The Proposal

I expect many women remember details of the day or night when their love proposed marriage, and I am no exception.

 It was a lovely Sunday afternoon in May. I wore an attractive and stylish spring-like red dress because my tall, handsome boyfriend was coming, and we would attend graduation ceremonies at my Alma Mater. I admit I looked really nice.

When he got there, he seemed a bit nervous to me, but by then I was accustomed to him being either moody or nervous. I probably thought something “set it off” on his way to our house.  

He sat with me on the sofa in the living room as we talked with my mom and dad and exchanged pleasantries about the weather and the upcoming graduation ceremony.

Suddenly he pulled a box from his pocket and presented me with a lovely bracelet with Snoopy dangling on it. “Oh, how cute!”  I said as I began to put it on my wrist.

He got down on his knee. “Look on the chain,” he said. “See this? It’s an engagement ring. Will you marry me, my dear?”  He began taking the ring off the chain to slip it on my finger.

Yes, in front of my parents.

Time stood still.

I sat there with that Dagwood-Bumstead smile crinkled  across my face before I answered yes. I loved my parents, and as their only daughter I knew I was special to them, but for some reason, I never dreamed of receiving a proposal of marriage in front of them. It threw the entire sense of romance out the window.

My dad turned red as mom cried.

My husband-to-be rushed on. “This is the ring my dad gave to mom when they got engaged in 1945. I asked her if she had one I could give you tonight.”

The story went something like this: my love had it in mind to propose, and he thought the night of graduation would be excellent. Actually, I think he finally got up the nerve.  He had not gotten around to buying a ring or special piece of jewelry, so he talked with his parents.

 “I want to ask Atha to marry me tonight, but I don’t have a ring. What have you got around here?” So much for planning ahead, right?

Later, his mother said she offered him her old engagement ring because she didn’t want him to change his mind, and she loved the idea of me wearing it.

My husband was so pleased and so excited, or possibly so relieved to get that part over with that he just sat back on the sofa with a sigh.

 He had it in mind to propose to me, and he could not wait for another time. It was then or nothing. I am glad it was then, and I know he thinks what was the big deal? After all I said yes, and here we are all these years later.

Individuals with ADHD may also get so anxious about a task or plan that they put off completing  the details, which merely adds to the anxiety. They often do not plan ahead. They may experience chronic procrastination more frequently than typical individuals. They put off important tasks or the ones that take more thought and energy. In this case, it was the task that was going to cost him more money.

The pattern for our marriage was set.

In our story, Husband could not wait until we were alone at dinner. He was driven to act at that moment. He could not consider the inappropriateness of proposing marriage in front of mom or dad. It seemed romantic enough for him. What if I didn’t have my own ring? (His parents did give us that ring with their blessing.)  He figured we would get around to buying me a new ring in the future.

That is whole other story.

Overreacting

My husband’s impulsivity often leads him to overact with yelling or disconcerting noises when he drops an item, misplaces something, or merely gets startled. Many times I’ve wondered if he’s hurt himself or had a heart attack; his reaction is that extreme.

I once asked him to describe how his impulsivity affected him as a small boy in school:

“Of course I liked to stare out the windows in our old school building, and since our first-grade room sat on the side of the two major streets, I could follow the flow of traffic to the side of me and in front of me, which I often did. One day this really shiny, new 1956 Chevy zoomed faster than usual past our building going east. It came flying down the road and sped up loudly when it raced through the intersection. The noise, the speed, the flash of sunlight scared me. So being me, I jumped out of my seat, threw my hands up in the air, and screamed quite loudly, ‘WOW! Look how fast that car is going!’  My teacher had been working with a small group of students, and she about hit the ceiling. She looked like she had been shot or peed herself.  

I could totally envision the entire scenario. A blonde boy in blue jeans and a nicely-laundered cotton shirt, looking out the window while his books and papers lay scattered across his school desk. Tapping his pencil on the desk, he was quietly drawn to the movement and noise from the busy street close to the school ground. He lost all sense of time and space in those conditions and was totally spaced-out. He reacted to what he saw and felt without thinking of his surroundings and others.

It happened again today when he dropped an item from his desk, which is why I am writing about this behavior.  He has alarmed me more than once in the past weeks, only now his responses are more adult-like and sophisticated. I won’t print his latest string of words, but they look like this ^&%$#%^*!

Often he overreacts to various perfume scents all around him.  A normal, pleasant fragrance (at least to me) seems to intensify when he gets a whiff of it.  If a woman walks past us in public wearing loud perfume, he often yells Phew, that stinks, or That ‘s awful while he takes something to fan it away from him.  I imagined how badly women must feel. Once upon a time, I blushed with deep embarrassed and tried to correct him. Now I ignore him. What if some woman tells him off? He would probably feel awful for hurting her feelings.

Several years ago he changed the brakes on our car during the days when money was tight and the kids were little and Husband was intent on saving money. Keep in mind his mechanical skills are so limited, he calls himself Mr. Goodwrench. His dad, however, was mechanical, so he came to help.  During one point, Husband was reacting ,yelling and eventually saying all types of words. His dad stepped back and in a quiet voice said I doubt that is going to fix the problem. That was one of the wisest things his dad ever said to him.

Back to his tirades at home, or even in the car, if he can’t find his wallet, if he has to slam on the brakes, or if he hears a loud noise, the reaction is all the same.  His voice and tone explode with anger and frustration, or intense alarm. Possibly he literally feels it throughout his body, but I told him today’s reaction wasn’t necessary. He looked disbelievingly at me.

Excuses, excuses, he was filled with them. I doubt this behavior will change, no matter how many reminders I give him.

Creativity

I think I got the following ideas from one of Doctors Hallowell and Ratey’s books that themes in ADHD include “inconsistency and inconsistency again, creativity, provocative behavior, winning personality, varying motivation, exasperating forgetfulness, disorganization and indifference, underachievement, impulsivity, and the search for excitement  rather than discipline.” Whichever of their books, it is a keeper of a quote.

A typical response from my husband to the above would be, “I resemble that remark.”

Let’s begin with the notion of creativity. Besides thinking of weird new wording for familiar songs and poems, my husband is highly creative, as are his siblings.

 Where I see one or two resolutions to a problem, my husband will see two or three additional ones, and he describes them as turning my resolutions about 180 degrees. It is not only me. He generally thinks he can improve on much of what other people do. He says he sees what people are trying to accomplish, and he see where can improve on it. As he once said tome, “Of course, that may be my ego coming through.”

Much of his creativity happens in the kitchen. He desires to cook and cook well. As I may have mentioned earlier, though, he is not creative when it comes to cleaning up after himself.  His artistic endeavors also expressed themselves during his pottery phase and the years when he built woodworking projects in high school.

 I think of his creativity when he puts a new interpretation on a familiar theme or word. For instance, Murdock becomes Mudrock. I remember when he learned sign language in order to communicate with a neighbor’s son and persons in our church who were deaf.  He used those same skills to teach a deaf coworker CADAM and CATIA. Husband learned a principle, then immediately shared  it with his coworker. For Husband, it was an easy and sensible fix to helping this coworker prepare for a job.

The majority of his adolescence and young adult years, he liked the excitement of being with people, mostly friends. He was seldom at home and was always on the go, which he called boogedy-shoot. We spent the first 18 months of our married life walking malls, going to see friends and family, and generally boogedy-shooting because he could not stand to spend time confined in our apartment. It did not allow enough space for him to move around. He wanted space around him for his brain to focus in many different directions.

 I focus on the fact he is more forgetful than creative, and I sincerely wish it would not bother me as much as it does. Doctors Hollowell and Ratey said it is exasperating ( as in tiresome and tedious), and they could not be closer to the truth. My husband constantly forgot major things such as his wallet, the last place he laid his keys, his need to put gasoline in his car. He forgot to put away his tools or mow the lawn. I bought him attaché cases or brief cases where we made a “home” for the items he forgot every morning.

However, I could not put chores in his brief case, and his forgetting to do a chore for me or follow through with a promise convinced me he was basically indifferent to my inner needs.

His indifference to things which are highly important to me almost got him nailed in a crate and mailed back to his father and stepmother.

In our earlier days, I was convinced he did not have a notion about the meaning of the word self-discipline. After all these years, I remain convinced that he did not.  It is a concept he learned through successful, but painful practice. He was too old for us to use a behavior management chart. His rewards came with verbal praise and from my telling him how much it meant to me when he followed through. I cannot tell you he actually learned from those rewards or responses because such learning is gradual, and he is still in the process of “getting it” gradually.

As I think back to his earlier adult years, he struggled to figure out who he was and what he wanted out of life. I suspect his parents did not know any more who he was than he did. Confusion bred confusion in that household.

Careers

An article in Attention Magazine ( Career Choices and ADHD, April. 2011) provided excellent advice for young adults who are searching for an appropriate career path, in which the author offered splendid comments and wisdom for young adults.

Chris Dendy ( page 22 and 23) advised young adult and teens with ADHD:

         

Identify skills and interests

          Get vocational testing

          Try computerized career programs

It might be helpful to take a personality test such a Myers-Briggs  

    Personality Inventory

          Explore courses in college and meet professionals in various fields.

We probably broke everyone one of those recommendations when my husband got a job. After all that was his primary motivation: get a job before we got married at the end of the month. He only had three weeks, even though we had been engaged  much longer than that.

My husband did narrow his interests down to being a chef to being a potter with his own art studio, or owning a farm and run it the organic method with much help from Mother Earth News.

He attended college, several of them, in fact, from which he dropped courses or received low grades. He majored in business as his father wanted him to do. Actually one of our former professors counseled me not to marry him because by age 23 I had earned my Master’s degree. “He is marrying you because you have your graduate degree, and you can support   him.”

He found himself accepting a job from a major aircraft company, even though he said he would never work for one. His dad was an aeronautical engineer and pilot, and my husband said he competed with airplanes all his life, so why work with them?

He retired from that company after nearly 37 years employment, where he spent 31 years as a technical writer. Several days presented unspoken torment for him because of the care to detail enmeshed in it.

I think it was the constant changes and challenges in technology that kept him from running out the door, and the fact we had small children.

He often says, “It was the grace of God and a praying wife that kept me there.”

I think it was his sense of responsibility and fear of failure that kept him hammering away on life’s anvil, one dull thud at a time.

What we failed to understand in our earlier days stems from the notions of positive choices, positive self-image, and matching careers with personal interests. Husband failed to think in terms of his strengths. He did not have a positive opinion of himself.

Notice the first point on Dendy’s list mentioned above. Career or vocational testing or even coaching could have helped him identify his personal interests. At the time, he loved to cook. Would he have learned to hate it if he had to cook all day long?

He also loved to garden and work in the dirt. Might he have sustained an interest in landscaping or farming?  After all a farmer is a records keeper, and Husband is not.

He enjoys reading history and sharing trivial facts.  Would he have been a historian and academic in the field of history?

He loved the study of the human body. Would medicine have matched his interests more? The medical field offers variety on a daily basis. It contained dramatic and high-energy moments. As a man-of-the-minute, Husband remains calm in the face of emergency, and he sees the body as a functioning system much as I see a car as a mechanical system.

I could see him being successful somewhere in the medical field.

Actually, he has taken opportunity of early retirement to pursue a new career in the medical field. He plans to do work in medical coding and billing. As a cancer survivor, he hopes to specialize in work that registers tumors (if I have it correct).

Numbers have meaning for him. He can memorize numbers that have more than seven digits. He coded airplane parts for many years; now he can code body parts.

He sees it as a complete match.

A Formal Diagnosis

  

My husband describes himself in a number of ways such as:

My foot is nailed to a board, and I continually go around in circles.

I am an amoeba in a vat of acid constantly reacting to the stimuli.

(My favorite) I can’t find my ass with two hands at parade-rest.

Armed with the list of a number of items we found in Fowler and Fowler’s book, Honey, Are you Listening, my husband made an appointment with a psychologist in our community who specializes in adults with ADHD.

Dr. R.V. began by establishing rapport with my husbanding, and somewhere in that first visit, asked my husband a series of questions about his life and functioning as a child. From that information he concluded what we already suspected, or actually knew.

Since his earliest recognition, my Husband was hyper, did not pay attention, was disorganized, and he failed to pay attention (yes, I said it twice). Those were just the few symptoms they explored. On the next visit, Dr. R.V talked with my husband about his symptoms as an adult. It was the same list with a different twist.

Then there was an interview with me as the spouse. The questions maybe took 10- 15 minutes in which I answered yes or no as quickly as possible to any description given. I was not allowed to elaborate on any of them, although I really wanted to do so.

So the good psychologist talked about his findings in researching ADHD in adults, he came to the conclusion that a computer program he often used would tell him more about the manner in which my husband’s brain worked. In later work, I came to believe it might have been the Continuous Performance Test.

For about 15 minutes, my husband clicked a button whenever finding a specific number or symbol on the screen.  Later, he described it as "30 minutes of this popping thing up in front of my face." Dr. R.V. said the results showed my husband’s brain got tired within the first three minutes, and he wondered how my husband had been able to function throughout the rest of it, or even so well in life in general.

Basically Dr. R.V. said, “You must be a smart man to go through life as successfully as you have. Your brain blinks or turns off every few minutes.”

Ah, ha! I had my first clue why communication between Husband and me was a real problem.

After Dr. R.V. administered all assessments and rating scales, he said something that my husband will likely never forget. The Dr. used a quantitative scale by which he verified an adult was a person with ADHD The score had to be at least -1.9; Husband likes to say his score was -7.9.

I don’t remember number details, and I would likely get them wrong if I tried. The most important result born of this experience was the definitive diagnosis of ADHD.

For those who do not live with ADHD, this may not make sense. If you or your spouse does not have it, you don’t know it. ADHD truly is a complex disorder in which it seems behaviors and tendencies spin and tumble within the individual so that life is an inconsistent jumble.

At least in seemed that way in our lives; a diagnosis gave us something to blame or help us understand why life tossed and turned at speeds greater than items tossed about by our Kansas winds.

We learned that ADHD is not the same for any two people, but we learned that for my Husband, his mind worked in apparent contradictions: he could display huge amounts of mental energy at one point, but then display great amount of sluggishness at others. His mind generated great visions, but he was unable to plan and carry through with them.

His way of looking at the world was skeptical, amusingly remarkable, and original or his very own.

He is his own person ( and sometimes it is difficult to tell whether it is personality or ADHD, or even if there is a difference), but he is not the standard ordinary individual.

This brings me to the question is ADHD truly a disorder? I would suggest not in itself. It becomes a disorder when it interferes with his ability to operate under the unspoken rules of society and when it means he struggles with various comorbid conditions such as depression.

The diagnosis did not change him, per se, but it did give him the starting point for new understanding of himself, including a new appreciation of himself.

Reviewing the List

Although the list we found in Honey, Are you Listening?  (Fowler and Fowler, 1995)  prompted us to seek additional help,  you can find a similar helpful list on adult ADHD symptoms in the excellent foundational work, Driven to Distraction (Hallowell and Ratey, 1994). Their work provides a list of 20 items with which they say the chronic disturbance (to which I say how polite of them to use such a term) is present if the adult can say yes to at least 15 of the items.

1.   A sense of underachievement, of not meeting one’s goals.

2.   Difficulty getting organized.

3.   Chronic procrastination or trouble getting started.

4.   Many projects going simultaneously; trouble with follow through.

5.   Tendency to say what comes to mind with necessarily considering the timing or appropriateness

6.   A frequent search for high stimulation.

7.   An intolerance of boredom.

8.   Easy distractibility, trouble focusing attention, tendency to tune our or drift away with an ability to hyperfocus at times.

9.   Often creative, intuitive, highly intelligent.

10.                Trouble in going through established channels, following proper procedure.

11.                 Impatient; low tolerance for frustration.

12.                Impulsive, either verbally or in action.

13.                Tendency to worry needlessly, endlessly

14.                Sense of insecurity.

15.                Mood swings, mood lability.

16.                Restlessness

17.                 Tendency toward addictive behavior

18.                Chronic problems with self-esteem

19.                 Inaccurate self-observation.

20.                Family history of ADHD, manic depressive illness, or depression.

I like the list my husband individualized for himself:

1.   Got into trouble throughout child and teen years as a mouthy smart-aleck.

2.    Had a difficult time paying attention in school.

3.    Impulsive for me began with a capital I.

4.    College transcripts contained more incompletes or with-drawns than passed class with a C or higher.

5.    I don’t want to share the number of risky ventures I got into.

6.    I don’t want to describe them, either.

7.    I was lazy and called lazy.

8.    I wanted to dig a huge hole in the dirt in the backyard and take comfort in it.

9.    I was only organized when the task was really important to me.

10. I often cried as a child.

11.  Mother didn’t like it when I sang for her friends, “ Casey was hit with a bucket of s*** as the band played on.”

12. I didn’t understand why; she was the one who taught me the song.

13. I frequently did not feel accepted by my dad, but I knew dad’s mother loved me.

14. I learned to cook out of necessity, but I did not clean the kitchen well, and neither did mother.

15. I always felt different and alone.

16. I started smoking cigarettes at an early age.

17. When I like to do something like cook or garden, I can focus on it, but I only read one book completely while I was in high school.

My husband found that when he could put a name to some of his consistent behaviors and  uncomfortable memories, he could view ADHD as a framework and sense of perspective.

I believe the insecurity remains along with the tendency to worry and what I see as toxic thinking described by Hallowell and Ratey. The past associated with ADHD is not easily unraveled or put to rest. However , the future holds greater promise due to the teeny steps of improvement I have seen in the past few years.

Verbal Conflict

The arguments do not come between us these days. After this many years, he still thinks he is right, and I know I am.

 However the first year of marriage was a true test of learning to communicate and adjust. The first verbal blowup occurred within the first six weeks and involved his neighborhood friend and buddy, Gary.

After all these years I still have difficulty going over it; Gary was  low life in my estimation. He did not like me, and I certainly did not care for him. I even went as far as telling my husband that Gary would not be a part of our life together after we were married.

I now know that persons with ADHD make potentially dangerous choices in friends. They often associate with younger friends and choose friends with risky behaviors. Let’s just say Gary was a risk on two feet. However, he and Husband had been friends since childhood, and Husband thought Gary was one of the few people who had ever truly liked him.

My husband made the mistake of bringing Gary to our apartment while I was at work. He intentionally brought Gary into my home and personal space.  He thought Gary should see that life was good for my husband.

On a Saturday morning, my husband promised to mow the yard and fold laundry. He woke with the intention to do so, but he looked around our tiny two-bedroom space and felt proud that he had married a professional woman and had begun a home.

So he thought he should feed his feel-good euphoria by bringing over his old buddy. I still think it was work avoidance and losing track of priorities. Professionals tell us it is not a matter of being lazy; it is merely a matter of motivation. I continue to believe it is a form of laziness, which is a learned attitude as a result of my husband’s ADHD.

Household chores were not a priority as he grew. His father never mowed the yard, and his mother did not expect his help with chores.  He simply was accustomed to go where his thought of the moment led him.

 I made the mistake of reacting in anger.  I do not and never will have much use for Gary, and I did not then understand the significance of getting derailed and off-track. I took it as a personal affront.

Wrong. Wrong.

Rather than losing my temper (which always initiates his temper), I should have chosen the time to explain how the invasion of Gary into my world, my apartment, and the time meant to help us hurt me. I should have used “I” words: I felt you chose Gary over my needs. I believe Gary is not a good influence on you for these reasons. I felt disappointed that you were not available to help with household chores.

He likely would have gone on the defensive, but not with as much anger. It likely would have taken several conversations on the topic as he really understood what I was trying to say.

Instead I lashed out a series of “how dare you” comments. Such comments are not good for any marriage, but as a new bride, I had much to learn.

What I should have done was give both of us some space. It would have been better had I not tried to make the problem his instead of mine. He goes on extreme defensive when he thinks he is the problem. Now, keep in mind he often is the problem, or the ADHD can be blamed as the problem. In a verbal dispute, he goes into battle approach, and he attempts to become the bully.

On that day he learned he should not raise his voice to me; he should not consider that because he is the Husband, his word is indisputable. I led him around in a verbal argument that his ADHD way of thinking could not follow. He eventually sat down from exhaustion and fatigue.

 I stood my ground, and years later he compared that strategy to a cobra and mongoose fight. He called me the mongoose, whose thick coat and resistance to the snake’s venom make the mongoose the victor in many battles with cobras.

I should have been wise like a mongoose who often chooses to avoid a battle with a cobra.

In reflection, I don’t think Husband was ready for some adult responsibilities associated with marriage. He wanted the image and conveniences, but he still wanted to get up on a warm summer day and go randomly into a care-free day. From this experience, I learned it is wise to give persons with ADHD time and space to be ADHD.