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.