typical to describe people that have neurological development and states consistent with what most people would think of as normal, particularly with their executive functions and their ability to process linguistic information and social cues.[/footnote] mind is creative problem-solving. Solutions that don’t seem logical to the rest of us, necessarily, but make perfect sense to the child. Clark gives us lots of examples of this trait, sometimes in a dangerous way. Let’s just say you don’t want to send him out with any type of cutting implement without a clear set of instructions, a demonstration, a run-through, and constant oversight. Which begs the question: Why the heck don’t I just do this job myself, if he isn’t learning anything from it?
Ah, but he is, Grasshopper. We must be patient. Very, very patient, my inner kung fu master says.
(Hold me.)
Note that it truly is a miracle that Clark survives his mother; yelling only once in this lengthy exchange was quite an achievement for me. Intellectually, I know yelling does no good, except to occasionally keep my head from exploding off the top of my neck.
Our learning from the scenario above? That Love and Logic doesn’t overcome the wiring of an ADHD brain. Some behaviors just aren’t choices for Clark. Some are, though, and one of our challenges is to keep him from gaming our system by using ADHD as an excuse for bad choices, especially as he becomes more parent-savvy.
Lacrosse gloves . . . it was pretty funny.
Click here to continue reading The Clark Kent Chronicles.
~~~