Dancing The Stripper

My mother-in-law could be impulsive in action and spending, especially when she was bored.

She bored easily.

Shortly before our wedding, my beloved and I stood in her kitchen at 2 p.m. one hot June afternoon. I remember the exact time because she warned me, “At 2:10 Bill McLean is going to play my daily request, ‘The Stripper’ on the radio.”

My beloved glared at her and said, “Oh, Mother, don’t!” as he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

In no time, Bill announced that he was ready with Betty’s daily request, “This one is for Betty McNay”, and on cue she grabbed her tea towel. Holding it by each corner behind her back, she postured in anticipation of the music. She stood on one leg and pointed the toe on the other foot.

The music began with the familiar grind. The distinctive instrumental song is associated with burlesque and strip tease. Raw ya Te du te du, te du du du. Bump. Bump.

And she began her moves, only they were not so familiar to me. She began by lifting her shoulders as she moved the towel up and down in a drying motion.

In a Fred-Astaire manner, it became her prop as she twisted and moved and bumped around her small kitchen: across the back of her shoulders, across her ample breasts as she shimmed her shoulders, and across her expansive backside as she bumped, bumped, bumped with the tune until it reached its crescendo and final phrase.

She said the ultimate goal was to tie a tassel to each nipple and make them spin in opposite directions.

Da du, Da du, Te da, da, du da, Ta da, da, da, da, bump.

If you do not know this tune, you would do well to listen to the Youtube version. It was written by David Rose in 1962.

Of course, as I laughed until the tears streamed down my face. I was forced to lean against a wall to hold me up.  She watched me intently, getting a real kick out of my reactions.

Husband stood off merely shaking his head from side to side.

“You just had to do it, didn’t you?”

She laughed heartily.

I thought the entire event hilarious, while she performed to my appreciation of her dance.

That is how she often handled her frustration or boredom. She turned to humor.

Adults with ADHD without any knowledge of the disorder instinctively realize they need release with movement.

My mother-in-law could really move. She taught people with physical and mental disabilities to bowl, she rode motorcycles and drove her cars fast. She liked to be on the go.

As long as she was impulsively moving, she was less likely to do the spending, which she would attempt to hide from Father-in-law.

Impulsive spending is one of those issues that can be a sore spot for the adult with ADHD and his or her partner. For Mother-in-law it was a matter of resistance to Father-in-law’s budget and control of finances.

We would call it being oppositional.

Keep in mind she was not a heavy spender. She didn’t fill her house with expensive items. Actually she mostly bought garage sale or resale items.

However, when she saw a new item at reduced cost, she might buy it and hide it from him for a while. For example, she once bought a blue and white dress in her signature polka dot pattern that fit her form well. Along with it she bought two or three more new dresses, and then hid all of them under the bed. The space beneath the bed was terribly cluttered with old magazines and other publications, so she knew he would not see the box.

Approximately one month later, she brought the polka dot dress out of hiding and wore it to a special event.

“Nice dress,” he complimented her. “Is it new?”

“No, I’ve had it for a while,” she told him.

The account of the dance is amusing. The one about the dress is not. Both stories illustrate classic ADHD behavior.

Questions I Would Ask His Mother

Today I mentioned his mother to my husband. He responded with a groan and snide comment: “She would probably tell you to hit me across the butt with her fanny warmer just for general principle.”

He was referring to the blue paint paddles she kept in her desk drawer. You know the ones; they are the thin strips of wood used to stir paint. She had several of them labeled FANNY WARMER, and she gave me one before we were even married. “Use this on him whenever he gets out of line.”

You should have seen the smirk on her face when she said it.

My husband’s mother died suddenly after we had been married a brief four months. As mentioned in a previous entry, I found her fun and amusing, and after all these years, I still feel cheated in a fashion.

Don’t take me wrong because his dad later married another lovely woman. I also consider her my mother-in-law and grannie to my kids. As a matter of fact, because I experienced excellent interactions with two mother-in-laws, a friend once said, “You deserve to be pelted with stones.”

But to move right along, Husband’s mother knew things about him that no other person will ever truly know. Most of what she knew she failed to tell me before she died, or probably, she chose to keep it to herself.

“I really want you to marry him,” she once told me.

 As do other mothers of children with ADHD, she was the expert on him, and I sometimes need expert guidance.

For one thing, has he always seen a rabbit in the moon instead of a man in the moon?

Rather than the eyes and mouth of a human face, Husband clearly sees the form of a rabbit with long ears, especially when it is running up the left side of a full moon.  He even has me seeing it.

Did his mother see the rabbit in the moon?

Now that you know about it, I challenge you to look for it, too.

For another thing, did he always space out when putting on his shoes and socks? I ask you, would he put on one sock, sit for several minutes and stare off into space? How many times would his mother remind him to hurry up?

What would she have done if she had been with us in the restaurant last week when he retrieved a lemon seed from his tea and shot it across the room through his straw? Our daughter said, “That was the most ridiculous thing a man of your age could have done!” Husband looked somber while I laughed. Would his mother have laughed or ignored him?

I want to know has he always gotten mad easily and held onto grudges? Has he always been short on patience? Is this an ADHD thing, or is it behavior he learned from his mother?

How many times did he make promises to his mother that he never intended to keep?  For that matter, did she know he would do the same with me?

If she were available, I would ask her concerning a couple of stories he has told regarding her. Did she really send her kid to the car for a swatter when the restaurant was full of flies?  Did she really use it?

Is it true father-in-law once asked her how fast she was driving, and she said 75? Did he really casually tell her to show it down to 80? Did she know her kids were willing to swear she was driving at 110 mph?

For the final and most important question, did his mother know the concept of follow through, and did she attempt to teach it to her son?

The Iceberg

Thanks to my friends in the CHADD (Children and Adults with ADD) organization, I often point parents in the P2P training program to a nifty illustration. CHADD refers to this as the Iceberg because the point must be stressed: just as an iceberg has much mass beneath the surface, there is more to ADHD than what you will observe on the surface.

On one of our first dates with Husband, we attended a concert given by his piano teacher, a professor at Friends University, where we met. After the concert, she came to the lobby to greet attendees. Husband got caught up in the moment of excitement and pride and rushed to give her a huge hug and kiss on the cheek. “This is squirrely,” I thought as I stepped back in embarrassment. Years later, when she had become a personal friend, I asked if she remembered the incident. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “but I just figured that was part of who he was.”

Part of him was the inability to express emotion appropriately.

The same evening, the same date, he invited me up to the museum at Friends University for which he had the key. He was the museum assistant, and before you think he wanted to get me alone in the dark, forget it.

He was again caught up in emotion over our date and over Joyce’s concert, so he needed to boast a bit.

We climbed to the third or fourth story. Looking over at the city lights, Husband lit a cigarette and bragged about hanging out the same windows when he cleaned them. He even opened one of the tall, massive window panes, so we could smell the crisp winter air. At some point, he threw the cigarette butt with a flourish and watched it spiral to the ground.

He quickly grabbed my hand. “Oh, shit, I don’t think it was extinguished.” He literally pulled me down the stairs to search for it. We found it on the lawn below the windows quite extinguished from its free flight through the air.

Joyce was correct. Beneath the surface was a 20 year old functioning adolescent whose frontal lobe probably lit up like a Christmas Tree each time he made a decision. That was who he was.

Be assured we now know much about problems with Executive Functioning. Currently, many professionals, especially Barkley who is considered the number one expert on the topic, believe that ADHD is the Executive Function Disorder.

Briefly, Executive Function has to do with activity in the frontal lobe of the brain. Remember ADHD is considered a neurobiological disorder in which integrated operations are weak.

The brain frontal lobe is responsible for shifting the continuous process related to attention, and Dr. Thomas Brown points to at least six functions that are impaired in the person with ADHD and which profoundly impact daily (and here I suggest moment-by-moment) living.

According to Dr. Brown, we describe these function problems: Activation, or organizing, prioritizing, and getting to work; Focus, or sustaining and shifting attention; Effort, or regulation of effort and speed; Emotion, or managing frustration and the other emotions that go along with it; Memory, both working and long-term recall; and Action, or self-control and self-regulation.

It would have been most helpful to know about this in our early days of marriage. We might have avoided problems managing the finances, and getting chores and upkeep completed around the house. Our communication skills might have evolved in a different, more pleasant manner, and I certainly would have sought professional help much sooner.

This information would have helped me understand Husband’s actions the day he exploded in anger at our dog, hitting it in the head with a plastic bucket, then immediately scooping it up as he cuddled it, rocked back and forth and cried loudly. The dog survived, but I think it was as confused as I was at the seeming contradictions in behavior.

·        www.chadd.org

·        Brown, T.E. (2008). Executive functions: Describing six executive aspects of a complex syndrome. Attention Magazine.

Tomato Seeds

As he cleaned off his desk piled high with papers, books, and sundry items, Husband said, “I notice they are not sprouting in the bag on my desk. They have been there for a year, so I want to see if they will germinate.”

My husband decided to plant the tomato seeds he was describing. However, he did not do it the conventional way, or at least the way I think he should have. My way is to plant them in a pot or in the ground and care for them from there.

My husband’s way was to take a paper egg carton and craft and elaborate upper and lower decks. The seeds were supposed to know to germinate in the lower deck and grow through the hole in upper deck. I forget why he chose that method, and I am too busy to ask for further explanation.

He likes to do things with a certain flare of creativity and difficulty, especially when it comes to working in his garden. He often says.  “If it doesn’t work, well, we will always think it should have.”

His mother liked to be creative. Mother was more like my husband in her flare for doing something different. One year she decorated a tumble weed sprayed green for her Christmas Tree.  Another year she nailed 1X2 boards to the wall in a triangle shape and decorated it accordingly. It really did not matter about the tree because the floor surrounding it was piled high and deep with presents of all sorts for her children and family.

Husband likes to brag about her artistic flare. “It made it easier for her when the Christmas Tree stayed up several weeks after the first of the new year,” he once told me.

Problem for me is that he doesn’t think it is appalling that it stayed up that long.

However, I should continue with the story of the seeds. Eventually Husband placed small plants in the ground and actually remembered to water them. That is, he remembered for a few days. Thanks to rain showers, they received the necessary water to grow sturdy plants with blossoms before the summer heat began to advance.

I think he watered them intermittingly, but passably. He picked a total of one small yellow fruit that stubbornly produced in spite of age and speculative effort.

Husband now tells me he would rather buy tomatoes at Farmer’s Market or his favorite health-food store. He thinks less effort to which I agree. It is less frustration for me, too.

In the earlier days of our marriage, we attempted large garden plots each spring. I wanted to see well-tended rows and mulch around the base of plants. Husband planted the neat rows, but ignored the weeds and sometimes forgot to pick the fruit. It totally annoyed me.

Husband’s responded to my annoyance by saying, “It sounds like a personal problem to me.”

In spite of the weeds and the mosquitos that thrived among the plants I faithfully watered, we gathered enough summer produce to somewhat off-set our labor.

When Husband would tell me, “I want at least five acres of land for a garden and fruit trees”, I would immediately go into an inward panic.

I didn’t have the time or physical strength to care for such a project.

Fortunately, our current half-acre plot does not contain good garden soil. I think we are getting old for large and grandiose projects.

He continues to dream of crop farms, huge gardens, and canning fruits and vegetables. I tell him, “Get real! It won’t happen in our lifetime.”

He often retorts that he looks forward to gardening in Heaven where each tomato will fill the bed of a pick-up truck.

Family ADHD

Shortly after we married, I received a phone call from Mother-in-law. “I have a present for you. I found it out in the country,” her voice sang with laughter. 

Instinctively I knew what it was. “If it is one of those damn tarantulas, it is staying at your house,” I laughed back.

Mother knew how freaked out I was over Harriet the tarantula she raised for her kids.

We named it Gladys, and Mother caught insects to feed Gladys in the terrarium.

Gladys lived in her glass box until Mother died during surgery five months later. We found the spider dead from starvation.

Oops! We had forgotten to feed her.

Earlier I mentioned my husband’s mother, so this is a good day to talk about how ADHD might be a genetic-based disorder.

When I talk with parents of a child with ADHD, I often ask, “Which one of you has these same symptoms?”

I can follow several typical ADHD symptoms back through my husband’s family from his mother, her father, and Grandpa’s mother, Maudie.  After that I have no information.

Before I knew what ADHD was, I knew his mother was one of the sloppiest housekeepers I had ever seen. I thought of learned behavior because my then-boyfriend’s car was messy where he constantly threw trash over the front seat into the back.

One day as we sat in his car, I happened to mention it. “The backseat of your car is deep with crumpled cigarette wraps.”  “I know,” he said, as he nonchalantly scrunched an empty pack in his hand and threw it over his right shoulder.

Yet, even though I am neat-nick, I accepted their clutter as part of who they were. Why? They were two of the most interesting people I had ever met, even though both also suffered from low self-esteem and depression.

My husband’s grandfather was the same way. He was not messy (thanks to Grandma June), but he was a recovered alcoholic. As I learned more about ADHD and tied family behaviors to each other, I realized he exhibited one the risky behaviors of self-medication, and the anger levels associated with it. Grandpa also had a quirky sense of humor.

The story goes that one day he answered the phone to a salesperson from the  Arthur Murray Dance Studio. After he listened to her say he had won free dance lessons, he asked,

“Do you teach people in wheelchairs how to dance?” The voice at the other end said, “Oh, I am sorry,” and hung up.

When Grandma chided him for it, he said, “I didn’t say I use a wheelchair. I merely asked if they teach people in wheelchairs how to dance?”

Grandma June gave me another clue when she talked about her own mother-in-law, Maudie. She described moodiness and a need to control, but she went on to say. “But I just loved her because she was exciting to be around.”  

Great-grandmother, Maudie, walked along the tops of walls when she was in her late forties or early fifties, and engaged in other high-adventure behavior, all just for fun or because she could.  

I knew what Grandma June meant by exciting. My mother-in-law showed me how to do a cartwheel when she was 50 years old and was 50 or more pounds overweight. She could tear a car engine down and rebuild it better and with less parts, and she raised 25 cats on her half-acre lot.

 Before that she raised collie dogs (one of whom became a Lassie), founded our local kennel club, kept an alligator in her bathtub for several weeks, and maintained the life of her own pet tarantula, Harriett. Her life demonstrated constant motion. I simply loved spending time with her.

Of course none of this actually fit into place until I discovered the genetic connections in families with ADHD.

Do not forget that ADHD is a real genetic disorder, and it is one of the most researched disorders. Dozens of published researched articles suggest this genetic association.

20th Anniversary

The sun was shining and the air was hot on that July evening in the early 1990’s. The kids were old enough that we did not need a baby sitter, so we planned our evening at our favorite eatery. We would be celebrating our 20^th wedding anniversary over our favorite prime rib meal.

The atmosphere inside the restaurant was cool and darkened, and our waitress hovered around closely because Husband told her about our celebration. “Twenty years ago, we chose to eat together like this for the remainder of our lives,” he told her with his customary flare. She thought it was such an amorous thing for him to say. It was so dark that I had difficulty seeing the buffet or my plate clearly. I did see the waitress because she was often in our faces.

At that time, Husband’s company considered moving us to a community about two hours east of where we live. The prospect was both exciting and scary because the new community was much smaller and would involve a tremendous adjustment for both of us and our children.

For my part, I wanted to talk about the possible move, about our wonderful life together, and the potential of the many years that laid ahead of us. It was a romantic setting, and I felt cozy and comfortable.

Husband was anxious throughout the meal. He kept bouncing his knee and displayed a general nervous attitude.

I should have known something was up.

About half-way through the meal, Husband pulled a ring box out of his pocket, and handed it to me, “Happy Anniversary, my dear.” He always approached dreamy settings with quixotic drama.

I gasped when I opened the box and saw the shining ring set, both the engagement ring and the wedding band. It did not look like anything I would choose for myself, and as I compared it to the large heart-shaped diamond I wore, the contrast was obvious.

My diamond was not many years old, but none-the-less, the new set was beautiful and expensive looking.

I cried and asked him if he had taken the money out of our savings account. After all it was a possibility even if we were planning a move.

“I can assure you I did not take the money from savings,” he said.

At that moment, the waitress stuck her head into the conversation as she admired the rings; she brought us complimentary dessert. As she continued to carry-on over the rings, Husband began to sweat. Even in the dark I could see him turning pale with a scrunched-up smile and expression across his face.

He quickly suggested we leave, and before we stepped into natural light, he began to explain, “The sentiment of the gift is sincere; however, that is not a real diamond set.” Once outside I could see it was not, and I felt deceived and cheated all at the same time.

“I bought it for $20.00 at the convenience store. Get it? $20 for our 20^th anniversary?”

I did not speak to him all the way home.

Once there, I stomped up the stairs to our bedroom and threw the box and fake set into a draw.

Downstairs, our kids were asking their dad “How did she take it?” Are you still married? Earlier he confided in them about buying the rings at QuikTrip and even asked one of the girls for a ring box.

When they saw my reaction, they burst into laughter.

Husband was not so amused, and I did not think it was at all funny. Nearly 20 years later, I now think it is funny, and he is still not so amused. I yet have the ring set and have worn it in public much to his consternation and dismay.

Teachers Who Do Not Understand

My mother-in-law remembers that Baby Sis was speaking simple sentences at less than one year of age. That did not amaze me; after all, she was the third child in a verbal family. At age two, she thumped my leg when I corrected her. “You not my boss,” she said.

I remember when we visited a museum in Santa Fe that displayed an unearthed home of early dwellers. A skeleton lay in the corner. At age four, Baby Sis pulled her brother into the room saying “Look, there’s a skelkonton over here,” and she got mad at us for laughing.

She also became angry when we laughed at her for correcting her brother who could not say the word chicken. He pronounced it schicken, and each time he said it wrong, she would get close to his face and say, “It’s not schicken, Brother, it’s schicken.”

As I mentioned earlier, the world of spelling posed a foreign concept to her, and even though she is an excellent speller today, those first spelling tests confounded her. Her natural sense of music and agility came to the rescue. Taking a cue from Walt Disney who used Jiminy Cricket to teach the world how to spell encyclopedia, we spelled the words to simple tunes and rhythm. During the spelling tests, Baby Sis sang the correct spelling silently. We also used sign language and spelled each word manually which helped to pattern the word in her head.

I share this because children with ADHD may also experience problems with learning, and one of those problems may begin with a teacher’s attitude toward the hyper or inattentive child.

My first-name friend Lori, from first grade, afforded us an oasis for my hyper child with an inquisitive mind. We needed it after the experiences in Kindergarten where Mrs. M. believed in principle over people.

Baby Sis insisted on wearing her dresses to school every day, and as she attempted to sit as still as possible in Kindergarten large group, she folded her long legs as best she could, and tucked her hands inside the elastic of her panties.

One morning when I picked her up from school, Mrs. M. asked me to step inside the room, so she could “speak with” me. Baby Sis stood next to her desk with shame and fear written all over her face. Mrs. M. began to explain that she was concerned my child was masturbating during large-group, and we should explain to Baby Sis how inappropriate it was, or we should take her to a doctor for examination.

Mrs. M. became my least favorite teacher of all time from then on.

In spite of my anger, I explained my child was attempting to curb her own inability to sit still, and then I turned to Baby Sis. “Keep your hands on the outside of your skirt. This woman thinks you are playing with yourself.” Mrs. M. turned bright red and struggled to backstroke; from then on, I made certain Baby Sis wore shorts under her dress at school.

Mrs. M. seemed to make Baby Sis her pet project from that day forward. Each afternoon my child came home from school with stories supporting the fact she “was not appropriate” at school. That phrase rang alarms in my head, causing me to see bright red globes.

 I began standing outside the door of the school room at various times and days of the week. The door included a sidelight glass from which I could observe Baby Sis and her teacher’s interactions.

The day I opened the door without knocking with a powerful Mrs M! the teacher nearly bounced off the ceiling with surprise and alarm. I had caught her in the midst of ridiculing Baby Sis in front of the other children. I asked her to step into the hall and explain to me what Baby Sis was doing that was so “inappropriate.”

I also hid and observed playground activities, and one day took my daughter home early when Mrs. M. hounded Baby Sis for not getting into line quickly enough. “Mrs. M,” I said, “She got off the equipment when you called and was running to the line to please you.” I think the teacher peed herself.

Baby Sis graduated Kindergarten with a negative self-image because she felt she was inappropriate. Yet, soon after school was out, Mrs. M. showed up in my driveway with a request for Baby Sis to attend special and free sessions at our local state university.

Two hours per day for three weeks, she would be in class with a well-published author of children’s books who read stories, played games, and conducted other fun activities associated with her books.

“You don’t even like my daughter,” I said, “Why are you asking her? Are you short on quota?”  Mrs. M. stammered that Baby Sis would make a perfect participant. To this day, Baby Sis remembers the stories and songs introduced during those weeks. Among many, one thing the author knew about children. They need to have fun when learning.

Panty Liners, Razors, and Mashed Potatoes

I noticed panty liners began disappearing from the linen closet at a faster rate than expected. I even accused my oldest daughter of using them when she didn’t need protection.

“No I don’t, she said, as we turned our heads in choreographed motion toward Baby Sis, who was four or five years old at the time. Baby Sis already had a reputation for getting into areas such as closets and her sister’s chest of drawers. When we couldn’t find certain items, we often checked in her room and closet.

With matter-of-fact aplomb, Baby Sis admitted to it. “Those are my pads! I wear them like you and Sister do.” So much for discreetness and coming of age. It was when her sister began to use sanitary napkins, and Baby Sis wanted to be part of the girl brigade in our family.

Baby Sis preferred to wear dresses even at home, so each day she wore a dress and her panty liner. At least she wore it for a few hours, then I would find the used liner thrown somewhere inappropriate: on a lamp table, on her bedroom floor, or the kitchen counter. I thought she was cute with her routine and seriousness, but I did take exception when I found the liner on the kitchen counter.

The phase did not last long, and at the end of it, I came around the corner to see her standing in front of the front storm door with her back to me. She was reaching down in her panties for the liner.  With one quick movement, she pulled it out into the open and slapped it sticky side to the storm door.

There it hanged for everyone to see. Meanwhile Baby Sis had turned the corner and gone to the basement to watch TV.

I sat on the stair landing and laughed until I could not breathe.

I called her upstairs and confronted her with the liner. “I didn’t want to wear that old thing anymore,” she explained. “It wasn’t comfortable.”

“Go throw it in the trash, then,” I said.

The next day I found another liner on the same storm door. My neighbor, Marilyn, who directed a local preschool program shrieked when I told her the story. “You laughed? I would have screamed.”

How could I? This child displayed an entirely new attitude toward life as she encountered the challenges of each day with smiles, scowls, creative art work, and loads of energy.

Of course there was the day she attempted to shave her legs. My Bible study teacher had just phoned, and I was attached to the cord of the wall phone in the kitchen. Within two or three minutes I heard a loud cry and screech that even my friend could hear over the phone.

“I have to go,” I said. “She’s done something to hurt herself.” I barely replaced the receiver as I ran up the steps to the kids’ bathroom. Baby Sis ran crying to me with blood trickling down both legs.

Taking advantage of my being on the phone, she had sneaked my razor from my bathroom and proceeded to attempt to shave her legs. It was a blessing she did not cut deeper into her flesh. With the same tone of insult she expressed when she got into a cactus plant, she said, “It bit me!”

I did not laugh that time.

Such constant energy frequently got the best of her at dinner time because she refused to take an afternoon nap.

Often she would sit in her chair at the table and whimper with fatigue, especially if she was hungry and dinner was not ready. I customarily prepared a plate for her while I finished the meal. She liked mashed potatoes and green beans and the more she was tired, the more she rubbed the mashed potatoes in her hair.

It may have been the day she shaved that her dad saw the head begin to fall forward on the table. With smoothness and grace like a waltz, he moved her plate with one hand and replaced it with a throw pillow for her head. In slow motion she fell forward with hair sticky from mashed potatoes and slept peacefully on her pillow.

We let her rest there because, as parents, we knew to play the cards as they were dealt to us.

Baby Sis

In a box of memorabilia I recently came across a napkin covered in red lip prints. The note said, “Hi, Your daughter (AKA Hot Lips McNay) could not pay attention during class this afternoon. I thought you would like to see this.” It was signed by my daughter’s first-grade teacher and dated during the first month of the school year. I laughed when I recently found it; I laugh heartily when I first received it many years ago.

I asked her, “So you took lipstick to school. Why did you make these kisses all over your napkin?”  She replied. “It was boring. My teacher was talking about the words I was supposed to write, and I didn’t know what of those silly words meant.” She was talking her introduction to spelling words.

Being a bioneurological disorder, ADHD often progresses from one generation to the next. We strongly suspicion my husband’s neurological makeup came through his mother’s family, and at least one of our children is an adult with ADHD.

I am referring to our youngest daughter, wife of the ideal son-in-law. Her dad’s pet name for her is Baby Sis to distinguish her from our first-born daughter. Baby Sis believes readers will gain additional understanding of my life married to ADHD if they hear about my life mothering ADHD.

She is now a tall, beautiful, highly- educated woman, but she was energy in pell-mell motion from the time she was born until she, huh, she, well wait, she still is in pell-mell motion. Raising her provided many of the funniest moments I’ve known as a mom.

Her first-grade teacher and I were on a first-name basis: Atha and Lori. The first time we talked was one afternoon when I went to the class after school to explain about my hyper child. “This is all about my child, I said. “It will help her and you if you know more about her.”

I highly recommend parents with an ADHD child talk with teachers. I gained this wisdom from Baby Sis’ preschool teacher, Melinda, when I walked into the preschool one afternoon to see little bodies sitting in a nice large-group circle. Baby Sis was not with them, and as I looked for her around the room, I saw her sitting at the book circle, knees practically wrapped around her head, reading picture books.

Melinda waved me to sit and listen to the story. Afterward, she laughed with delight, “Your daughter hears more sitting in the reading circle than most of the others. She listens; believe me, she is more comfortable than trying to sit still in circle time.” Melinda talked with me about how some kids are hyperactive. Melinda had the best sense of humor about it, and I developed a sense of humor about it, too.

Baby Sis was the active and impulsive child in the neighborhood. I now realize how creative and unique she was for her young age.

But in those days, I would see neighbors talking among themselves about whether I really tried to discipline her.

As she grew, I discovered the only effective means of discipline was to sit her on a chair and set a timer for 30 seconds to one minute. She was to sit still without moving and talking, and if she did, I added seconds to the timer. To her those seconds seemed like an hour of pure torture.

Today, her older siblings still almost roll on the floor with laughter when they think of her facial expression as she sat on The Chair.

The only sound we heard from her was muffled crying.

Honestly, I never laid a hand on her. I couldn’t spank her because she didn’t associate it with her inappropriate behavior. She only focused on the spanking. “You hit me!” she would say.

But time out in the chair communicated to her. She was sent to time out for behaviors such as sassing me, drawing maps on the backs of my barrel-back chairs, and threatening to cut her brother with scissors. She held to the sides of the seat for dear life, but she eventually learned to avoid doing the things that got her sent to The Chair.

We used The Chair until she was seven or eight, and it was highly effective. Even now she turns pale and looks anguished when we mention it.