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.