A Mother of an ADHD Child

The incident I most remember from the 14 years since I gave birth to my youngest child is the woman who scoffed at me when I said that my son, then nine, was diagnosed with ADHD.

“Every kid is diagnosed with ADHD today,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “What else is new…”

I didn’t respond, because I didn’t know how. Nine years of nightmarish struggles flashed through my mind at once, and her tone, discarding my statement as if it were an old wives’ tale, rendered me speechless. I didn’t know where to start.

How does one portray a child like Yanky? Was I allowed at all to describe what it means to raise such a child? Perhaps what made it so difficult is the array of forbidden emotions that came along with it. I loved my child. At least twice a week, during the worst years, I’d fantasized how life would have been without him, of the days when I only had my first four children. I imagined myself being a mother also to them. Because children like Yanky don’t allow that. They suck all the oxygen out of the room, demanding the full-time attention of two present adults just to control the situation, when (with a husband working full-time), there was only me.

And you want one day in the life of.

There was no “one” day. It was day after day after day; it was knowing that there were still years of this… years that are supposed to be also filled with joy, looming over you like a long, dark tunnel with no end in sight. I could not even survive the week.

The hardest part of it all is being forbidden to say how you feel. But after years of struggling to raise a severely hyper-active child, one who seemed inured to every therapy and child-raising technique, I well know, having spoken to others, that at some point, in the endless exhaustion, every single mother out there of a Yanky feels that searing resentment welling up inside, and the overwhelming feeling of sheer, shocking hate towards anyone who does not understand.

I often disintegrated before I woke up. According to Dr. S, pediatric psychologist with as many titles as a professional can have, I was to wake up every day at six a.m., two full hours before Yanky needed to get on the school bus. This way I had time to eat a relaxed and healthy breakfast, one that would give me the ability to calmly deal with Yanky’s nightmarish morning routines.

There was only one problem with this most practical of advice. To get up at six a.m., I needed to go to sleep at 11 p.m. To go to sleep at 11 p.m., Yanky needs to be sleeping at say, 10 p.m. Forget 9 or 8 p.m. For that matter, forget 10 p.m. Yanky went to sleep when Yanky wanted to. And I, who often could not get to bed before 2 a.m., could not open my eyes in the morning.

But let us talk about the mornings when, by some miracle, I received my seven hours of allotted sleep time, and was up with the first ring of the alarm. I’d shower and get dressed. I’d prepare myself that big and hearty breakfast. I’d sit down to eat, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other, trying to ignore the ever-tightening feeling of dread knotting up my stomach, because nothing could distract me from the fact that in 45 minutes I needed to wake Yanky up.

Mornings back then always ended in tears, but it was never Yanky who was crying. He was the one shouting threats at me from behind his bed, or had completely disappeared a few blocks down, where it could take anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour to find him. I was the one crying. You are probably wondering why he was not on medication; some 25 mg of Adderal or Foculin should do it. Oh, but he was. Yet as any mother of a child with ADHD knows, to get the medication into his mouth, he first has to eat breakfast. And to eat breakfast he first has to get out of bed. And to get out of bed, he first has to agree to wake up.

I think back on those mornings as the equivalent of being thrown into a cage, trapped inside until I accomplished a singular task — get him dressed and fed and onto a bus. How dare I describe my own child in such terms — that is, until it is you who are there, on the ground, physically wrestling with a nine-year-old who is stronger than you are, and there are marks on your legs and arms from his kicks and punches, new bruises added to old ones. Mornings were, at minimum, a two-hour nightmare every single day.

Incentives didn’t work. I’d tried them. Every last one of them. The sticker charts, the lists, the coins, the Lego sets. The “inside voice,” the “outside voice,” the time-outs and ground-ins, the technique and method of every expert on earth and on the moon. I’d been to behavioral psychologists, and cognitive therapists, and on the receiving end of more useless wisdom and tactless comments than I care to remember, professional and unprofessional alike.

Everyone, it seemed, knew exactly what to do with such a child, unless they had such a child. It was a strange paradox, almost as if Hashem only gives such children to mothers who have no conceivable idea how to handle them, given the perfect certainty of all those around, who never had to handle them.

It still enrages me every time to remember the letter I received from Yanky’s last principal; or maybe it was the principal before — he’d been to four schools in three years — informing me that if only I structured Yanky’s nights and mornings better, he would come to school on time more often. If only. Because which mother of five would choose, of her own voluntary choice, to have utter chaos reigning in her home? What I answered the principal I will leave to your imagination.

But the part I hated the most was the person I’d become. By nature, I was an optimist. I loved being a mother, with all its struggles and joys. Then came Yanky, and by the time he was seven or eight years old, it was as if I’d been transmogrified into another person —bitter, resentful, a half-time monster. I was simply done. There is only so much energy each person has, and Yanky had sucked it out of me completely. I used to cry to my husband that I was jealous of those mothers whose children had severe Down syndrome, those sitting limply in their wheelchairs, receiving sympathy from all. How lucky they were. This, what has happened to us, was a curse. And my husband would sit across from me silently, in wordless agreement.

Our home was no longer a normal one; it had succumbed to the tyranny of one child, and there was nothing I could do. Yanky brought out a rage in my husband I did not know existed. My children, for a time, did not bring friends home from school. My oldest son, seeing me disintegrate, would beg me to give Yanky away to a home. He did this with tears in his eyes. And all I could think in my head was not “how can you say that?” but rather, which “home” would ever agree to take in Yanky? If there was one, I’d give him to them.

And this, of course, made me feel horrible. Feelings of despair would be followed by rage and hate, and then intense guilt. I was a horrible mother. How did I turn into this?

I wish I could say five years later that there was a miracle, but that is not the point of this article. Yes, things did get better; in certain ways even much better. The critical moment was finding the right school. For as long as he was in the wrong classroom environment, his aggression spilled over at home like radiating waves of toxic energy. Finding the right fit for him — in our case it was PTACH — gave him a place in a classroom that for the first time in his life he liked to be in, and this was an entirely new feeling for him. The teachers were endlessly patient, and within weeks his grades went from Ds to As. Over time, the morning struggles, though still there, became more manageable. Over time, he learned to inhibit some of his aggression. As time passes, he will grow and change more. I know this today, and I am no longer without hope. Which is why I don’t feel the need to further expand on all the things that did not get better — a list that’s plenty long. But what I do feel the need to expand on is this:

I have never gotten over those first 10 years. Raising a child like Yanky was the most lonely, terrifying experience one can have as a mother, and it has left its scars on me. A child like Yanky does not garner sympathy from society; it becomes not just a struggle to survive each day, but also a struggle to survive the cruel judgment of those around you. You are often left feeling like a leper, the parent of the child no parent wants their kid to play with; the parent who is an utter failure, a person who is incapable of raising or even loving her own child. And everyone around you seems to agree.

The experience changed me profoundly. I am not the same person I was before. I knew this when, several weeks ago, I sat in a park on a bench filled with mothers, young and old, where we watched our children play. One particular child caught my eyes. He was around four years old, running round and round in dizzying circles. Twice, he ran out toward the entrance of the park, and I watched his mother run after him. Twice, he grabbed or pushed other children near him, and I watched his mother pull him away. She, unlike the rest of us, could not sit on any bench, not even for a moment. This was a wild child.

Just then, one of the young mothers walked toward us and in a loud voice complained to her friend about her child being shoved by this wild “Indian.”

“Yes, he’s completely hyperactive,” her friend murmured, nodding sympathetically.

“Oh, please,” answered the young woman, flippantly. “It’s all a matter of discipline. I’m not saying he’s not hyper, but there’s also something called parenting!”

And with that, I lost it completely. By the time I was done with my speech to this poor, maybe-21-year-old, a good 20 minutes had passed, she was pale and shaking, the mothers on the bench had turned into still-life statues with wide, unblinking eyes, and I was crying uncontrollably.

So, yes. I was different. And clearly, I needed help.

I’ve been in therapy ever since. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which still shocks me, however obvious it should be. Years of living on edge, my entire mental being crouched in perpetual defense, has created a near permanent state of battle inside my mind, one that has become the default mode of existence. I no longer relax. I literally don’t know how to. I am defensive, conflicted, and I can’t recognize myself. And I desperately don’t want to be this way anymore.

But that’s a story for another article. And as the story for this article needs to end, I will finish it on this point. The diagnosis of ADHD seems like a simple one, and perhaps, as many say, it is a disorder that truly is “over-diagnosed.” But for those with children who are truly, severely ADHD, the kind for whom Adderal was invented, it is a harrowing life to live. Things that other human beings take for granted, like the ability to work or to take a vacation, or to find a babysitter — any babysitter, who agrees to stay more than once, so that you can leave the house, ever, are luxuries that no longer exist.

Your life becomes defined entirely by the overwhelming needs of one child. And sometimes, the only thing you need is the thing that is hardest to get — a sympathetic, non-judgmental, listening ear.