Maudlin alert

This week I will attend two moving up ceremonies for my five year-old, who is headed for kindergarten in the fall, and as the week gets underway, I can feel a storm brewing in me.

It’s not merely because he is my youngest child, and this marks the end of an era, though I’m sure that plays a part. It’s primarily because in addition to pre-kindergarten, he is leaving the DLC, which he has attended for the past year and a half.

From infancy, my husband and I suspected that our son had ADHD; his temper, his restlessness and obstinancy at a young age were outsized in comparison with his siblings. When he entered pre-school it became even more apparent. He barrelled through classrooms without a thought as to who or what was in his way. His skills were uneven. At three he had an amassed an impressive vocabulary of sight words and was beginning to pre-read, yet fine and gross motor delays made many activities difficult. He was sociable and hyperarticulate, but preferred to be in the company of older children and adults, and had a complete disregard for peers.

ADHD is not a matter of an inability to focus, but one of uneven focus; frustration tolerance for difficult activities is low, while other activities are so mesmerizing that you enter a state of hyperfocus, and the world drops away. My son had no interest in playing with manipulative toys, coloring, or gluing, but could sit for hours painting large scale, gestural works, or rolling a truck across the floor.

He became increasingly oppositional, both at home and in school, and not for lack of discipline; we began calling him Cool Hand Luke. He sought power struggles when I tried to avoid them; if I gave him a choice between putting on his shoes or coat first, he responded by choosing neither and having a tantrum. When I followed up with threat of a consequence, he would put himself a time-out rather than comply. Rather than outgrow tantrums, his continued to escalate. Positive behavior modification had no effect, as the long and sordid saga of our efforts to toilet train him made sufficiently clear.

By the time we brought him to the child-study team for an evaluation, he had littered the town with a trail of failed pre-schools.

The child-study team sent him for a neurological exam, and evaluated him thoroughly. After it was determined he did indeed exhibit the characteristics of emerging ADHD, they devised an IEP, and he was placed in a small classroom, where the staff began to work with him intensively to teach him the skills and coping mechanisms he would need, and was not developing on his own, to succeed in school.

The DLC has taken nothing but the most remarkable care of him; his teachers, aides and therapists are among the most dedicated educators I have encountered. Every staff member who interacts with him has shown nothing but the deepest respect, love, patience and empathy for my son, and he has developed close bonds with his peers and teachers. I will be forever indebted to them for playing such an important role in helping to put him on path to being the best, rather than the worst, possible version of himself.

At times with one’s children it is difficult to sort out whose emotions you are feeling; for a while I told myself I was empathizing with my son’s anxiety regarding fear of change, but I know this is untrue. I am not generally prone to sentimentality, but as the time to leave this womb approaches, in the next few weeks I am certain to embarrass myself many times with my inability to hold it together. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and for it, I bow down to all of the professionals at the DLC.