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You Can Lead A Groundhog to Water

I know, the saying is, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”, but it’s probably even harder to lead a groundhog.

That’s how I feel with my son every morning. And night. And sometimes in the afternoon. He is 9 years old now and he has ADHD.

That movie with Bill Murray, “Groundhog Day”, probably illustrates the way many parents of kids with ADHD feel. Every day is Groundhog Day. Every day you go through the same routine with the same script and the same struggle and every day you try to change something to break out of that infinite sense of deja vu. 

This morning was no different than yesterday morning. He stayed up too late last night. He was in bed at a reasonable hour, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, fall asleep. Therefore, he had a hard time waking up. Despite this, he did get out of bed with time to get ready, but getting ready is a huge water trough and he wasn’t the slightest bit thirsty. I managed some sort of game that resulted in his being dressed with enough time to get breakfast and brush his teeth, but that’s where it fell apart, just like the day before, and many countless days before that.  He wanted to watch TV. I let him watch a little, but it’s never enough. I turn it off and the wild rumpus starts. I’ve tried not letting him watch TV in the morning, but the wild rumpus still occurs, only worse. In any scenario, it always comes down to those last five crucial minutes that it takes for him to brush his teeth. I won’t go on about it. Suffice to say, we are tardy almost every single day.

I’m not looking for any advice here. Please don’t try to give any. The thing with advice is that it all sounds very reasonable and very sensible and very promising – I’ve done a lot of reading and heard out a lot of friends and actually have a family therapist – but putting it into practice is a whole other animal. (Ahem. Especially when you, yourself, have your own issues to contend with).  Sure, I can set up charts on the wall, set up routines, set up a reward program, etc. etc. but if my kid won’t participate, or if he tires after a day or two of participation and quits, then what? Force him? How? Manhandle him to the ground and dress him myself? Wrestle him to the floor and brush his teeth for him? Stick a pencil in his hand, hold his little fist, force it to the paper and guide his writing? (Something my own mother, in total desperation I now know, tried to do with me – in high school no less – before breaking down into tears, which I had never seen her do before. Let’s just say, that’s not the way to go). Threaten him with a beating? Aggression and punishment only lead to a laser-focus on resentment and unjustness and anger on the part of the punished (I should know).  It does nothing for motivation (because true motivation always needs to come from within); it does nothing for a willingness to cooperate (again, true willingness comes from the same place as true motivation); aggression and punishment do nothing to foster self-reflection.

I haven’t given up on the quite sensible, reasonable, humane, advice I’ve read or been told. I know that consistency is the key. I know that we need to stick with it. 

We just all need to be thirsty at the same time.

Second Thoughts

The drudgery of a new day. Gray, cold, wet, muddy, mucky day. Facing the knowledge that I’ve set myself up again with my wine-fueled, manic, grand, intentions to write everyday. One more lurking thing to hang over my head, ready to vomit guilt all over me the minute it goes unattended.
I woke up to the blather of the television set, checked in on the blather of the internet, and asked myself if I really thought any good would come of adding more blather to it all. The answer was an ego-deflating “Absolutely not”. (Not that my ego was huge enough to emit much air as it decreased, mind you…)
And yet, here I am.
Right.
Waiting for the other unattended, too long neglected, things I have hanging over my head to spew their bile over me for ignoring them to do this.
And what, exactly, IS this that I’m doing?
Just thinking out loud at the moment. Listening to one of my cats snore contentedly behind the computer screen and becoming envious of him. Wishing (my sincere apologies!) that I had not drunkenly mentioned to a few dear friends of mine that I’d started this thing that will, most likely, go absolutely nowhere and provide absolutely nothing interesting or enlightening to anyone’s day.
And yet, here I still sit.
Right.
Snippets are all I can handle right now.
I’m off in an attempt to wash away some of the spewage (that’s right, auto-correct; it’s my blog and I’ll make up words if I want to) that’s dripping down on me.

On Cue

Yep. Here it comes. Just as I should have expected it would.

That dank, listless, fog through which I begin to hear the faint voices calling, “Who are you?” “Who do you think you are?” “What do you have to say that’s so important?” “Why waste your time?” “What makes you special?” “Why bother?” “What do you really expect to do with this?” “What do you really know?” “What experience or training or education do you have?” “What have you ever accomplished?”

It’s as if I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks in a place where I felt free and light and confident and full of possibilities and now I find myself on the flight back home to inertia, apathy, and resignation. Very familiar territory. Back into that darkened room in which I don’t feel like doing much at all because…well…what’s the point?

I still want to move out of there though, so that’s a good thing, I guess.

Just too tired at the moment.

 

 

 

Grand Intentions

I’ve always been full of them. Great plans. Resolutions. Grand intentions.

I sit here wondering where I am going to go with this blog. What I intend to do with it. Do I even need to have a plan??

Last night, when I was full of my nicely rounded, masterfully blended, dark red liquid courage (with “just a hint of vanilla and mocha”), I resolved to write everyday. To creak open the rusty hinges of a wish to put words together.

After I had a chance today to wash away the remaining fuzzy film of late night recklessness with a cup of bracing, dark brown, full bodied (“with a hint of caramel undertones”) reality, I look around and wonder how the hell I am going to do that.

How the hell am I going to do that with kitchen counters full of dirty dishes (because I was on the computer) and bits of chewed up dog bed scattered everywhere (because I was going to get to that as soon as I was off the computer) and piles of mail to go through, and loads of laundry, and a bedroom that I need to finish painting, and fur balls that need to be vacuumed, and….and the list goes on.

I used to think when I was much younger that writers sat down and the words poured forth onto the page. In High School, I realized that this was not true. Writing was more effort than that. Writing involved so much more than that. You see, to me, writing was all-encompassing. It had to be true, and it had to be genuine, and it had to be original, and it had to be unique, and it had to be special, and it had to be perfect. It had to be your soul, Your Self, on that page. And the realization of what writing was to me, how much effort and time – oh how much time!! – that it would take to accomplish that, roared up, fangs bared, and like Medusa herself, turned my mind to stone.

I was vanquished.

Here I am now. Facing her again.

Backstory 1

Why am I blogging?

Why am I writing?

I don’t know. It must have something to do with being “Yappity”, as my father nicknamed me that one night. 

I will admit that when I was about, oh, twelve years old, I decided that I wanted to become a writer.  I was a total bookworm.  I was a complete story junkie.  I even wrote a poem around that age about books that expressed how I felt about the world of literature.  I would spend hours playing with my Fisher-Price toys making up all sorts of scenarios.  This family in the yellow dollhouse had a feud with the family that lived above the barber shop in the village.  This boy in the schoolhouse had a crush on the girl who lived in the chalet. Yeah. I had that many Fisher-Price toys. And I played with them until I was eleven. At which time, my friend’s older sister started making fun of me for it, and I reluctantly packed them all away.

I was an introvert.  Very much so.  I am an only child.  I used to think that this particular circumstance factored into my avoidance of social life, but now that I’ve had two children of my own, both of whom detest any sort of attention whatsoever, I see that it may simply be a genetic tendency. My husband, too, is an introverted person. Double whammy for my offspring.

Wait. A “yappity” introvert? 

Um. Yeah.

I might have been a bit of an introvert (my mother, an extrovert, was constantly trying to get me to be more “social”; pushing me to play with other kids in our apartment complex; pushing me to get out of my room, out of my books, out of my “selfish” playing alone with my toys.  I think she now regrets it; now that she knows those kids were most definitely NOT good influences…) but, still, I wanted to be able to express myself somehow. I wanted to write. I wanted to be an artist.  It was the perfect solution.

 

So, I had this idea in my head from a pretty early age that I was going to write. I was going to write about all sorts of things – because I also had an innate sense of justice/injustice that I wanted to address. I didn’t have the confidence to vocalize it to those around me, so putting it in writing seemed the way to go.

Becoming A Writer became my secret identity.  (Is it any wonder that “Harriet the Spy” was one of my favorite childhood books?) I began keeping journals (which are no longer in existence; a subject for a different post).  But somewhere in Junior High, that hope, that dream, of being a writer, and the confidence that I would someday achieve it, started to crack apart.

Ms. Baker. Yep. I am going to use her real name. Ms. Baker and her red marker and her red question mark next to the A that she – oh so reluctantly! – gave me on a story I was formulating in the writing journal that she assigned us to create.

She questioned the authenticity of the story I was writing.  “Original??” she wrote in the column – next to the “A”.  I was called in to talk to her after class. A humiliating, confusing, interrogation.  And that interrogation stayed with me, followed me, haunted me, the rest of my life.  It made me question my ability to be original, to have an original idea, to be able to write well enough, to be good enough, to be “true” enough….

It was the beginning to the end of my ambition.

It was also an unfortunate coincidence that I had the makings in my brain chemistry at that time for the development of Depression. Clinical Depression.

 

Yeah. Couple that with puberty and what do you get?

A hot mess.

 

Yappity

It was in October. My cousin was visiting from Germany with his girlfriend. They were staying at my parent’s house and we were all gathered in the living room after dinner.  All, except my father. He was in the kitchen cleaning up.  We were discussing, as travelers tend to do, the differences in cultures and lifestyles of various countries. My cousin’s girlfriend, who is from France originally, had never been to Texas before. The topic was food.

We had been drinking wine, and perhaps my mother and I had had a little more than my husband and my cousin and his girlfriend.  At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. Anyway, I think I had climbed onto my soapbox about the way we’ve tampered with food in the U.S.  GMOs, pesticides, additives, etc. etc.  Somehow, I got worked up about it and went into the gory reasons why my husband and I, and, consequently, my kids, became vegetarians. Somewhere in there, my mom started to get riled up at me about going on and on about it, and I vaguely remember her saying that we weren’t arguing about it. Although, it certainly seemed as if we were. My mother quipped something about my becoming a bit “uppity” (a sort of running joke between my parents and I, which I may, or may not, ever get to explaining…)

I stood up to get some more wine (yeah, great idea when I’ve already had too much…) and wandered into the kitchen where I loudly announced to my dad that I’d been pronounced “uppity”! Can you believe it? Uppity!!

“Am I being uppity?!” I asked my dad.

He was bent over the open dishwasher, loading it.  He didn’t bother to straighten up as he stopped, glanced into my eyes, held my gaze, and said:

“Uppity? No, not so much uppity. More like, Yappity”.