Dana Blankenhorn

A victory too late

My son graduated from high school.

The good news is the hell he went through, and the price he paid, won't be necessary for his children.

That's because theSupreme Court ruled this week, 6-3, that your kid has ADHD and the school refuses to deal with it, you can now send him or her to a private school and send the public system your bill. The case is FOREST GROVE SCHOOL DISTRICT v. T. A.

Celebrate Your Troubles

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 21 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When we got our  current cats, back in 2006, we decided they would be indoor meows. 

They have no problems. Their needs are all taken care of. They eat, they play, they sit by the windows or lie on our beds. 

Their placidity is in stark contrast to the neighbors' cats, both of whom are allowed outside. Those cats eye the world warily, and attack one another with ferocity. They know a truth our cats do not, that there is trouble in life, and you need to pay attention. 

What's true for cats is true for people.

Most kids today are raised with a minimum of trouble in their lives. Their playmates and playdates are chosen by their parents. They are hustled from karate to soccer to dance. They are protected and nurtured like flowers, usually in suburbs where the problems of real life are kept as distant as possible. 

People aren't cats. A lot of these suburban kids become teens and seek out trouble of one kind or another. They get cars and crash them. They feel hormones and act on them. They play at hurting one another. The best of them do as they're told, they cause no trouble for anyone, they graduate with honors, and they go on now to big-time colleges where they will experiment with sex, drugs, music, thought, and each other before settling down to lives of quiet desperation.

I didn't intend it to be like this, but there's another way to go.

Torture

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Everyone who has been a parent, or a child, knows something of torture.

As my son John prepares to graduate high school this month, my parenting career enters a new phase. I will try out this new role on a trip to China, Taiwan and Japan starting May 23rd. Posting will be sporadic.

It is not easier for someone with ADD to parent children who have it. It's harder. My son's ADD is much like mine, only sometimes it's on steroids, and our long-term efforts to treat it have left different scars on him than my own long-term denial left on me, coming up.

I must admit here that there were times when I hit him. Hard. He could be, can be, infuriating. He has the same buttons I have, and has known how to push them since he was a small child. Parenting him has helped me deal with my own ADD, for which I'm thankful. 

But there have been times when we tortured one another, both mentally and physically.

The Big Bang of the Online Universe

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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After 25 years online, with more-and-more ways to communicate interactively being found each day, it gets harder-and-harder to actually communicate. (Picture from Steve Kay.)

Take e-mail. Please. A-Clue.Com started life as an e-mail newsletter. I just spent 20 minutes clearing out 24 hours worth of junk via Mailwasher. And what I came out with, after all that, was mainly semi-junk.  Even after a mass clearing of e-mails from my work and my favorite mailing list, most of them unread, I am still left with a pile that I can hardly get to.

Each "real" e-mail -- often an invitation to an interview or a news release -- takes several minutes to read and respond to cogently. I don't have that many minutes.  So a lot of that legitimate e-mail itself goes unread, or is read too late for me to do much with it.

Instead I have lately spent increased amounts of my time looking at RSS feeds. I can skip over items I'm not interested in, but even after I read just the ones I am interested in hours may have passed, and work may not have gotten done.

Attitude

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We all have a little voice in our head saying "no, you can't." (Picture from A Year in Pictures of Working.)

Sometimes we call it our mothers. This is unfair to mothers. It is, in fact, the voice of caution, even of reason. Caution is not always a bad thing.

But in our modern world caution needs to be put in its place. Sometimes it needs to be shut down entirely. Sometimes it needs to be transformed, through adrenaline, into that which gets us through.

I have been making a study of attitude most of my life, partly because I find it so hard to adjust my own. I get nervous in front of people, always have. I can't shut down the voice. I admire those who can.

The earliest example I can offer is from the summer of 1975. I took a summer "job" selling knives, door to door. They were nice knives, I still have some. But I had no aptitude for it. I could not shut down the voices, and give myself the proper attitude.

There was one young person, of about my age, who could. Her name then was (yes it was) Candy Cotton. I remember her as short, wide-hipped, with long blond hair. And she never took no for an answer.

She was a great salesperson. She sold knives like no one's business. I like to think she learned to sell other things, and had a happy life, marrying someone with a different last name. But in retrospect maybe that name was her great ally. Forcing people to get past it, and pointing them where she wanted them to go, may have been the necessary life-skill which made her the salesperson she was.

Since then I've met many salespeople, and while most never knew it I admired them all. It's a tough life, sales. You are constantly facing the wall of "no," and you have to find a way to break it down. First in yourself, then in others.

The American Disease

I have no scientific proof of this, but I have long believed ADHD to be the American Disease.

Up to 5% of Americans are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm one of them. I'm creative, I'm quick, I tend to being a polymath. I also have trouble finishing anything longer than a blog post, I'm quick to anger, and I have enormous trouble concentrating on anything I'm told I have to concentrate on (as opposed to what I want to concentrate on). I am very difficult to compel.

In other words, I am both hyper-focused and distractable, I can be charming but I'm prone to depression. These are symptoms typical of what I call "male" ADHD, the kind you hear about and read about most often. I have likened it, most popularly, to having Robin Williams in my head. (This also brings a tendency to self-medicate. Robin's had two stints in rehab.)

There is another kind of ADHD, which may be dramatically under-diagnosed. I learned about it from my daughter. I call it "female" ADHD. In this version you become Robin's audience. You're lost in your own world, and breaking out into the real world can be a struggle. This often comes with learning disabilities -- dyslexia in my daughter's case.

So why do I call this the American disease? Partly because very few Europeans have it. To many Europeans this proves Americans are making the whole thing up. But think about it. If you were living in, say Germany or Italy 100 years ago, or in Ireland or Scotland 200 years ago, or in England 300 years ago, and you had ADHD, what's the first thing you'd think of doing?

Right, getting the heck out of there. Going to America.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.

Drives Me Crazy

Putting ADHD people together can be like trying to lie magnets together. They resist.

In the case of my son and I it means we bark at one another with the slightest provocation. We're ready to see intent where none exists. We misunderstand. We speak in incomplete sentences. Our expectations for one another are very high, and when they're not met it hurts.

John has had a lot more therapy than I did at 16. He's gotten a lot more help. He's given himself more help, too, joining a church of questioning believers. Yet he has a lot more trouble than I did dealing with people his own age.

I think it's because in John's life he's lacked peers. I mean real peers, people like him. Not just the same age, but similar in temperament, in attitude, in intelligence and love of learning.

That's the lesson of my own life, anyway.

Belief in Evil

The nightmare I've been dealing with concerning our son reaches another climax tomorrow with an appearance at juvenile court.

After three months of this I have a pretty clear idea what happened. We're hoping for the best.

But regardless, what seems very clear is that the teacher who claims my son assaulted her believes firmly in good and evil. Especially evil.

Evil can be a noun, a verb, or a modifier. As a verb it refers to action everyone knows is wrong. As a noun it refers to the person behind that action, and may also be used to damn their character, to consign them to the netherworld of death or prison. As a modifier it's a political football as in the term evil-doer.

How many more innocents have died in Iraq these last 5 years, at our hands, wittingly or unwittingly, compared to the number who died on 9-11? Yet our leaders refer to those who planned 9-11 as evil-doers, and to our own good men and women as liberators.

It's nonsense. War is evil, no matter who does it, no matter their cause. It is all hell. It is violence, it is destruction.  It's a central lesson told by everyone who has come back from any war. The only way to justify such evil is to see the other side as more evil, so that the war becomes self-defense.

I shouldn't criticize. That's our defense as well.

Dealing with Oppression

Oppression is not something I deal with well.

It's something we're supposed to learn in kindergarten, but the ADHD kid (like me) doesn't have a mind for it then, so it passed me by. (I doubt Robert Fulghum had ADHD, since he learned these lessons in kindergarten.)

Americans in general are bad with oppression, yet oppression is a necessary evil. It's part of life. Organization oppresses the disorganized. The kindergarten classroom must be organized. The teacher has to be in charge, even when she's wrong. You're supposed to sit down, shut up and obey instruction. That's the whole purpose of the class.

This personal reality is also political. The main reason Democrats seem so wimpy (to those in the Netroots) is they have learned the hard lesson of dealing with oppression. Whether by fair means or foul they've been losing, on the whole, for 40 years, and they're used to living in the nooks and crannies of a Republican world.

That's what triangulation is all about. You assume that your own side, no matter how well-intentioned, is too extreme, and you try to fit modest reform between what you want and what you know the other side is going to do. Hillary Clinton continues sailing into the wind that doesn't blow and it drives people crazy. That's her real problem right now. Barack Obama doesn't assume the wind exists, John Edwards insists the wind can be resisted.

Polls show Obama is right -- in our guts we know the Republicans are nuts. Every one of them. Even that nice Governor Huckabee. Yet Congressional leaders keep leaning forward into the wind, as though afraid reform is going to be knocked over. Media pundits keep leaning forward, into the wind that doesn't blow. There's an Emperor's New Clothes feel to the whole thing. Washington truly seems like a Potemkin Village at times like this.

But back to me.