Sometimes I think that the hardest thing about being a parent is making sure that the kids don’t kill each other.
Even on Shane’s birthday, I heard Dylan saying things to him like, “You didn’t do much for your birthday,” and “Birthdays are getting kind of lame.”
Maybe this is how Dylan is feeling. After all, he got a used tractor for his birthday when he wanted a go kart. Birthdays DO get lame as you get older – although I still fight to make mine spectacular every year. But that’s another story.
Shane, however, has just turned 10. Birthdays are still magical. They should still be magical at 13. And having Dylan drill into his brain that birthdays “are getting kind of lame” threw me right over the edge.
I pulled Dylan aside – on Shane’s birthday – and screeched at him: “It is his BIRTHDAY. He is a LITTLE KID! If you can’t treat him kindly and show him some respect TODAY then don’t bother even LOOKING at him tomorrow!”
Sometimes I think my own personal issues creep in without my knowledge.
Looking back at this comment, it seems that there was more at play than just making sure Shane had a happy birthday. There’s a bit of fear. There’s the fear that my oldest son didn’t enjoy his own birthday, and that it’s my fault. There’s the fear that my oldest son has no respect for his brother, and that he will continue to verbally abuse him at every opportunity.
There’s the fear that my oldest son is going to get all the attention, all the time, even when it’s my youngest son’s birthday. There’s the fear that my youngest son will never get any attention.
And there’s the fear that my boys are growing up, and that there’s nothing I can do to keep them young just a little while longer.
I need to back off and let them grow up. Together, and in spite of what they say to one another. In spite of Dylan and his issues, and me and my issues.
I need to back off. And let them grow up.
Yesterday was Shane’s birthday party. It never occurred to us that we would be in the midst of a crippling-the-city snowstorm.
Shane does not have a lot of friends. He is, instead, careful about the people he chooses to befriend – and as such, cares deeply for every one of them. Eight out of ten invited kids struggled through the snow to get here. The party was an absolute success.
I was watching them play together – a mass of 9- and 10-year-olds who were as likely to sit quietly and play as they were to tear apart the house. I know enough to have games scheduled, so they only tore apart the house in organized fashion – but the sit-down games were my favorite, because I was able to learn so much more about them.
One characteristic stood out above all others: Shane’s friends are smart. They are just a step or two deeper than what one would expect of fourth graders. There wasn’t a lot of talk about video games, or television. They used some creative toys in very creative fashion. And the jokes were almost adult in their intelligence.
One boy said, “Imagine you’re in a box. How do you get out?”
From my post in the corner I thought, Gee, I don’t know. What kind of box is it? Why am I there? Why can’t I get out?
Without even a beat, another boy called, “Stop imagining.”
“Right!” said the first boy. Someone didn’t understand, so he explained. “I said imagine you’re in a box. If you want to get out, just stop imagining.”
Maybe this is a popular fourth-grade joke, but I sure didn’t hear it when I was in fourth grade.
Later, it was time to break out the building toys. After cake, we had almost an hour scheduled for building. Shane wanted to make card towers and build with dominoes – so some kids did that. We also pulled out the Lego bin, and the boys swarmed all over them. Some of the vehicles sitting on my kitchen table today are awesome. And the domino tracks (which were occasionally knocked over by our dog) were also spectacular.
One boy, possibly Shane’s best friend in the world, wandered over to the bookshelf and found some incredibly hefty scientific books to study. This is a boy who has awed me with his discussions of symbolism in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series.
The kids cleaned up before they left – without even being asked. All of them!
And these are Shane’s best friends in the world. They are kind, polite, incredibly funny, sweet and brilliant – just like Shane. They aren’t all in his class, or even in his school, but he hangs onto their friendships – in his heart mostly – just enjoying the company.
I can remember Shane playing completely and utterly alone during recess in kindergarten. Watching him for the first time, I was stunned. When I was in kindergarten, I always played alone. I didn’t have a real friend until fourth grade – and then just one. Like Shane’s friends, my one friend was bright, kind and sweet. And I hung onto her friendship until 7th grade, when I suddenly decided I needed to be cool and get new friends.
I regret it, and miss her to this day.
So I worry about middle school, and what effect it might have on Shane’s reaction to his awesome friends. But I also talk to Shane, all the time, about how hard middle school can be. I talk about how it’s more important for him to love his friends unconditionally than it is to try to be what the other kids might want him to be.
And then I sit back and watch him interact with his awesome friends, and I wait and hope for the best.
Today we visited the neurologist again. We love our neurologist. We chose her because she is exceptionally thorough. Not all doctors are as thorough.
When we were searching for the perfect doctor, I scoured the internet and studied reviews. I talked to folks for recommendations. And we went to at least half a dozen doctors.
Our doctor was recommended by a friend, and took more than an hour to examine Dylan. She took frantic notes the entire time and gave us choices about medication. She said she liked to dose low and build up, if need be.
We still had another appointment. The final visit – and the final straw – was the doctor who took one look at Dylan, asked him if he liked sports, and wrote us a six-month prescription for Vyvanse. He didn’t even listen to Dylan’s heartbeat.
We chose the thorough doctor. And she has never wavered in her thoroughness.
“How’s the Strattera working?” she asked.
“Well…” I started.
“Oh, that doesn’t sound good,” she said.
“It’s much better than the high blood pressure medication, but it’s more like a sedative,” I told her.
“How so?”
“He’s much less bouncy, but he still has no focus ability at all,” I said.
“So it’s helping with the hyperactivity but not the attention issues,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, ever the professional speaker.
In the course of the visit, she asked Dylan about feeling depressed.
“I still do sometimes,” he said, “but not as much as before.”
“You DO?” I asked him. Then I turned to the doctor. “He smiles and sings all day, every day!” I told her. I felt like I was off my game somehow, having missed symptoms of my kid’s depression.
She explored it further, but there wasn’t much more for either of us to say. I was stunned into silence. Dylan? Depressed?! I thought.
“It’s mostly at school,” he said. “And hardly ever at home.”
Well, I thought, at least that explains why I don’t see it.
After another hour in her office, during which time she explored every symptom of every kind including those that have nothing to do with ADHD, we decided to increase the dose of Strattera and – in a week – add a very small dose of stimulant to the mix.
I asked if it might not be worth our while just to try a different stimulant, in hopes that the depression and pre-suicidal behavior might not return.
“All stimulants will have the same effects,” she said. “There isn’t one that would be better than any other.”
“I was hoping that maybe there were some that didn’t have the ‘crash’ factor,” I told her. I had been studying my copy of Straight Talk about Psychiatric Medications for Kids.
“No,” she assured me. “Once he has had this reaction, and also the way that he is talking today, I think we should really try to avoid those negative behaviors.”
So here we go again. Three pills in the morning for a week, adding a touch of stimulant – and a fourth pill – after that.
We shall see. Meanwhile, not a teeny tiny touch of depression. Dylan kicked butt in Monopoly again, and we had an absolute blast, all day long.
But that will stop me from worrying about it.
At 7:00 this morning, we got an email from Dylan’s algebra teacher.
“Good Morning!” she starts off happily. “Dylan’s effort over the past few weeks has been great. He has totally turned it around.”
It’s the most enthusiastic this teacher has been in months. Reading it, I am already thrilled.
“With the retakes he completed he was able to pull his grade up to a ‘C’!!!” (The extra exclamation points are hers.)
She continues: “He also did fabulous on his exam… 85%!!”
At this point, I mutter out loud: “Oh. My. God.” (Shane doesn’t like me to use the Lord’s name in vain, but I am still working on this.)
Dylan hears my gasp and calls from the breakfast table, “What?”
I walk in to see Dylan. For him, it is still an ordinary day.
Because I can’t be a positive, upbeat, encouraging mom, I say, “There’s good news and bad news. First, you got a ‘B’ on your English exam. And you got a ‘B’ on your social studies exam.”
He is unphased by this. I pause for dramatic effect.
“But…” (I wait for the proverbial drum roll.) “You got an 85% on your algebra exam!”
Dylan leaps from his chair, waves a fist in the air and yells, “YES!” Then he throws himself onto the floor in the next room, thundering like a fallen elephant.
Again squashing any chance of real positive reinforcement, I tell Dylan to be quiet so he doesn’t wake up Shane.
Realizing my error, I try again. “Come and see the email!” I say. Dylan reads it, looks up at me with his eyes shining, then goes back to the table and beams all through breakfast.
He says, “Now can I get Uvu?” Or maybe he said Ubu, Ooloo. I don’t know.
“What’s Uvu?” I ask.
“It’s a program I wanted to download and you said to ask you after exams.”
“Is that the one where the age requirement is 18?” I ask.
“No, that was Kik,” he says.
“You can get Uvu,” I say. I have no idea what Uvu is. But he’s a pretty good kid, I think, and I can probably trust him to be safe with it – whatever it is.
Then I rush him out the door to the bus, which he almost misses because he was so late in coming to breakfast, and because of all the algebra hoopla.
It’s a glorious day in the Hawkins household.
My son is off to his algebra exam – the test that will determine (for him) whether hard work, practice and strong effort actually bring rewards.
It’s a milestone of sorts – his first anxiety-producing exam. And when I walked into his room this morning to give him a good-morning hug, all I could think about were the days when, as a toddler, I would lift him into my arms and we would dance and dance around the living room to Rod Stewart’s rendition of Ooh La La.
“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger…”
It’s only been 10 years. Ten short years since my baby – now two inches taller than me – would dance with me in the living room, or fly into my arms to be twirled in the air, or sit outside with me and play in a mud puddle. It was only ten years ago.
And this morning, for the first time, I thought, That’s before I knew anything was wrong with him.
But there is nothing wrong with him. He’s not broken; he’s made this way. God picked him to be just exactly like this: ADHD and all. He’s brilliant and sweet and funny and kind and optimistic and enthusiastic and absolutely perfect just the way he is.
So what if he can’t concentrate in school? He can concentrate when it matters to him. He can do things he loves – build, design, invent, re-invent – and no one has to tell him to “pay attention.”
He’s getting straight A’s in engineering – and it’s hard. He has to learn the principles of design and put them to use in building a whole slew of different contraptions. His contraptions work. And he loves doing it.
It’s just that … his brain doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. The neurotransmitters aren’t firing on all cylinders. So it’s hard for him to concentrate on things that aren’t hands-on. He bounces to stay stimulated. He sings and spins and taps to keep his brain firing. It’s irritating as heck, but it’s how he keeps himself entertained when the subject matter isn’t entertaining enough.
So if he does well on the exam, so be it. It would be a great lesson that hard work does pay off.
But if he doesn’t do well, it would be a great lesson that studying for three weeks isn’t as efficient as keeping up with the class on a daily basis.
Either way, I love that boy. And I want him to know that, above all else.
Semester exams happen this week in seventh grade. I had no idea there were “semester” exams. When I was in school, exams simply didn’t exist. We had frequents tests, and there may have been some extra-large tests at the end of the year, but nothing like this.
Dylan’s algebra grade depends on his doing well on his algebra exam.
His tutor has come three times every week. Dylan’s grade went from a 32% to a 65% and is now hovering at 73%. He has a C! We are so excited! My genius son has an average grade! Yaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy!
Two more days of tutoring before the algebra exam. Meanwhile, he does have other exams looming.
So yesterday, I made a suggestion: “Maybe you could study.”
“What for?” he said.
“For your exams,” I said.
“Well I’m ready for everything except algebra,” he said. He then ran through his class list, and why he didn’t need to study for any of those classes.
“It’s still a good idea,” I said, “to at least run through what you’ve done for the past four months. Just go through your paperwork and get a reminder of what you’ve done, so you can be ready for any topic.”
“Well, I am going to study social studies tomorrow,” he said. This, from a kid who is always going to do whatever – tomorrow.
“And you have English tomorrow,” I said. “Just go through your paperwork and see what’s there.” I tried not to push, but if he doesn’t learn to study soon, he’s going to sink when he gets to high school.
And then, to my surprise, Dylan opened his binder. He took out some paperwork and looked at the topics that are going to be covered on his English exam. He read them out loud to me, and it was obvious that he was going to do fine on his English exam.
As a matter of fact, he’ll probably do fine on all of his exams – maybe even algebra. He calls his other classes “easy.”
I think it’s great that he thinks social studies is easy. It’s all history. The things he’s learning in there are beyond my scope of recognition. I don’t even know the time frame, let alone what happened then.
In science, he says, he just has to dissect a frog. No studying required for that, he says. Looking back on my frog dissection, which scarred me for life, I quickly printed a letter about the ethical treatment of animals – and Dylan will be doing his dissection on the computer. No frog deaths necessary here.
“What about chorus?” I asked him. “You said it was a hard one.”
“I said it was a long one,” Dylan corrected. “I’m all about music.” And he is. No need to study, I guess.
But at least, he gave it a shot for English. And tonight, after his tutor, he’s promised to look at some social studies. It’s a start.
He might be headed to college after all.
It’s a two-hour delay today, thanks to icy road conditions.
Dylan, who is awake with me at 6:30 when we learn of the delay, is concerned only with his algebra exam. If they change the schedule, will he have to take the test earlier in the week? He wants the extra time to study with his tutor.
I assure him, then reassure him, that they won’t change the exam schedule for today. I tell him sleep is the most important thing, and just to rest now, not to worry.
Then I spend two hours trying to sleep, worrying about the exam schedule.
When I get out of the shower, the boys are both awake and playing with Pokemon cards. But they are not ready for school. Dylan is in pajamas and obviously hasn’t even considered brushing his teeth yet.
“Dylan, your bus will be here in 20 minutes.”
“What? Already?” he stammers. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Bye, Shane,” he says, sprinting from Shane’s bedroom and leaving a terrible mess that Shane doesn’t even see.
Shane is in his underwear with a shirt on, digging around for pants. He must have heard me coming.
“Good morning, Shane!” I say jovially, since Shane is almost dressed and he still has 2 1/2 hours before school starts.
I go downstairs and make Dylan’s breakfast. I let the dog out. I let the dog in, and dry her feet. I make peanut butter sandwiches and pack up lunchboxes. I check my email. I wait.
Dylan thunders downstairs ready to eat an omelet, whole-grain toast and a green banana with only six minutes left.
Luckily, he inhales it all in four.
Dylan takes his pills. He’s still successfully taking Strattera, if you can call B’s (instead of A’s) and D’s (instead of F’s) a “success.”
“Can you drive me to the bus stop?”
“Sure.” It is icy rain, after all.
I toss a bowl of cereal on the table for Shane.
“I’ll be right back,” I yell to Shane. We get to the bus stop 42 seconds before the bus arrives. I turn around and drive the 500 yards back to our house.
It is 9:30 in the morning. It feels like 7 a.m.
Shane and I spend almost two hours playing with Little People, reading books and doing magic tricks.
We talk about the show we’re going to see tonight. The kids got tickets in their stockings for Christmas. Shane is excited to go, as we all are.
“Remember when we got our tickets,” he says, “and we thought it was such a long wait until January 10th?”
“I remember,” I say.
“But now it’s here and tonight we’re going to the show and it was, like, so fast!” Shane says. “And in two years it will be like, wow, that show was a long time ago!”
I laugh. “That’s probably true,” I say, not wanting to recognize that, in two years, Shane will be facing middle school persecution and Dylan will be looking at colleges.
When it’s time to go to school, we can’t believe how fast the time went. We manage to be almost late, like always. He jumps out of the car into the rain.
For some reason, watching him trot up the sidewalk, backpack bouncing, saddens me … just a little bit more than usual.
Just before dinner, our house was teeming with math.
Dylan’s tutor, an absolute wonder, was working diligently with Dylan to finish his exam review packet. They were sitting quietly at the kitchen table, an occasional question and answer tossed about like murmurs in a Pink Floyd song.
Meanwhile, Shane – who is also in advanced math class – brought in his homework to where I was sitting in the office.
It’s geometry. I see angles of varying sizes. Shane says something about a protractor and I say, “I haven’t used a protractor since 1976, so I’m not sure I can answer your question.”
Luckily, Bill – my mathematically-inclined genius of a husband, came home from work at about this time. He helped out with the protractor.
But it soon became clear that Shane was missing a very important component of measuring angles: the concept of angle – its very definition. He seemed to believe that angles were just two lines – and had nothing to do with the space between the two. So I drew pizzas and “cut” them and made them into “angles” to give him a broader idea.
He didn’t get it. So I got out yarn, and Shane chopped off a piece. I used the yarn and the carpet to explore the concept further. For 10 minutes, I tried to explain the concept of an angle, and measurement, and how you could tell if something was more or less than 90 degrees.
Shane was almost in tears when I was done. “You didn’t have to say all that,” he told me. “It took you 10 minutes just to tell me that one thing!”
Apparently, he understood more than I thought – and in my zeal to explain the greater scheme of things, I bored him to tears.
Shane finished his homework, the tutor left, and we broke for dinner.
Then we checked Edline for Dylan – the computer’s way of sharing grades and assignments with parents and students. He had raised his grade in algebra from 34% (failing) to 62% – a D!
We high-fived and danced around like crazy people. A D! Dylan brought his algebra grade up to a D!
“I never thought I’d be this excited about a D,” he said, still dancing.
“Neither did I,” I said sincerely.
We then took a brief trip through Dylan’s binder trying to find lost work. He made a list of the things he needs to do tomorrow: turn in his forms for SSL hours, talk to his social studies teacher about missing homework, turn in his missing English homework, finish retaking an algebra quiz at lunchtime, talk to his science teacher about his missing lab work, turn in his football paperwork that was due in early December, and bring home his P.E. clothes that he’s been wearing every school day since Thanksgiving.
By the end of this process, he was yelling at me, “You don’t always need to tell me what to do! You act like I would fail if you didn’t tell me what to do!”
Of course, I am only pointing out missing work that he hasn’t been able to notice for himself, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I screamed back meaninglessly about how he can make his own lunch, talk to his own teachers, go to his own IEP meetings – blah blah blah – still hoping he will find all that lost work and finish his papers without me reminding him to do it.
But anyway, the high-fiving was over, and we went back to our normal disagreements. Shane’s homework is still on his desk – not in his folder where it should be. So after all that hard work, Shane probably won’t turn in his homework tomorrow.
And Dylan’s SSL form (which has to be turned in tomorrow or he loses credit for enough hours to graduate from high school) is sitting idly on his desk while he eats ice cream, alone at the kitchen table, at an unnervingly slow pace.
And here I sit, typing. Quietly. Not telling them what to do.
The holidays are officially over (although our tree is still, sadly, up and dying in its stand). The kids have gone back to school.
Dylan’s tutor will be coming twice a week. His enormous algebra exam takes place sometime in the next two weeks. I had no idea they gave exams in January – but here it is, upon us. He has a 34% in the class. And, thanks to my lovely email asking his teacher to be kind to my son, I haven’t heard back from her after several subsequent emails. Oddly, I think, she doesn’t want to talk to me. She surely doesn’t want to help Dylan anymore.
Meanwhile, Shane forgot his backpack on Thursday (his first day back to school in two weeks) and today he forgot his instrument for band. I yelled at him all the way home to get his backpack on Thursday, then said nothing about the instrument today. I drove home and got both for him – which won’t happen again, but I feel somewhat responsible for not remembering myself that today was band practice.
After all the time we’ve had off – just having fun, playing Monopoly, going skiing, watching movies and eating pizza – I feel like I’ve been out of a job for several weeks and suddenly have to return to work. It’s funny, because I don’t usually consider raising the kids a job – although I know it is one. It’s just my life.
But with the return to the house to pick up the instrument this morning, I realized that the kids could really do without so much interference on my part. They’d learn more if I weren’t there to pick up the instrument and bring it to school. The teacher might respond to emails if I hadn’t been so blatant about my feelings.
Then again, Dylan would still have a 34% and Shane would have been without an instrument – so where’s the line, exactly, and did I cross it already?
I keep saying, I’m going to step back and let my kids make their own mistakes, fall on their own faces. But it’s so HARD to let them fall on their faces, when I’m standing right there, willing and able to help.
I don’t want to be one of those parents who does everything for their kids. I want them to learn things as they go. I want them to make their own choices and even their own errors in judgment.
I know about allowing kids to have their own consequences to their own actions. I’ve read all the right books. I know what I’m supposed to do. And maybe – just maybe – in 2014, I’ll be better able to do it.
But probably not.
After one day back at school, we had a snow day. Dylan came home with a huge packet for algebra, to help him review for a looming exam. I mentioned it several times, but his attitude was that he should wait for his tutor before he even started it.
It’s due the day AFTER his tutor arrives, and it’s several pages. Thus started the discourse – including a bonus reward if he can bring up his grade to a B by the end of the year – trying to teach Dylan that it’s a good idea to actually WORK on something, to PRACTICE, to make something happen.
“I don’t know if I can even do it,” he wailed. “I’ve got a negative failing grade right now and I don’t even know if I can bring it up!”
“Dylan,” I said, “like everything else, you have to do it one step at a time. You can’t move a mountain if you stand and stare at the mountain. You move one rock.”
He stared at me.
“Well I just wish we could have the tutor here twice a week,” he said.
I picked up the phone. “We can have the tutor here twice a week!” I said.
“Don’t call him NOW!” Dylan responded. Obviously, he had additional wishes.
“You have to work at this, Dylan,” I said. “You have to actually work to make it happen. If you want to change your grade, you’re going to have to do real work. I’m talking about one to two hours of algebra every night.”
“I don’t have enough algebra to work on for an hour every night!”
I sighed. “I bought you two algebra books, and you haven’t opened either one of them. They’ve been sitting here for four months. They are for practice. One of them supposedly explains algebra for people who think like you do. But you wouldn’t know because you haven’t even opened the book.”
I pointed to his desk, where one of the algebra books was suffocating under a pile of papers from last quarter. Nothing had been touched on that desk for months.
Dylan changed his tactic. “Well I need my calculator for some of these problems and I can’t find my charger!”
“I didn’t lose your charger,” I said. “That calculator cost $140, so you can owe me that if you can’t charge it.”
“But I didn’t lose it!” he wailed again.
We went back and forth for awhile before I finally walked away.
Hours went by. Dylan played video games and texted his friends. Finally, there was a silence – and I went in to give him almond milk – a drink that is supposed to help him focus.
I found him playing video games again.
“I thought you were doing algebra,” I said. “I brought you this drink to help you focus.”
“I wanted to go outside,” he said. “Plus I don’t even know how I could do a whole hour of algebra right now.”
I called his dad at work, before I exploded. “You HAVE to talk to him,” I said, “or I’m going to kill him.”
He talked to him. Dylan sat down and worked on algebra for 45 minutes.
Then he went outside and played, which is all he wants to do. And in all of my great wisdom, what I want most is for him to be happy. I can’t fight the excuses when I know he’s barely 13 and already worried sick about getting into MIT.
He should be playing in the snow.
