Author Archives: Frank South

Mar 14

ADHD KO’s Dad Before Parent Night at School

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My sixteen-year-old daughter, Coco, who like me has ADHD, has a big “Night Advisement” session at her high school tonight. All the kids and parents meet with counselors and teachers to decide your child’s curriculum and goals for the following year. Driving her to school this morning I asked her about it and she said, “I’m going with mom, it’ll just make you nuts.  We’ll tell you about it when we get home.” I tell her that I’d like to go too, she says that I’ve seemed to be on edge lately.

“No I haven’t,” I said. Coco rolled her eyes and said that I’ve got plenty to do without crowding into an auditorium and filling out forms.

“You hate that kind of stuff,” she says.

She’s right, I do.  And on my way home after dropping her off I realize that she’s also right about me being on edge. Actually, it’s more like over the edge and holding on with my fingernails. I’ve felt it coming on again for a little while and I’ve been doing my best to fight off the dread and stay positive, organized, and cheerful. But sometimes there’s nothing to do but turn and face it head on. No matter what I do – more exercise, breathing, talking to my shrink, filing, cleaning, eating ice cream, or chain sawing dead trees in the back yard – a air-sucking ADHD overwhelm collapse is rolling my way and I can only hope that I can remember what I learned from the last time this happened the week of my birthday a year ago.

In late rounds that week, ADHD hit Dad with a surprise roundhouse right to the head, knocking him flat with panic, despair, and a hopelessly dark world-view. Petrified that his therapist will want to put him on anti-depressants again, Dad took a self-imposed sick-week and hid in the bedroom.

Family said Dad took a dive.

“Now he gets to lie around all day, eat cookies, and read books,” family said. “Who’s going to do the laundry, clean the kitchen and bathrooms, vacuum, mow the lawn, feed the dog and change the light bulbs?”

“Not I,” Dad said from under covers, “My head hurts. Leave me alone. I need quiet.” He was tired of being a slave to these needy, noisy people. He really wished they would all just disappear.

A couple of days went by. The house was peaceful, not a sound. Well, sure the family’s out doing things in the world, growing, making a positive contribution to society and all that crap. Dad got out of bed to get a sandwich and maybe a few more Kroger oatmeal-raisin cookies. The kitchen was empty – but really empty. The whole house was deserted. Dashing around in a panic, he can find no dishes, no clothes, no furniture, no dog, no people. His wish had been granted. His family has packed up and moved away. “No, no, I didn’t mean it!” he screams, “Come back, I like changing light bulbs!”

And then – wham – I fell flat on my back in a tangle of sheets. I opened my eyes to our dog looking down at me. He tilted his head, raised an eyebrow and said, “Woof?” Okay, good, my family hadn’t deserted me.  But I did get laid out by that ADHD punch to the head and heart. And a good-sized part of me was convinced that the only reason my family didn’t pack up and leave is because I stayed on my feet and kept up with the household chores, part-time jobs, and all the other people-pleasing behaviors that cover the dark, frustrated fury and self-loathing burning at my rotten core.

My crusty old corner-man in the boxing ring sits me on the stool — squirts water in my face. “How many times I gotta tell you to keep your head down. No wonder ADHD caught you with that right. Now, he’s got you throwing around wild-ass mixed metaphors. Stay focused, kid. Fight your fight.”

Okay, okay. But see, it’s not that I think that my family is mean and shallow or really treats me like a slave. It’s that I know how difficult it can be to be around me when I get overwhelmed, frantic, and short-tempered. I can barely tolerate myself when ADHD hits me with a wave of burning synapses that gets so huge that I’m sure I’ll tumble over and over, and stay lost in confusion and uncertainty forever. And then, trying to keep from drowning, I lash out — desperate to grab anything that makes sense — and say or do something scary or hurtful.

So why on earth would my family stay around for this lunacy?

Before, it was probably because I was a mammoth provider when I worked in television. Today — not so much. So I become a mammoth homemaker. And in a snap, I turn into my mother – the 50’s housewife putting aside her desires, her writing – to take care of her spouse and kids. And you have to be real tough to pull that off.

My corner-man towels me off, shaking his head. “You’re not hard enough for that, kid. I seen some of the toughest ladies in the universe fight that fight and get flattened by a bitter madness that’s meaner than anything you can handle,” he says. “If you can’t stay focused, for crissake stay honest — fight with what you got.”

I tell him I don’t know what I’ve got to fight with. ADHD is dancing around in the ring looking bigger and stronger all the time. He can’t wait to pound me into screaming mush.

My corner-man slaps me. “It’s love, kid. That’s what you got — a whole family full of it. You fight with that, you can’t lose. Now get out there and show that bum who you are.”

So I do. And the old corner-man is right. The fight may never end, but ADHD or not, it’s the love we have for each other that gives all of us the reason and power to stay in the ring and prevail.

But keep an eye out for that nasty roundhouse right.

Besides Easy to Love but Hard to Raise, Frank South, a writer and performer, also contributes to {a mom’s view of ADHD}, writes articles for ADDitude Magazine, and writes the ADHD Dad blog for additudemag.com.

Earlier version published in additudemag.com

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Feb 02

ADHD & Hypomanic in the Principal’s Office

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“If you want to know where your heart is, look where your mind wanders.”  – Unknown, scrolled in the middle of a fluffy cloud on the side of a light blue coffee mug in a gift shop.

First, I know where the heck my heart my heart is. Second, my mind does not wander. In the middle of the night, using the distracting cover of dreams, my mind makes plans and plots quietly in secret. Then, sometime during the day when my guard is down, and when it can do the most damage, my mind breaks out of prison and flies into the high grass laughing like mad, the blood hounds braying in pursuit far behind.

It’s a couple of years ago, before we moved from Hawaii to Georgia.  I’m in a meeting with a principal at a private school where I’m being hired to do my ADHD show, Pay Attention. The principal, a kind and thoughtful woman in her thirties, has seen me do the show and thinks it’d be good for the teachers to experience ADHD “from the inside.”

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Dec 16

Bringing Down the ADHD Christmas Tree

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The clear glass angel shines and sparkles. It’s in the perfect place, with a blue light right behind it. It’s not hanging straight though. It’s caught up on a lower branch of the Christmas tree. If it was hanging free it would look a lot better, more like an angel is supposed to look. I can’t reach it yet. If I scoot back under and get back behind the tree I can fix it. Just a little farther, I’ve got it, but I need to break that little piece of the lower branch off I think – almost got it, if I get up on my knees… And then it’s moving away from me, the whole tree is moving away, falling, oh no… with a whoosh and a crash, the family Christmas tree falls to the living room floor. The water from the stand spreads on the rug, soaking through the wrapping on the presents.

My mom and dad rush in from the kitchen to find me standing over the lovingly decorated family tree like a seven-year-old Paul Bunyan. A blubbering, wailing Paul Bunyan terrified that he’s going to be punished horribly. His presents thrown into a pile and burned in the front yard, and he’d throw himself on top, a Christmas funeral pyre. This Paul Bunyan has an over-dramatic and morbid imagination.

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Oct 28

Scary Stuff: Halloween, ADHD, and Change

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“We are falling down, down to the bottom of a hole in the ground, smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, I’m so scared I can hardly breathe, I may never see my sweetheart again.”  –  John Prine, “The Bottomless Lake”

I originally wrote this piece in October 2009 for my blog at ADDitudemag.com, when we were still living in Honolulu.  I’ve rewritten it here to flesh it out some and clear out the clunky stuff.  Much has changed for us in the intervening years.  My wife’s mom lives with us in Georgia.  Our son has moved out and back to Hawaii. My daughter’s doing well in high school. Other good and bad stuff has happened and is happening as it does with all families, but I’ve left this piece in 2009, though it begins fifty years before that, because some things never change – Change makes me crazy.

It’s Halloween in Villa Park, Illinois, 1959. I’m ten-years-old in my homemade Zorro costume. My shadow on the moonlit sidewalk looks just like Guy Williams’ shadow in the TV show. I am Zorro — “a fox so cunning and free.” My friend David says it’s late; we have to get home with our treats before the teenagers came out to do their Halloween tricks. He’s worried that we’ve gone too far to get home in time with our sacks full of Milky Ways, Mary Janes and popcorn balls. I say there’s plenty more loot out here tonight for Zorro and his faithful companion Sancho Panza.

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Aug 11

The ADHD Double Tango

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Coco and me in a 5th grade talent show

My ADHD daughter, Coco, was thirteen years-old and dealing with her first year of middle school, and my ADHD son Harry was twenty and still living at home and the whole family including my non-ADHD wife Margaret and our way-too-intuitive dog were all still living in Honolulu, scraping by in paradise, when I wrote this post for my ADHD Dad blog at ADDitudemag.com.

A lot has changed in three years, we live in Georgia now, Harry has moved out, and my mother-in-law has moved in.  But the ADHD Tango between my daughter and I, goes on – the steps are more complex now that she’s in high school, but the challenge of the dance remains.

It’s last week, Friday afternoon – I’m on a deadline, trying desperately to finish an article that I’ve procrastinated even starting for days, and now it’s down to the wire. My wife and twenty-year-old son are at work and I’m home alone hunched over the computer calling myself stupidlazystupidstupidstupid when my thirteen-year-old daughter, Coco, comes slamming home from school. She grabs a banana from the kitchen, walks into my office, and with a big sigh plops down in the chair across the desk from me.

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Jul 24

My Daughter’s ADHD Rage and Mine

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Coco, Hawaii 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?” - Richard Russo, “Bridge of Sighs”

I wrote this in 2009 when we still lived in Hawaii, and I was beginning to understand how deeply similar my daughter and I are in temperament. “God, you guys – I’ll do my homework after I eat, okay? Stop bugging me about every stupid thing every stupid second! You make my life a nightmare!” With that, my fourteen-year-old ADHD daughter, Coco, storms into her room with her bowl of mac and cheese, and slams her door so hard it sounds like a gunshot, which sets the dog on a barking jag. Between barks I can hear Coco kicking the wall. I stand in the kitchen still holding the pot and spoon I made her dinner with, close my eyes, and keep my mouth shut. I am not going to respond in kind. I am going to breathe. Slow even breath in, slow even breath out.

I learned this from my last therapist. The therapist, who after years of slowly building mutual trust and rapport, deserted me to face the daily emotional pummeling of being a parent all by myself. So this nightmare, as my daughter calls it, is all his fault, the selfish creep. I should hunt him down and beat his head in with this mac and cheese spoon.

But he’s not a selfish creep. He set me up with another therapist before he closed his practice. And I’m not facing this parenting stuff alone. My wife, Margaret, is right here, sitting at the kitchen table. “Your cheese is dripping,” she says. Margaret has a less extreme approach to life. She sees the humor in both of our kids’ dramas. She watches as I put the spoon in the sink and wipe up the cheese sauce from the floor. Breathe in, breathe out.

“Are you okay?” “Mmm – hmm,” I nod, between slow even breaths. “Your problem is, you take things too much to heart,” Margaret says and smiles.

That’s a phrase we picked up from Richard Russo’s novel, “Bridge of Sighs,” describing Lucy, a man prone to occasional blackout spells who’s nearly immobilized by love, family, guilt and obligation and who I identified with intensely. It’s become a gentle joke between us, because I do. I take everything too much to heart. It’s not that I get my feelings hurt; it’s that I get immobilized by compassion. When Coco yells and explodes out of frustration, I identify with her intensely too. In her eyes I can see the overload crowding into her head pushing all rational thoughts into an airless corner where the only way out is to react and react big or you’re sure you’ll suffocate.

No matter how gently requests or questions are put to you – and sometimes that’s worse because then it sounds like condescending “careful of the mental patient” talk – but however it comes at you in a short amount of time or just the wrong time for you – you lash out to stop it, but you’re also lashing out at yourself inside your head looking to break apart this wall holding in the overload and let air in – just one second of quiet air – that’s all you want, and in the moment bright red rage is the only hope for release and you don’t give a damn about anyone else. A second later, you apologize and add that new bag of guilt onto the huge pile you carry around your whole life. And of course the pressure of that guilt adds to the next overload. So I’m always telling Coco, “No sorries, it’s all okay,” whenever she apologizes over small things, or even medium things.

I think we need to forgive others their slights and slips as much as possible. But more importantly we have to learn to forgive ourselves and maybe with some help from others work on adjusting how we handle things. Coco and I both have been working on our tempers and doing pretty well at it.

She told me what she does is slow things down and not talk. “It’s not that I’m not listening, Dad,” she says “I just don’t want to lose my temper and mess things up.” The more pressured she feels in her head the slower she takes it – whether it’s getting ready for school in the morning, doing homework, or getting ready for bed at night.

I don’t know what I can do about taking everything too much to heart, especially when it comes to those I love and value, but I can probably do better at shaking off the anxiety. I’ll work on adjusting that. I might try a little of Coco’s “go slow” approach myself.

 

Originally published 2009 www.additudemag.com

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May 27

Mysterio

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For my son, Harry, on his 23rd Birthday

“Learning disabled,” he said, “but bright.”
ADD, auditory tests, meds, therapy,
The doc’s toy animals smile from the shelves,
All the mystery of my son made simple, tied up tight

I chafe at labels, fear for stigma you’ll face,
But none of that noise touches you,
At your own speed, you grasp what sparks to you,
Indifferent to the ranting rivalry of the race

Now you’re off on your own,
On your first birthday away from home,
You’ve slipped free from my worrying arms,
And you’re working, laughing, grown

But back at Big Bear Lake you were nine
In the rented boat, poles out, lines in, quiet as monks
We drank cokes and waited for fish,
As our bobbers winked in the lake’s midday shine

At the lodge, laughing, we fell into a TV magic show,
Sharing Oreos as Mysterio’s cape made big things disappear,
That cape covered us too, and snapped us away into today
But my son, my mystery, you remember, I know.

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Mar 21

My Daughter’s Eyes

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A poem to my fifteen year-old daughter with ADHD, as she finishes her first year of high school.

By Frank South

What I see as you first grew,
is that you are frighteningly alive.
All appetite, curiosity, impatience,
Always searching, your eyes are blazing blue.

What I see as you grow,
is your wild hunger for the new, welded to
your anger at the ordinary. So you run,
desperate to expand what you know.

What I see as you wrestle with school,
is the fury of betrayal you turn toward
that odd-ball wiring in your head,
when it won’t remember a lesson or rule.

But what you can’t see is plain as fire to me.
The docs and meds are only tools
to help you keep your wild blue-eyed spirit free.
For you have no deficit that I can see.

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Feb 18

ADHD and Eye-Contact Between My Son and Me

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My ADHD/CAP son is moving out on his own and back to Hawaii next month and besides already missing him, I’ve been thinking back on all we’ve learned together about ADHD and all the comorbid conditions that we drag around with it in a little Learning Disabilities red wagon. I wrote this a year ago, when things were tense between the two us and I was looking for a way to break through to him.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you going to do the kitchen or not?”

There’s no answer. At least I think there’s no answer. It’s hard to tell because I’m talking to a closed door.

“Harry!”

My 21 year-old ADHD son is in his room on the other side of the door. We’re trying to break him of this rude habit of communicating to the family through hollow-core plywood. I’ve taken the door off the hinges and carted it out to the garage a couple of times, but then we’re all subject to the sight of his incredibly messy room, and the first time he promises to be a more responsive member of the household, we let him put it back up.

Once I took it down and put it back up before he even came back from school because I couldn’t take even walking by the open entrance of the nuclear waste dump where he sleeps, plays video games, practices guitar, and eats ramen noodles.

My son will tell you he’s not ADHD. He says terms like “ADHD non-hyperactive type” are stupid. He’ll cop to being maybe a little ADD, but he refuses to take his meds, and since he did pretty well this semester at the community college, we’re not fighting him on it.

But Jeeze-Louise, the kid’s twenty-one for god’s sake, and I can’t get him to clean the kitchen when I ask him to, or even open the door to his room when he’s talking, or in this case, not talking to me. We’ve always been a engaged full-service parenting operation, equipped with the standard arsenal of love, respect, rules, manners, discipline, expectations, rewards, consequences, and blah-blah-blah. We get tired and space some stuff out sometimes, but most of the time we’re there pushing for the best for our kids, I think, I hope.

But these days it seems that’s all I do with my son – push. I’m tired of always being the cop in this relationship; I’m tired of always being on his ass. Yes, he’s got learning disabilities, but so did I growing up.

Then, just before I go into a “When I was your age…” self-righteous rage, Harry opens his door and says, “Okay, okay… I was just getting my IPod.” Then he walks past me with headphones on and starts cleaning the kitchen – slowly, with one hand. His other hand is occupied with IPod adjustments. I’ve told him a kazillion times that cleaning is a two-handed job. I was a professional dishwasher at his age before moving up to grill cook and you have to grab work with both hands, the same way you have to grab life if you expect to get anything from it… anyway, you get the idea. Harry does too. That’s why he’s got Eminem pounding in his ears.

My son Harry’s ADHD and my ADHD are very different in a lot of ways – I’m an on-edge, jumpy, combined type with comorbid emotional and psychological doo-dads lurking in my head like unexploded bombs that go off with the smallest nudge, who has learned to use meds, power tools, or whatever it takes to bolt down my concentration to what’s in front of me.

But Harry’s ADHD, combined with his co-morbid auditory processing delay (which he also doesn’t like to admit to) has him buried down in a cavern, looking at the stuff that he’s gathered around him and not all that interested in venturing out into the sunlight to experience anything new.

For awhile it seemed like no matter what either Harry or I did, we were going to be stuck forever in this boring dance of hyperactive discipline and passive-aggressive rebellion. Then I noticed that when we talked to each other we barely looked each other in the eyes. We’d start with eye contact, and then we’d both slide off as our attention was drawn to other things while we were talking. It’s a small ADHD habit we share.

So, I’m trying something new. I keep my eyes on his when we talk – through the whole conversation. And, yes, I also try to talk about other stuff than what chores he should be doing.

But the eye thing really seems to make a difference. He looks back – eye contact. Yesterday we even shared a smile.

Originally published in additudemag.com 2010

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