Being a parent of a child with ADD/ADHD can feel isolating.
As with any perceived difference, however slight, you feel like the only parent that’s ever faced such difficulty. My daughter is 6 and is amazing. She’s brilliant, creative, funny, loving, and active. She also happens to have ADD/ADHD.
That last part is what took me the longest to comprehend, that she also happens to have it. It doesn’t define her or my parenting abilities.
When A was 2, we started to feel as though what we were experiencing wasn’t what other parents go through. It couldn’t be that hard. Her tantrums were extreme. We never knew what would set them off. There were also periods of what we considered to be total normalcy. During those times we started to believe we finally had it all figured out. We were getting the parenting thing right. Then disaster would strike again and knock us off our pedestals. Suddenly we’d be back to feeling like we knew nothing as parents and that we were irrevocably screwing up our daughter.
Her most calm moments have always been in nature.
We talked to our pediatrician about it many times and each time heard, all children throw tantrums. She’s really okay. It was so hard not to focus on the difficult parts and focus on what was so wonderful about her. She really was, is, wonderful.
After years of feeling as though we were failing most of the time, we finally got somewhere with our doctor. They referred us to their in-house child psychologist. She was amazing. She helped us realize that what we were experiencing wasn’t completely out of the norm, but perhaps on a more extreme level. That’s how we’d always described A, extreme. We met with her on and off for a couple of years without A, but after a couple of separate evaluations, we decided we wanted to try medication. We had, of sorts, an official ADD, possible ADHD diagnosis, and we didn’t know what else to try. She had been struggling in school for a couple years, not academically, but behaviorally.
She was still young, but we didn’t want it to get to a point where it could be too late to change.
Part of who A is involves some defiance. There’s your average 6-year-old, I don’t wanna, then there’s, I don’t want to, I won’t, you won’t make me, ever. That’s what we were facing. Therefore, taking the medication was a new battle we weren’t prepared for. We tried breaking apart the capsule and hiding it in food, but she always found it. We tried teaching her to swallow a pill, but she claimed she couldn’t and then would refuse to try. We so desperately wanted her to take it because when she was in a good mood and took it well, her days at school and with us were hugely improved. She was still our amazing little girl, but with more focus and less impulsivity. She was, for lack of a better way to say it, the girl we always knew she could be. I know it sounds like we’re bad parents, always thinking our child could be something different, but that’s how this struggle effected us. We felt like we were always heading up hill and we didn’t want that to be her forever.
As a last ditch effort, we had the medication made into gummies and hoped that she’d take them like regular gummy vitamins. (I so desperately wanted that silver bullet; the one thing that would take away the hard parts and leave the best parts.) She didn’t. We found ourselves in this place we didn’t recognize. For years we’d advocated for her and tried to do what we thought was best for her, despite her objections. When it didn’t work, we were lost. We had literally pulled out all the stops. There was nothing left. That’s when I had her 1st grade parent-teacher conference.
First, let me say, that while I think she’s had great teachers every year; this year is a combination of her increased maturity, likely being more challenged academically, and having a really amazing teacher. Our conference was fantastic and I learned that she’s not only testing above her level in every subject, she’s doing pretty well helping herself with her attention difficulties. She’s asking to sit separately from others when she’s feeling distracted, she’s choosing to use a chair at circle instead of sitting on the floor. I was so surprised and impressed. Her teacher even told me that while her being on the medication would make things even better, she doesn’t think she’s having a hard enough time, at this point, to be terribly worried. Oh the relief! A thousand bricks being lifted off my shoulders. She’s doing okay. I couldn’t wait to call my husband and my mom and my dad and … you get the point. I could have shouted it from the rooftops.
For the first time I started to feel like she would be okay. We would be okay.
We have hard days. We have hard weeks. In the end, though, she’s a wonderful girl with extraordinary qualities. Many of those extraordinary qualities are due to what also makes her have difficulties. We’ve needed to learn to take the good with the bad. We are her parents, she is our child. We are her quiet place, she is our wild. And that’s okay.
