Fast-forward now to spring of 1998. It was spring break, so I had in my home daycare that week not only the regular daycare kids, but extra kids who had no place else to go when there was no school during the hours their parents were at work. School breaks were always a stressful time. I couldn't turn these kids away--many of them were my former daycare kids or the siblings of my current kids--but I really didn't have room for them, either. (It is criminal that our society does not attempt to systematically address the fact that children often have no place to go when they are out of school.) One day during that week, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a blond, angel-faced boy, perhaps ten years old, smiling sweetly at me. I had no idea who this kid was, until I spotted the man who was coming up from the parking lot to join him on the porch. I recognized the father first, and only then the boy. It was L, whom I had babysat for only about eight times, for just a couple of days at a time, when he was three and four years old. L was only eight when he appeared on my porch that day, but he looked like a well-grown ten-year-old. Dad and son were wearing huge grins, but my heart was sinking. I already had too many kids to care for, and of all the children I had ever babysat for, L was one of the two most difficult. (The other most difficult one was C, a ten-year-old girl who was among my regular kids at the time L showed up on my doorstep. Keep track of C--she'll be back.) As a small child, L had been incorrigible. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, and what he did was never what anyone else wanted--especially not what I wanted. He was a cute kid, and very loving, but he was a royal pain in the patootie. His dad was a good friend of one of my other daycare parents, and he was undergoing chemotherapy, so I didn't feel that I could turn L away, but I always dreaded when I was asked to take him. Now here he was again, after all those years--and he was big. My immediate thought was that he would be even harder to control in this new, larger size. It turned out that during all those years that L had not been coming to me for babysitting, he had never forgotten me or my daycare. When he and his father had driven by my daycare that day, L had begged him to let him stop in for a visit. They stayed for about an hour, but the dad was due in Kansas City for a chemotherapy treatment, so he had to get going. L asked me very shyly if he could maybe stay with me for the rest of the afternoon rather than going with his father. He asked so sweetly that I didn't have the heart to say no, and I also figured it was only for about three hours, so I would probably survive. I took the kids across the street to the school playground, hoping that L would be easier to handle if I let him run off some energy. Besides, I like to get the kids to the playground. I think they should be running around, yelling, and climbing most of the time. But L surprised me. He didn't want to play with the other kids. He wanted to sit and talk to me. I was amazed at this boy's memory for everything associated with the time he had spent in my daycare. It was not all that much time, and he had been very young, but he had forgotten nothing. He remembered specific conversations (since I also have that knack, I know he remembered them with uncanny accuracy, too). He remembered games we had played. He asked about children who were no longer at the daycare. He also talked about my spaghetti. Everyone loves my spaghetti, and he literally rhapsodized over it there in the playground. So much so, that I gathered up the children so we could go home and I could whip up a batch of spaghetti and meat sauce for afternoon snack--as a special treat for L. Because, you see, by then I was ready to do literally anything for this adorable, funny, smart, sweet little (ok, kind of big) boy. He was such a delight that I was sad when his dad came to pick him up that afternoon, and I asked when L could come to visit me again. I also asked, when L was not right there to listen, exactly what had happened. Where was that child who had been so destructive and difficult to handle? (Oh, the father was well aware of his boy's behavior. As a single parent he'd had his hands full with the little dickens.) That's when the father told me that L had been on Ritalin for over a year, and that it had changed his life. He now had friends, whereas in the past other kids had not wanted to play with him--he was too rough and he couldn't control his own behavior. Teachers now liked him, too, and it turned out that he was not the academic loser they'd thought, but actually astonishingly gifted. And because his whole life was not filled with people yelling at him, criticizing him, or rejecting him, his self-image had shot straight up. Of course, his sudden success in school also had an impact on that formerly negative self-image. The father told me that the reason L remembered me with so much love was that, as L had often told him, I was the only person except for his father who had ever been nice to him. He said I was his only friend, because I was the only person who loved him. By this time, sap that I am, I was actually crying. Partly it was because the fact that this little boy's inner life had been so unhappy just broke my heart. Partly it was because I was so touched that he had remembered me with so much love. But a lot of it was also because I was so relieved! You see, I am not the kind of person who is mean to little children. Where kids are concerned, I am so patient I sometimes wonder if I am all there. But this little boy had tried my patience in a way no child had ever done before. He was the only child who had ever made me wish that I could yell cruel things and beat some sense into him. But I had forced myself to treat him exactly the same way that I treated every other child. Inside I was always furious with him, but being cruel to a child would be as impossible for me as abusing a puppy. I could never do it. I think I was also crying because of the guilt I was feeling, because all the time L was innocently loving me, I had been desperately counting the minutes until I could get rid of him. Then Dad told me something else. He too had gone on Ritalin, and it changed his life, as well. He'd always been an alcoholic and a ne'er-do-well, in and out of trouble with the law, and he'd never been able to hold a steady job. He only quit being an alcoholic because it had destroyed his liver. (It was liver cancer he was getting chemo for.) But on Ritalin he finally felt as though he had some mastery of his own behavior, and he no longer felt always on the verge of spinning out of control. His only regret was that he had not been offered Ritalin sooner, before he had ruined his life and his health. Now, let's go back to C, the little girl who was a female version of the unreconstructed L--worse, even, if you can imagine! C came to me at eight-and-a-half years of age, along with her four-and-a-half-year-old sister, H. Both children were incredibly hard to handle, and both were completely unsocialized. Once they joined my daycare, most of my time was spent managing their behavior, and by the end of the day I was absolutely exhausted. But there was a clear difference between the two. C very obviously had a severe case of ADHD, whereas H was just very badly behaved. Understand, I have tutored people of all ages with ADD/ADHD, and I have read extensively on the subject. I know the difference between ADD/ADHD and even extreme bad behavior. I had no doubt at all about C. C was a very unhappy child, as unhappy as she was obnoxious. She had no friends. No one liked her, especially not her teachers. Every single day she had to take home a note to her mother detailing her transgressions, and her mother was constantly being called in for conferences concerning C's behavior. She was always in trouble, and academically she was a disaster. Having seen the change in L--especially the change in his self-image and the difference in his level of happiness--I began to push C's mother to have her tested for ADHD, as well as for the learning disabilities I was quite sure she had. Eventually, the mother listened to me, and C was diagnosed and put on Ritalin. The change was dramatic. C is still not a well-socialized child--but that is the result of unfortunate family circumstances, the same ones that have produced her badly behaved younger sister. C is no angel. Nor is she academically gifted, though she is doing much better now that she can sit down and focus on her schoolwork. But even she is delighted with the difference in her life. She told me once, a couple of months after she started taking Ritalin, that she always felt bad that she couldn't behave. "I wanted to be good," she would say, "but I just didn't know how to make myself stop being bad." She had always felt out of control, and with the Ritalin, she felt as if she could choose her behavior rather than being driven to do things she did not want to do by something she didn't understand. One aspect of ADD/ADHD is impulsivity, and I suspect that is what L's father and C were talking about when they told me that they always felt as though there was no way to get back in control of themselves. Not everyone with ADD/ADHD will experience such dramatic changes from taking Ritalin. But I have watched several of my tutoring students who have gone on such drugs after a diagnosis and who found that they suddenly had more focus and more control. So I finally decided to try it myself. Now I am glad that I did. I don't always take Ritalin, but during the semester, when I cannot afford to be distracted and scatterbrained because I have to do the work that I have to do, Ritalin helps me to stay on task. It is far less of a struggle than it used to be to settle down and do what I must do. By the way, I have not been taking my Ritalin since this semester ended for me on December 20, 2000. If you were curious enough to check the dates on my articles, you would find that fifty-eight of them, counting this one, have been written since I went off Ritalin, just twenty-three days ago. And the funny thing is, I have written twice that many. But I have limited access to the computer, and having just taught myself basic HTML on December 28, it takes me about five times longer to post an article than to write one, so I have not yet had time to post most of what I have written. In other words, there are real advantages to having an ADHD personality. We can accomplish more than you can imagine--as long as it's what we feel like doing at that moment. My ADHD tends to manifest itself in frenzies of reading and writing (I read at least a book a day). But it also tends to keeps me from doing things I need to do. (You don't want to know what my apartment looks like right now.) Classes start up again next Tuesday, so I will start taking my medicine again. When that happens, I will focus on what I have to do, and spend less time playing (i.e., reading and writing and posting articles). In a way, Ritalin is for me a "responsibility pill." It allows me to control my impulse to do only what I want to do, so that I can do what I really have an obligation to do. In other words, it helps me to function as a productive member of society. I believe that is what it did for L and C, as well, though as children, what is required of them is in many ways different from what is required of me. |
