Blog Post 2019

Seriously?

Anyway, let’s just rattle off some personal observations that argue for the accuracy of my ADD diagnosis – which, dear-Jesus-son-of-God, I STILL need to defend to myself, regularly reminding myself that yes, I really have ADD, and it’s not just a handy excuse embraced by some corner of my brain – the evil side, the one that takes the last cookie and hoards all the charging cords – perpetuating a lifelong fraud upon not only the rest of my brain but also The People In My Life, using my ADD to both explain and continue a life filled with a complete lack of diligence, discipline, follow-through, maturity, responsibility, reliability, promptness, attentiveness and helpfulness.

HOW I KNOW I HAVE ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER

1) The opening paragraph of this entry, which is all one sentence.

2) “Blog Post 2016” followed by “Blog Post 2019.”

3) Currently in pajamas despite getting up two and a half hours ago.

4) I wrote an awesome song parody about ADD that I would love to make into a video except I have no freaking clue which of the many of my kids’ old school notebooks contain the lyrics I jotted down.

5) Should I decide I should take a few minutes to see if I can find them, it will morph into an all-day project in which I clean two rooms that no one ever sees, and organize several boxes containing stuff that most reasonable people would simply throw away or donate into labeled boxes each containing newly-defined-and-sorted categories of stuff that most reasonable people would simply throw away or donate.

6) Should I then go on to make the video on a future day (having taken the necessary rest period after the day of room-detailing and item-sorting), I will lavish several hours upon the recording stage (including creating a homemade karaoke track when I decide the available ready-made ones are all too imperfect to use); several more upon the creating-the-visuals stage, more still upon the editing phase, all in the name of convincing eleven strangers around the world that I am talented and funny.

7) I still secretly rejoice when I wait until the last minute to do something and then still manage to pull it off. I showed THEM, boy howdy.

8) I have abandoned all pretense with family members: My go-to phrase in conversations at home has become “I’m sorry; start that story again because I wasn’t really listening.” If I’m feeling polite I will substitute “listening” with “focused.”

9) I hate making appointments because even with a calendar right in front of me, I manage to inadvertently create scheduling conflicts requiring additional calls to change the appointment I just made.

10) Cold half-mugs of coffee populate my home.

11) My attitude on any given day will be either “why bother?” or “I’m on a roll.” Those are the only states of being.

12) Acquiring insight into my ADD simply means that now I need to take one or two more steps in order to outwit my new insight. “Yes, I could end this feeling of overwhelm by simply picking one simple task and doing it, but I know what will happen: I will turn that simple task into a hyperfocus festival that consumes the entire day! And now I am overwhelmed anew!”

13) I am probably avoiding something right now by typing this blog post. Getting dressed, perhaps. But this blog post started because I was watching a video about tornadoes. I’d connect all the dots for you about how I went from watching the tornado video to this exact moment – because, believe me, I still can – but something tells me it probably wouldn’t add entertainment value.

But if you are a fan of tornado videos, I highly recommend Pecos Hank. Let’s see if I can add a link without getting sidetracked….

https://www.youtube.com/user/honkytonkblood

Cool.

I’m going to get dressed now.

(After I add a couple of illustrations. That should only take an hour and a half or so.)

Blog Post 2016

I could explain the lame title of this post with an equally lame joke: something along the lines of “Like it? It took me a whole year to think it up.”

Or I could say that I chose it to reflect the average frequency of my postings.

The truth is that I started with the title. I know, that’s where you, the reader, started it, but as the writer I can’t start there, because I’m not one of
those Mozart-freak-genius types who have the entire symphony composed in their heads before they pick up a quill. I can’t name this before it’s born – “I’ve always liked Christopher….” I must first meet this post, and that only comes after the long and painful labor rife with expletives and a desire for medication. Then, if I am lucky, the perfect title may perhaps coyly reveal itself from behind the corner of a convoluted paragraph, temptingly adorable. I type it at the top, and just as I hit POST it morphs into overly precious with a wink and a sickening giggle, but I keep it because some part of me still believes it will appear clever one day.

But I wasn’t planning to create an actual post; I was just idly testing my account to see if it was active after all this time, and replacing the prompt word “Title” seemed to be as good a test as any, so I thought up that scintillating humdinger of “Blog Post 2016” and began to type it into the title box.

B…..

L…..

It took so long for those first two keystrokes to travel the path from external keyboard up the Brontosaurus-tail-cable to my laptop screen that feared I might have to change the title to “Blog Post 2017.” Something was gumming up the works, and for once, it wasn’t my brain. I hovered, waiting. Accept my offering, blessed Motherboard….The suspense reached cinematic levels, early 1980s minus the green ASCII-font text; one of those close-up shots where we await the computer’s response, all eyes fixed on the cursor, waiting for it…to…reveal…the…message….

TOTAL-WORLD-ANNIHILATION-SEQUENCE: ACTIVATE?: Y/N_

The movie lingers for the ironic moment of the cursor blinking in indifferent silence….

No, not today! I’m going to resist the urge to hurl this ancient laptop across the room – though with tethered keyboard it would make an awesome spectacle – and instead be The Bigger Person. Yes, I’m fully aware I am the only person in this scenario; that’s what makes the tantrum a viable option in the first place. But no, here, with nobody watching (nor reading, in all probability) I will instead calmly pause the passionate artistry of creating this test page, and look for computer applications I can close in order to coax some speed out of this machine.

B…..R……B…….

Back, and trying again. Things got infinitely better once I closed my email. The process of closing it was, like the typing, aggravatingly slow, thanks to a brilliant upgrade I’d made to my email a couple of years ago. At the urging of my husband, who actually cares if the entire world knows our entire life, I added extra security layers to my email account. It worked; now my mail is Top-Secret from myself, securely hidden behind an error message about a server. Hillary Clinton keeps calling me to ask how she can get an account just like it.

Since I can read my email on my iPad, I’ve been steadfastly ignoring the MacBook email problem for the past two years, save for my genius plan of waiting for it to serendipitously fix itself in some future upgrade. Two years after implementing this method, I’m slowly embracing the reality that the solution lies in me actually doing something.

I suspect fixing it involves having a Top-Secret security text message sent to my cell phone. It just so happens that I’ve misplaced my cell phone and therefore its contents are also Top Secret at this time. For consistency’s sake, the same serendipity problem-solving method outlined above is the one I’ve put in place to locate the phone. Phone Progress Report: Three weeks and counting!

So the slowness of my computer is the result of the poor thing choking on the massive message backlog in the MacBook Mail queue. Cue music: “I Am the Very Model of a MacBook E-Mail Message Mess!” Alas, clicking on anything, like “Ignore,” or “Retry” or “QUIT THIS GODDAMNED BROKEN EMAIL THAT ALWAYS AUTOMATICALLY LAUNCHES AT STARTUP EVEN THOUGH I’VE CHANGED THE SETTINGS IN THREE DIFFERENT PLACES TO MAKE IT NOT DO THAT GODBLESSITFUCKINGDAMN!!” unleashes a flashback of calendar-alert reminders, ping, ping, ping. It’s a hideous rapid-fire sequence of old dental appointments, school concerts, other people’s birthdays, sign-up deadlines, and all the other obligations I’ve ever asked my computer to scold me about. Press key, induce panic attack.

That feature is new since the last upgrade, and I don’t much care for it. As with all the email problems, I have waved it away with a big old “FQ.” That’s for Force Quit, as in, “You don’t need to run this application; these are not the emails you are looking for.”

So it looks like my test page really wants to be a full-fledged entry. And I’m willing to indulge. I’ve missed this whole blogging business (ha, ha, business – good one). Yes, it’s got great acoustics, being all big and empty of readers. It didn’t matter because I only ever do this because I love the sound of my own writing voice bouncing back at me.

But the entries had been getting  progressively less funny. And I care deeply about my audience. If I wasn’t making myself laugh, then what was the point? I mean, I fervently hope for laughs from you, accidental reader out there in random Internet space, but they’re hard to hear. If I am laughing I can pretend that you are, too, and that makes me happy. Making my future self laugh is pretty cool, too. And I wasn’t laughing; Future-Now-Past-Self (damn, that’s complicated) was just reading, then scrolling, then wincing and moving on. My posts all seemed to trend towards…random medical complaints. My blog had become the grumpy old lady at the wedding reception that you get stuck sitting next to and never figure out exactly how she is related to anybody.

I think it got that way because I was attempting to put this blog in a compartment. This was supposed to be my ADD blog, for an ADD audience. I had another blog, supposedly devoted to my life in general, but it had started as part of a silly fandom and thus the chronology of public posts was peppered with friends-only entries. I’d become uncomfortable adding to it; I felt I was just adding dots for readers to connect Actual Me to all the Weird I’ve ever posted on the Internet. My readership was never more than a dozen, but I fretted all the same.

The ADD blog was always going to be anonymous, because I didn’t feel – still don’t feel – terribly comfortable revealing this fact to those who know me save for my husband and kids. I fear being accused of copping out, accepting a fad diagnosis, being lazy, needlessly medicating, etc. I wanted to vent about that in this blog. I think I did, somewhere in this blog, because this was that blog, The Brain Fog Blog,  a blog about ADD, specifically, my personal journey through an ADD diagnosis and the resultant changes in my life strategies.

Yes, I was trying to focus my blogging, at the same time that I was trying to focus myself.

The result, oddly enough, was altogether too much focus. The blog pinpointed down into sexy sentences such as these:

“I got a couple of whiteboard weekly calendars – one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom mirror – but it seems I only update them every other week.”

“10 mg less didn’t seem to change much, so at the next appointment I asked to go down another 10.”

“Too headachy, tired, etc. this morning to accomplish the original list of tasks slated for today…”

The last post even included some commentary on the state of my gastrointestinal tract. Why I thought anyone cared isn’t even worth pondering, because I was probably well aware nobody would. Why I felt I needed to express those thoughts in permanent form is more of a puzzle: Did I want to remember this later? And if so, was this really the best location? Here, in the long thoughtful passages of the blog, so I could rediscover it and feel the joy anew, exulting in the beauty of my dancing prose?

Sure, I could reboot the thing, make another one, new layout, new title. And maybe I will, someday, after this, The World’s Longest Test Page, is posted. But I’m going with change via the lazy, serendipitous method because unlike fixing and finding electronic gadgets, I actually get results when I let my writing unfold. Yes, it ends up being absurdly long, one of those “too long; didn’t read” posts. I have to stop worrying about that crap. Especially since the people who use that phrase went on to become even more impatient and now just type tl;dr. And I worry that these folks will think I’m lazy.

So maybe this is really still some kind of test post after all. What do I want to write, and who is it for?

Test post. No proper subject, no focus, just a long free-association. Sure, I’ve edited it; mostly for things like typos, and better humor, and occasional clarity. I’ve jazzed it up with some photos. I’m already happy because I want to edit it. Those posts about my Vyvanse dosages I couldn’t wait to get away from. But this all-over-the-map test post, I’ve enjoyed hanging out with it.

Maybe somebody whose motto isn’t tl;dr might enjoy it, too. That probably doesn’t include an ADD person, which may be another problem with me attempting to write a blog for that audience. And yet I’ll post it here, in this existing blog about ADD, and pretend the connection is that ADD folks love to go all over the map, because they do. That’s one thing I share in common with them and makes me think, yes, maybe I am in the club after all. That’s where that silly serendipitous method comes from. I don’t find gloves by looking in the glove compartment. I find them by absent-mindedly sticking my hands in the pocket of a long-forgotten coat: Hey, I’ve been looking for those! Why search, when you can discover?

It’s time to say goodbye, Blog Post 2016, and send you out into the Internet. I hope somebody discovers you. Me, I’ll be hoping to discover my cell phone before Blog Post 2017 rolls around.

 

Time Away and TMI

Hello, ancient blog!

I’m just plunging right in after my long hiatus; as I write this I don’t remember when I last posted. I’d like to check back to see, but I won’t, since that’s sure to throw me off task. *Awards self Gold Star for deflecting ADD trap*

I did read some of my old posts a couple of days ago, right after I decided it was time to renew my effort to remember how to get in here and post. (The basic source of my confusion, by the way, was a new computer that didn’t have the site bookmarked).

I’m really glad I did document some of those early-journey days…things have changed since then, ADD-wise. They’ve settled into various grooves, one after another.

Acceptance…for a while.

Then – well, not quite denial so much as hitting the Ignore button. That was partly due to a nasty GI mystery that took off 5 pounds and shifted my focus from brain to body. Since I’d been fine on the Vyvanse, we were pretty sure it wasn’t the cause of my troubles, so I continued to take it on schedule, but otherwise didn’t give the ADD business much thought. I stopped reading the self-help books, I stopped going to Totally ADD and just tried to Get Stuff Done. That worked…for a while. 

As my bowels calmed down, I began noticing my brain was pretty irritable a lot of the time, and my ADD doctor noticed I had a very slight tremor in my hands, so we backed down on the Vyvanse dosage (I was at 70). 10 mg less didn’t seem to change much, so at the next appointment I asked to go down another 10.

In the middle of all this dosage adjusting I hurt my back shoveling snow. That meant a bunch of other meds and moods to deal with. Perhaps not the best time to go fiddling with my Vyvanse dosage. For a while I got monstrously depressed, to the point where I didn’t even know whether my back was doing better because that would have involved getting up off the couch. I finally resorted to a bit of self-medicating, in the form of some Prozac I’d been prescribed for PMS to take on an as-needed basis. I started taking one every day…really what I did was kind of slide from the PMS days over into the next month, and then on through the next PMS cycle. Now that the period’s here (this has to rate as the most TMI post in the blog) I’m stopping the Prozac. Also because my bowels seem to be acting up again.

OK, that’s the end of the TMI part, I hope. I only wrote all that down to remind myself what brought me here at this moment, since I’ve been meaning and wanting to write any sort of blog anything for the last….well, However Long It Was Since Last Post. So to sum up, three things. No, four. (Not including Bright Red Outfits).

Going down to 50 mg – perhaps I need to have a certain amount of ADD-ish-ness to “waste the necessary time” to write.

Being sick – Too headachy, tired, etc. this morning to accomplish the original list of tasks slated for today, which included putting my plants in the planter, folding laundry, and assembling an IKEA dresser. Because I still don’t have a handle on an appropriate amount of tasks for a given time period.

Being depressed – It’s always navel-gazing time in Depressionland!

And finally, something good: I read excerpts from my Other Blog to my daughter the other evening, and we both laughed. Perhaps for different reasons, but I’d like to think she found my sense of humor as genius as I happened to as I re-discovered all those clever life observations I’d made. Something about it inspired her to run upstairs to begin writing her own blog, which of course she plans never to let me read, but all the same, it made me think perhaps it was time to unleash a few more great thoughts, if only for the sake of personal history and personal future reading pleasure.

And there is a lot about the ADD stuff that I still want to talk about. There’s a lot that I still haven’t worked through. Worse, there’s a lot that I thought I was working through that continues to trip me up, sometimes in the literal sense (Hello, procrastinated clutter!). I’d like to start talking about it again. Because it’s dawning on me that I won’t get it all done, and it’s time for me to pick my priorities before stupid habits and other people’s needs choose them for me.

I hope to be back soon. On a regular basis, even? I hope you’ll follow along, even for a short time. Honestly, I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up. Most things I take up anew seem to last about three weeks before I move on (ADD thing, I know). However, blogging was a longstanding hobby so I don’t know if it counts as a new thing to my ADD mind or not. We’ll see.

 

 

 

OK, Trying Again With the Owl

 

Because it’s just so damned cute. Real writing coming very very soon.

Is This Thing On?

Somehow I forgot how to get into my blog and post stuff….Yeah, it’s probably the ADD. This is a test post. If there’s an adorable owl somewhere in this post it’s all systems go, baby!

Progress Report

The worst thing about letting your blog lapse into dormancy is the awkward walking-back-in moment: “Hi! Remember me? And my blog? Where have I been? Oh, those busy, busy holidays…” It’s every bit as excruciating to type as it is to read.

And yet if I just jump in and start as if my last post was dated yesterday instead of two whole seasons ago it somehow feels less than genuine.

So maybe instead of trying to do some kind of long, musing post – my usual style – I’ll just free-associate some random observations about adjusting to the whole ADD business.

First of all, I am still adjusting, in the sense that I haven’t just…well, added it to some mental file drawer and moved on. ADD is still a “hot topic” for me, something on the short list of Stuff On My Mind. Naturally, it’s partly because there’s a daily reminder in the form of a pill that I take: Good Morning! You have ADD! But I don’t have the same reaction to, say, my birth control pills: Good Morning! You have functional ovaries! No, it’s just the ADD med that seems to have some sort of added significance amongst the assortment in my day-of-the-week reminder box.

One issue that never seems to permanently resolve is do I really, really, REALLY have ADD?

At least once a week I feel like some kind of faker, or whiner, or something. She couldn’t handle the workload, so she got some drugs! It doesn’t help that those family members I’ve told seem to keep the idea at arm’s length, for various reasons. (A future post topic, most likely.) And it really doesn’t help when I’m out and about in the world, and I encounter somebody – kids, usually, because with three of my own I’m around a lot of kids – and my first thought is “Wow, is he ever ADD.”

Because I quickly realize I’m saying it from some place I have never occupied. I was never like these kids myself. Of course it’s the same forces at work that keep inattentive types from being discovered: I’m seeing the hyperactive kids, they’re the ones that everybody notices, including me. But all the same, the behaviors they exhibit are so unlike anything I’ve ever done in life, that it’s hard to imagine I have anything in common with them.

Maybe it’s like this for others who receive the inattentive dianosis, with the symptoms that, for the most part, can’t be seen. Sure, sometimes people catch me not paying attention. Sure, I can go in and say “I suck at paying attention.” But how does the doctor know – and, for that matter, how do I know – that I’m not just suffering some humungous bout of insecurity? That nagging feeling of I could do better – what does it really mean?

How much more useful it would be if doctors could see inside my head, count the number of times I’m Someplace Else? And even more useful still if doctors could see inside everybody’s head, and count everybody’s Someplace Elses? You could plot it all on a graph, just like height and weight in the pediatrician’s office.  “Let’s see, your attention level puts you in the fifteenth percentile; let’s think about trying some medication.”

Instead, of course, it’s pretty much all up to me, and whether the doctor agrees with my self-assesments. Every visit, I’m given a fresh copy of that same old form:”How often do you fail to pay close attention to tasks etc etc etc….” Never, Rarely, Sometimes….The pen hovers. Um, never! If I’m not seeing it, how do I know I’m missing it?… No, make that All the time, because I just know I could do better! How about I just split the difference and say Sometimes….And can I have a fresh copy of this questionnaire, please?….

Currently I’m at 50 mg Vyvanse. We’ve been steadily ramping me up, 10 additional mg every three months, and the big puzzle, always, is, where do I stop? Am I still seeing a benefit? Am I seeing more benefits than at 40, at 30? It’s so hard to know – I find myself sitting in the doctor’s office, weighing ridiculous things in my head – is a good 40 mg day equal to a bad 50 mg day?

Can my oops moments be quantified? Three yesterday, two today? There are so many ways to screw up: Is a forgotten load of laundry that never makes it to the dryer worth more, or fewer, points than losing track of time and making your kid late to ballet class? That box I’ve been meaning to move upstairs, the one that is still sitting there…is that one point, or five, for the number of times I’ve thought “I’ve got to move that box,” and somehow managed not to complete the thought with the action? Should the math be based on duration, or consequence? It only takes a fraction of a second to forget that you can’t move a hot pot back onto the burner without an oven mitt….

So, nearly one year in, and still plagued with doubt. That kinda stinks.

As far as tangible improvements….

I guess the biggest is I’ve stopped missing appointments. I just wish I could figure out why. I got a couple of whiteboard weekly calendars – one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom mirror – but it seems I only update them every other week. As in, it’s still last week around here, according to my whiteboard. But maybe the meds are helping me follow through long enough to write a quick note when the confirmation call comes in.

As for my household tasks, well, I had this whole lovely system I designed where I assigned a chore to each day of the week. Things were going well for a while, but then my part-time job started up again, and then, phhhht. It wasn’t too obvious things were going to seed at first, because my initial cleanup efforts were pretty thorough. But now things are starting to pile up in rooms I’d cleaned out, and my vanity – the beginning of the new me, the very first area I straightened up – is a disaster. I merely have to stand in front of it, and things fall off onto the floor – ka-dink! What was that? I didn’t even touch anything!!!

OK, admittedly, there’s another force at work there. In January I got braces. Yes, having them in high school wasn’t enough fun; I had to go do it all again here in middle age. I wouldn’t have bothered except that my bite was getting so off-kilter that my upper and lower teeth were nearly strangers. The othodontist’s first question after looking in my mouth: “How do you chew?” Not very well, thanks, and here’s your enormous check.

Dental floss (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s why ADD and braces are not a stellar combination: Flossing. It’s awkward enough sending all that string into the nooks and crannies of my teeny-tiny mouth, but now I’ve got this wire fence around everything, and so I have to use these floss threaders and maneuver the string underneath the wire, then back out again, then over to the next tooth, except which one is the next tooth? By the time I’ve worked my way out from under, I’ve completely lost track of what tooth I’m on, and since I’m sort of crazy-afraid of gum disease, well, that means I have to err on the side of caution, meaning I’m probably flossing the same teeth over and over again, and it takes something like twenty minutes to go through the entire oral hygiene routine, and my vanity now has to have room for all sorts of new mouth rinses and a Water Pik and special toothpaste and regular toothpaste and itty-bitty bristly things and so, no, it’s not really at its sparkly best, my vanity, and that goes for whatever vanity you happen to be discussing.

And that’s how I’m doing. Better, but there’s still room for improvement. Right now, that’s about all there’s room for around here.

The View From Halfway Across

 One week ago I was screaming at my phone.

Not screaming *into* it – this wasn’t some sort of 911 moment, nor was I having a particularly violent verbal argument.

I was screaming at my phone because I didn’t know how to answer it.

This is the sort of story that, minus the screaming part, would make my kids laugh. Can’t you just hear the incredulity in my middle-schooler’s voice? “You don’t know how to ANSWER your phone?” OMG! Awk-ward!

I might have seen it that way, too, before the whole ADD business (OMG, I’m ADD!) entered my life. My middle-aged life.

I wonder how many people get diagnosed – as I did – in middle age?

Even if you allow that Totally ADD’s targeted audience is adults, it seems like there are a lot of us in the fortyish age bracket posting in the forum, and lot of those same folks are there because we’re new to this whole the-way-I-am-has-a-name business, we’re just now suspecting we are ADD, or we’re newly diagnosed.

Back when we Gen-Xers were kids, procrastinating with the help of Happy Days, waiting impatiently in line to see Star Wars, and hyperfocusing on video games only as long as we had a supply of quarters, people didn’t know so much about ADD. That’s probably the biggest of a whole bunch of reasons people my age didn’t get diagnosed sooner…..

But I’m not really interested in the reasons people don’t get diagnosed, or why they fly under the rADDar. Har-dee-har-har.

What I’m really interested in is, why DO they get diagnosed now? What strange and mysterious forces got us to pencil ADD Evaluation in between Dishwasher repairman and Soccer game and PTA meeting and Root Canal?

Why now?

Answer: Hormones! End of blog entry!

You only wish. I’m just getting started….

OK, it’s true, if you’re a woman, there’s a hormonal component to your ADD symptoms. As there is to everything else, right? We are constantly under the influence, at least until menopause, but for now we mid-lifers have “perimenopause,” some sort of hormonal dress rehearsal for the Change, complete with a costume parade of weird symptoms, one after another coming out of the wings. Preeeee-senting: breast tenderness! fatigue! decreased sex drive! irregular periods! vaginal problems! bladder problems! difficulty sleeping! And don’t forget the thrills and chills of the Mood Swing, as it soars to astonishing heights and plummets with dizzying drops….

OK, so what does this have to do with ADD? It turns out estrogen helps your brain messages get through, so when it drops during such times as 1) the last few days before your period or 2) with perimenopause, things can get noticably more muddled. Which is lots of fun if you’re already wrestling with a major case of PMS. I! LOST! MY! FUCKING! KEYS!!!  I didn’t notice the muddleheadedness at first, because it was completely overshadowed by the bad moods, and it became a chicken-or-egg question: Did I get lost because I was so pissed off, or did I get lost and THEN get pissed off?….

But after several months of these sorts of events, I began to notice that I just couldn’t trust my brain after about the 24th of every month. Whether this was new, I can’t say, but noticing it, that was new.

The next thing I noticed was that some of the symptom lists for perimenopause included  “confusion” or “cognitive difficulties.”

Thank God, I would say, it’s not Alzheimer’s!

I was actually really worried about this, that it could be Alzheimer’s. OK, sure, early forties is a bit young, I would tell myself as I fumbled through my purse in a daze, but what if I had one of those TV-movie versions, the tragically early-onset Alzheimer’s, mercilessly swift? Didn’t a lot of my goof-ups have a sort of “senior moment” quality to them? “Do you know you have two pairs of reading glasses on your head?” No, and thanks for telling me where they were; I’ve been looking all over!

So I was worried, yes, but in the end we fortysomethings are pretty rational, it’s not like we go to the doctor asking to be screened for Alzheimer’s and the test comes out ADD instead. It’s more a worry about the the condition everyone has, from birth: Mortality.

When you hit forty the lapses you are having, and the coping mechanisms required, take on an ominous significance – Wow, does this note on my steering wheel make me look old? You start tuning in to things, you’re suddenly on the alert for things that detract from that young, hip, vital image you’re struggling to maintain, and when you’re on the alert, boy, do you start seeing stuff.

Image via Wikipedia

Or you would, except that your vision’s going. This was actually another factor pointing me to diagnosis. Suddenly I needed glasses, and because I wasn’t wearing glasses for most of my life, I didn’t have a good glasses strategy going on. It’s all the worse since right now I only need them for reading. Which would be fine if I was just talking about reading in a cozy chair by the window, but it turns out I’m reading when I’m cooking, taking medicine, or sorting the kids’ underpants. Who knew? Does this tag say small or medium?…And where the hell are my glasses?

Do my glasses make me look old? No, dear, because you never actually wear them….

In a way, an ADD diagnosis was a reprieve, a little hit from the fountain of youth. You don’t have an old-people disease, you have a kids’ disease! Not really, of course, but the fact remains that the bread-and-butter of the ADD specialists is still kids. When I visit my ADD doctor, there are Disney movies playing in the waiting room. Probably the most well-traveled mid-life road to diagnosis is via the diagnosis of one of the children in the family. Not so for me, but it may yet happen in reverse, as there’s there’s one of our kids we’ve got our eye on …

For me, the biggest factor in my diagnosis at age 46 is the good old classic midlife crisis.

I’m not talking about the red-sports-car and trophy-wife version. That’s a guy thing. See, women get mood swings and bladder problems, and guys get sex and fun cars. Where is the justice?

What I’m talking about goes across the gender board: That dead-of-night when you’re lying in bed asking yourself What have I accomplished? If you don’t have a good answer for that one, you’ve got a midlife crisis on your hands.

Me, I don’t even need to be lying in bed. I can have a midlife crisis — I kid you not — driving over a bridge. Not because I want to jump off it, but because midway across this thought will suddenly pop into my head: Somebody designed this bridge.

Or I’ll be shopping in Target and I realize Somebody’s in charge of all these employees, in this one store. And somebody’s in charge of all those people who are in charge. Or I’ll use some stupid innocuous little thing, like a can opener, and think Somebody makes these all day long, and Somebody else invented can openers….

That used to be, I don’t know, just sorta cool and interesting, but now it’s a source of total awe and angst. Because these people are grown-ups, and….

Well, damn. So am I. How’d that happen? Answer: over a shockingly long period of time, you old dinosaur, but the truth is, I didn’t really see myself as a grown-up until very recently, and so the fact that normal human people did all this stuff didn’t blow my mind because I just figured some day I’d grow up and grasp what it’s like to be comptent at stuff that was actually important. Sure, I was an adult, if you checked my ID, but as a grown-up I was pretty much faking it (like when I had to sign mortgage papers) or secretly rejecting it (I am so above the conversation at this party; are we going to talk about anything besides the names of good electricians and which route is the fastest downtown?).

And as I began to realize I was being left in life-accomplishement dust, my immature way of looking at the world began to be sort of like wearing my hair long. Can I still work this look? Because after a certain point, it just starts getting…a little pathetic.

Kind of like my own career, or lack thereof. Jobs, yes, I had those, but I never landed with certainty on That One Thing I Really Wanted to Do, and thus I never had anything that went above entry level, and I beat a hasty retreat to at-home motherhood as soon as I could. These days I do a couple of things very part-time. In the rest of my time I marvel that folks my age are surgeons and executives and professors and pilots and engineers and inventors. And here I sit, lucky if I can figure out how to simply use the things they invent…..

Such as my smart phone, which is clearly rejecting me, its incompatible host.

 

You’re Not ADD; You Have Three Kids!

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This was my mother’s response to me when I told her I was concerned that I might have ADD. “You’re not ADD; you have three kids!”

At times I have to laugh at the way it lands on the ear. As in, Look, there’s your proof: three times in your life, you could focus on something!

Of course that’s not what she meant when she said it. This was her way of reassuring me, one mother to another. She had three kids, so she has a certain perspective. Even so, it wasn’t all that reassuring. You mean it’s supposed to be this way?

My youngest is seven, my oldest twelve. If I could have done the math on the spot and figured out how many years of chaos that equaled I’d have gotten depressed, but instead I got – well, I don’t know, exactly. I remember being somewhere between embarrassed and angry. Frustrated? It doesn’t really matter now; the conversation was over, I was going to have to work this one out some other way, and I did, I took my life story, the one my mother knew fairly intimately, over to a doctor, one who had two kids herself, and she said ADD, and as of this writing I haven’t shared the news of my diagnosis with my mother. That’s a topic for another day, I guess.

But I do often catch myself thinking there is indeed a gray area between what parenting does to your head and what ADD does to it. There’s some decided overlap there.

Take the inattentiveness, my first and foremost symptom. All my life I have tuned out of conversations and lectures, but typically I struggle to at least try to stay in the game. Put a grade-schooler in a car seat at the very back of a minivan, and it is simply too much work for too little payoff. How did your car happen to leave the road, Ma’am? Well, I was engaged in a spirited debate about whether my favorite Pokémon character was Pikachu or Torterra….

In fact, this is a situation where having three kids actually helps, because they can have these spirited debates with one another, and I can just drive and sing along to my iPod. But the fact is, I willfully and habitually ignore my children to a rather shocking degree. I think that might be why my middle child starts every sentence – even the most inconsequential – with, “Hey, Mommy!”

Then we move on down the checklist: impatience. All I can say here is, what parent has watched a child tie a shoe and never ever leapt in to finish the job?

Which ties neatly in with chronic lateness. Especially when you discover the shoes must first be found, and untied, before they can be tied. And what childhood activities don’t require bring-alongs, be they uniforms, equipment, bags, or books? Where is your coat? Where are your shin guards? There’s no way to leave early enough to account for every eventuality a child can serve up, even if you have them sleeping in cleats and toe shoes. Because the most uttered words in childhood are “I didn’t have to go then!”

Maybe I don’t have to even say anything about the quick temper/short fuse symptom.

Interrupts others. “Hey, Mom, I have a question and I wanted to ask you….Um…The question is….If you wanted to make….if you wanted to make….this….If you have a….a….What I’m trying to say is….if I want to make….Well, the thing is….”

Go ahead, listen to that and try not to speak before the question is actually asked. I’ll time you.

Talks excessively. Absolutely, every day. Just ask my husband, who gets an earful after the kids are finally asleep.

Misses appointments. Don’t even get me started. First you have to work out all the regular weekly stuff – ballet on Monday, Tae Kwon Do on Tuesday, piano on Wednesday, etc. That’s bad enough, but of course not all three children are in ballet, or Cub Scouts, so you have to work out the different combinations of who’s going, who’s just going along for the ride, who’s old enough to stay home, and that is starting to sound a lot like math. If Child A has to be picked up from ballet at 5:30 p.m. and Child B has to be dropped off at Tae Kwon Do at 6 p.m., at what time must Mommy make dinner?

And don’t forget, To Every Thing There Is A Season, so by the time you get it all worked out, half your schedule changes; suddenly your child is not being picked up promptly at 4:30 from Mad Science because you didn’t even remember that you signed him up for Mad Science: that was in early September, but the class didn’t start until mid-October….

And then there are the other appointments, the one-time ones, but that’s not really accurate, because they just keep coming and coming…the orthodontist, the eye exam, the flu shot, the checkup, the random den meeting, the field trips, the spontaneous play dates. I need a note for the bus! I’m supposed to have a bag lunch! And the ever-popular I need twenty-four cupcakes for the party tomorrow!

These things are clichés, right? The suburban mom taxi driver, shuttling the kids around all day and screaming “CALGON, TAKE ME AWAYYYYYY!” I’m guessing most of you are too young to remember that commercial, but I know my mom remembers it. Because it was aimed at her, and all the harried moms. The narrator’s voice intones The phone! The dog! The doorbell! The children! And then Mom shouts the magic words, and the images of all these noisemakers swirl away to reveal Mom relaxing in a bubble bath.

It’s an old commercial, before the word “multitasking” came along. These days, the triumphant ending would show Mom being in the bubble bath with the dog and the children, talking on the phone.

Or maybe the children and the dog would be outside ringing the bell, and the guy who had previously been at the door would now in the tub with Mom….

Sometimes a wandering mind can be fun!

Where was I? Oh, yes, our chaotic mom lives, multiplied by three. Except that, as I said, I don’t do math. I do windows, however, if only occasionally. Right now I’m trying to make the kids do them. But the point is, kids are messy. Three kids are super-messy. Three kids have three times as much stuff, they bring home three times the school papers, they make three times as many loads of laundry…. So, yeah, it takes me longer to do the laundry, it takes me longer to sort the papers, to clean the house. Normal, right?

How in the world can I tell? I guess I have to compare.

Other people I know have three kids, and they seem way more put together than I am. These tend to be people we met via my husband, or people in the neighborhood, or parents we met at school.

Then there are other people we know who seem to be living the same kind of crazy as me, or crazier. Interestingly, these tend to be the people I knew first, and introduced to my husband. My old school buddies. My family….

Clearly I needed some other yardstick, so for a time I turned to the books. There are a few out there written for women. Their value, alas, was somewhat limited. My favorite example was a checklist in a book called Moms With ADD. The list had this header: You May Need Therapy If…. I hasten to point out that this was an earnest list, not a humorous one. One item in the list was You sometimes walk into a room and forget why you are there. I think everyone has done that one more than once, haven’t they?

On that very same list was You have left your child in the supermarket shopping cart and had to drive back to get him or her. Wow. At that point, do you really need a book to tell you to get help? I would imagine your very next stop would be therapy, assuming you managed to elude outright arrest. “Analyze me, but make it quick; I’ve got ice cream that needs to go in the freezer.”

Then I tried Sari Solden’s Women with Attention Deficit Disorder, since it seemed to be recommended by many. For a while I was thinking maybe this one spoke to me – “Do you feel bombarded in grocery stores or shopping malls?” – Hey, she’s talking about Grocery-Store Head! But the connection was tenuous, mostly because her typical Woman With ADD seemed to be someone who was putting forth a noble, courageous effort to complete her tasks and couldn’t understand why she spent her entire weekend organizing. Whereas I saw myself more as someone who simply couldn’t be bothered and spent my entire weekends avoiding the unpleasantness of it all. I felt almost unworthy of the diagnosis.

The literal icing on the cake for that book was the anecdote about a woman who tripped coming up her front walk with her grocery bags, and somehow a frosted cake ended up in a tree. That just seemed far more spectacular than anything I’d ever done. In fact, I never have a problem getting the groceries in the door. I even get the cold stuff into the fridge and the freezer. The rest of it might sit in bags for a day or two, but that’s normal, right?

Or is it? This is what my life has become: running everything through the filters. Run it through the busy-mom filter. Nah, I’m thinking most moms put all their groceries away most of the time. Run it through the ADD filter: Bingo! An incomplete task in which the challenging parts have been done!

The book that I found to apply to me most was Understanding Women With AD/HD by Kathleen Nadeau and Patricia Quinn. It’s not too surprising because I remember watching a video about women and ADD with Patricia Quinn and thinking “This woman’s totally got my number.” The book has a checklist that is one of the most thorough I’ve ever seen. I was checking off all sorts of stuff on it, astounded that my hatred of fluorescent lights could be attributed to ADD. If you’re looking for validation, you will likely find it there.

Strangely enough, once my mother made the “three kids” statement, I never felt like I could look at my own childhood home life for perspective. I was one of three kids, but what if I had ADD all that time? What if my mother did? What if my whole family did? I’m pretty sure my dad’s a no, but a case could be made for everybody else. What do I even remember? How do you step back from what you assumed was normal? How much chaos was there, but hidden from me? How much was my chaos overshadowed by someone else’s?

I remember our house was messy (and still is), but I think of it as my mother’s conscious choice; she doesn’t like the mess, but she feels cleaning is less important than sitting and relaxing after dinner, or enjoying a beautiful day, or being involved in activities. For a long time I admired that way of thinking, and I still do, but over time it has begun to dawn on me that I have an inner Neat Freak. I don’t like the mess, I don’t like the clutter. I despise grime and grubby surfaces! I can’t relax if the place is too unkempt. I’ve just never been able to tackle the problem.

Mostly because I couldn’t decide what was causing the problem. On good days I imagined myself to be above it all; like my mom, I had better things to do. On bad days I assumed I was just horrifically lazy. On neutral days I chalked it up to having had a poor housekeeping role model, and some bad habits.

Most often I simply said I had no time. Because, sure, I can’t deny the logic that says 3 kids divided by 24 hours equals something less than a whole. I’d give you an exact number, but I just can’t be bothered to do the math.

Maybe that’s what makes the ADD diagnosis so appealing. Adding is easy math, right? Except that we know ADD isn’t something you acquire. You always have it. It’s ironic, in fact, the reason so many people don’t know they have it is that they just assume this is what life is, this way of thinking and doing. And that was me, thinking I was lazy, spacey, undependable, but what did it really matter?

And then I had three kids, and suddenly it all got harder.

And it began to matter tremendously.

No, it isn’t supposed to be this way. My kids are not supposed to be the last ones picked up from every birthday party. My kids are not supposed to open their school lunch and discover their sandwiches are just two empty slices of bread because Mommy forgot to put anything inside them. My kids are not supposed to be digging through the dirty laundry looking for a pair of pants to wear.

And my son should not have to start every sentence with “Hey, Mommy!”

Yes, I have three kids.

And if it weren’t for them, I’d have never found out about my ADD.

Signs of a Struggle

 Before I was aware of my ADD, I considered a lot of my organizing troubles to be due to lack of sleep (first as a student, later as a new parent). At some point the kids started sleeping through the night, and the most logical explanation for muddleheadedness crossed over to advancing age.

I only had to look around my in-laws’ house to realize that being old required some rather inelegant coping strategies. Things like light-switch plates with the names of each light scrawled above: PORCH, FOYER, STAIRS, POST LAMP. Those aggressive block capitals, written in fat red permanent marker, would follow me all around the house during every visit. Commands barked out from the backs of old envelopes scotch-taped to the paneling. WATER BILL. CALL DOCTOR. VITAMIN SALE CVS. TRASH PICKUP.

The bulletin board that was meant to be the place for temporary papers had instead become an unchanging art display of old wallet-size photos and souvenir key rings. Thumbtacked there is a yellowed envelope marked RECEIPTS, the word underscored with a big red swoosh, as if to emphasize a longstanding argument. How many times do I have to tell you, stop tossing them on the dresser?!?

Naturally the bathroom is also full of large handwritten labels, either because the print on the pill bottles is too small, or because a hand-soap dispenser has been re-purposed as LOTION, or because there are personal items that require a personal name. And, of course, there are more reminders here, taped up to the mirror, along with a long list of medications, which is protected with a sheet of plastic cling-wrap taped on top.

Admittedly, my in-laws have probably always been more about function than form. It’s hardly a decorator’s touch that accounts for the fact that next to the toilet are two nearly identical plastic wastebaskets. One is lined with a bag and contains what you might expect; the other is full of magazines and crossword puzzle books. A handwritten note on torn scrap paper taped to the second one says NOT TRASH.

Still, it disturbed me, all this senior graffiti, both in its imperative quality and the simple fact of it. When you get old, you will neither trust your eyes nor your mind! What was it like to live this way, your own finger constantly wagging in your face? PUT OUT RECYCLING! BROKEN – DO NOT USE! CHANGE OIL!

And then it started following me home, in a way. We’d ask the in-laws to watch the kids, and we’d come home to notes taped to the stove: BAGELS IN FREEZER. G. HAS A RASH. FRED SMITH CALLED. On the table would be a stack of magazines, covers ascrawl: PAGE 167: SUNSCREEN. IMPORTANT INFO! KIDS NEED AT LEAST 50+. READ AND SAVE.

No matter how many times we would tell them where the pen and paper were, they “could never find it.” And so they’d tear ragged sheets off our pristine printer paper, or bring their own pads, ones they’d made from recycled scraps trimmed and glued together.

I vowed I would never live this way. Usually I vowed this under my breath, in a muttering fashion, as I went around the house tearing down the notes after they’d left, grumbling as I rubbed off the stubborn adhesive residue. I would never allow my house to be cluttered with these notes, this perpetual jumble of scribbled obligations destroying the beauty of my dwelling! My house is to be a place of peace and calm, not stress and chaos!

 And then I found out I had ADD….

The joke is, of course, that my house was never a place of peace and calm, much as I strived to make it so. I was swimming upstream, and it showed. Boxes full of mysteries, hastily gathered in a cleanup crisis, lay in corners of multiple rooms. Piles of papers sat undisturbed on kitchen counters. The pantry usually had a bag of groceries parked in it, because the job of finding homes for the purchases was too complex, given the lack of an obvious system within. Loaded laundry baskets sat in front of the TV awaiting folding. The kids would trip over each others’ shoes in the entryway, toss library books on the couch, and leave backpacks on the floor.

And truthfully, hadn’t I already attempted to nag myself in all sorts of ways? Hadn’t I left messages to myself on my answering machine on a regular basis? What were all those pop-ups on my computer calendar there for, if not to nudge me?

Still, I hadn’t landed on anything that was all that helpful. It was too easy to ignore the pop-ups, and they happened to come calling when I was least likely to be productive anyway, engrossed as I was in the Internet. I hated the sound of my voice on the answering machine. I always had this cheesy tone, especially since I was usually calling from a public place and knew people were eavesdropping. “Hi, this is me, with a reminder to myself, defrost the meat…” Ugh.

More than I hate my answering-machine voice, I hate my handwriting. It’s not atrocious, but it’s just….not good. It looks sloppy. When I try to slow down and write more carefully, well, the results look careful and sloppy. My mother-in-law, she of the ugly oversized capitals, has made “jokes” about my messy handwriting. I’m not sure I’d agree that hers compares favorably with mine, but I was unhappy enough with my own writing that I tended not to label anything; it just looked like more clutter, all those words on boxes, on Post-Its, staring out at me…

And now I was staring at ADD, and I realized, in something like a heartbeat, that it was time to embrace the signs. I needed visual reminders, I needed organization, I needed notes and labels and signs! And so I set to work making signs.

But these signs were going to be different, if this was going to work. They had to have staying power. No Post-Its for me.

 And they had to look good. That was paramount.

I finally found my joy in the form of white Avery address labels. Instead of addresses, I printed other things on them. Categories, for all those boxes in the pantry: Flour, Corn Meal, Brown Sugar. Labels for baskets and boxes in the family room: Library Books, School Library Books, Books to Return. Labels for magazine files that hold the piles of paper: Handy File, Put on Calendar. Labels for folders that go in pocket mail slots on the wall: School papers, To Do, Papers for J.

I took delight in the selection of fonts for each label. Pantry items were in a matching blue bold engraved-look font, my to-do file a jaunty fifties style. A name tag for a child’s school folder was done in a Peanuts font I downloaded off the Internet.

From there I moved on to honest-to-goodness signs. I have a list of daily tasks posted in the kitchen. There’s one that greets the kids as they walk in the door: When You Come Home From School. Underneath that header is a checklist with about a dozen items. The first one says untie shoes, which sounds like a joke, but it’s not; otherwise the shoes get kicked off, and the double-knots await when the rush for the morning bus comes. I thought the kids would hate it, but they didn’t; turns out maybe they don’t like the sound of my nagging voice so much either. That Peanuts font, which I used for the sign, they like that a lot.

And, you know, I’m starting to like myself a lot better too, as the house slowly falls under the influence of order. Order, not orders, I remind myself, staring into my reflection in the bathroom mirror, which gazes back at me through a blue scrim of dry-erase reminders to myself. Yes, it’s a bit messy. But I can still see through to the other side. And I am there, smiling back.