Well-Trained?

My son was devastated to have lost another critical Lego piece to our nine-month-old border collie.
"That's what happens when you leave your stuff lying around," I said. Tiny objected.
"But I thought he was well-trained," he cried.
"You're well-trained, and you do crazy stuff all the time."

We have pondered the curious sight of my son's smurf-blue poop (a certain someone sucked down a blue sharpie, no kidding), his bizarre tendency to flush household items down the toilet as a protest against visiting his father (couldn't he just draw a picture full of angst like other kids?), and his occasional exhibitionist behavior (for no reason whatsoever). In fact, my son isn't at all a far stretch from the aforementioned puppy, whom we have taught to respond appropriately to a myriad of commands, including "Toby, don't lick your wiener." He needed only a little time to figure out the ban on wiener-licking in my presence. My son needed a greater deal of training, however, for his wiener-issue last year, but he now responds well to "Tiny, quit flashing your wiener." Licking and flashing aside, both critters, despite receiving plenty of affection, structure, and nurturing to coach them into being socially acceptable, occasionally indulge in random miscreant behavior. Because it's fun. Because they can. Wieners aside, they share a common bond.

They are both brilliant thieves. The pup gleefully steals Legos, socks, underwear, Kleenex, and blankies. This year, my son's booty included a Kindle, a watch, miscellaneous Lego guys, and ten dollars. Each time, we stepped up Tiny's training.  And just when I thought he was untrainable, the cycle broke, and Tiny restored himself with a sense of respect for other people's things... most of the time. Toby recently skulked into the living room with a stolen peanut butter and jelly sandwich, flashed it before me, and then lay down in complete shame and resignation. Of the two beasts, he is by far the easier one to train.

Despite the struggle to thwart thievery, Tiny is a leader in the manner in which he returns items (most of the time). We hope his approach inspires his four-legged friend to do the same. Normally, stolen items are returned pretty much in the manner in which they were snatched-- whole, unbroken, unsoiled. Right now, our fuzzy fella gladly returns the Legos he steals, but 24 hours later processed in a pile of poop in the backyard.

We take our training one day at a time chez Catiche. Wish us luck.

At least he's quiet...

Bill Cosby once spoke of a dinner out with his wife and very young son. At one point, the child was lying on the floor between tables of diners. Bill and his wife deliberated over whether or not to tell the child to get up, and then suddenly Bill's wife said, "At least he's quiet."

There is much to be said for quiet. At the office the other day, as I spoke to one of my colleagues, her child, whom I hadn't known was there, darted out from her cube into the open and proceeded to practice karate moves in the common area. My friend heaved a sigh. "At least he's quiet," I said.

My mom used to say over and over again that children should be seen and not heard. I used to despise that line of old school thought,  but much can be said about not having to listen to whining, banging, or any of the other chaotic noises that accompany children. Seeing the squirt bounce about and having to listen to him tearing apart the house are two different concepts.

I never quote my mother's adage, but my children have still picked up my craving for peace and project it onto their own situations. This morning, our floppy-eared puppy bounded into bed between my son and me. He rolled around for a snuggle and waltzed about the bed squishing us in the process.

"Ugh!" I cried, shoving the dog off the bed.
"At least he's quiet," said Tiny.

He might be Tiny, but he's got it going on...

It's been a weird week. I sat down tonight with my son, who is often in trouble, the source of trouble, or party to someone else's trouble, and asked him how he handles stress. I just wondered what he would say.

"Go to Starbucks and have coffee," he said.
"What else?" I asked.
"Go have coffee with people."
"No, seriously."
"Coffee."

My son isn't seven yet. He seems to have a good handle on things for a kid who is in constant hot water. But instead of the coffee cure, I opted for a small glass of wine.

"I'd like some wine, cheese, and olives, please," he said, "and then we can sit on the deck together."
"You can't have wine. And I am not up to fixing a cheese plate."
"It's okay," he said. Tiny proceeded to pull out olives, mustard, and crackers, and arrange a rather pleasing looking tapas. "Would you like the recipe?" he asked as he wrote it for me.

I'm not sure when my first grader turned 40, but there he was admiring his plate, which I decided would be his dinner with the addition of some leftover salad. I made egg sandwiches for my daughter and I, and invited Tiny to join us in the dining room.

"You go on ahead. I'm good," he said, motioning us away with the back of a hand. Where does he get this stuff?

ADHD: The Best Boy in the World

My son was officially diagnosed with ADHD this year. This comes as no surprise to anyone who really knows him. I find myself in an interesting place, however. There are the parents who tell me they do not advocate use of medication (and for good reasons) and then there are those who, like me, put up a long battle and finally say to the doctor, "My child needs more than what I can do for him." Medication is a tricky deal. Side effects, risks from long-term usage, a journey that requires time and patience to adjust meds. My theory behind the medication is that it clears up his brain fog just enough so we can work on teaching new behaviors (making good choices, speech therapy, and how to organize). While I hope medication is not a long-term need, I do, however, know quite a few people with other disorders who will be on their meds for life. I see his need for meds but worry about it at the same time.

We did what so many others have done when a child seems recklessly driven by an internal motor like Tiny's: vitamins, changing diet, participation in physical activities such as sports and yoga, running the track before class or in-between classes, meditation and visualization exercises (yes, really), behavior modification, reward and consequences, stimulation gadgets he could fool with to burn off the fidgets and wiggles (he would ultimately break those), and adjusting sleep schedules. While elements of these things have relieved some of Tiny's tendencies to be on a constant search-and-destroy mission, they were no real redirection. One of the things that pushed me to look into medication was the acknowledgment that his behavior, documented in child study meetings, psychological evaluations, and countless emails with teachers, was making him feel like he was a failure, and nothing we were doing to naturally relieve his symptoms would help. One day, I said to my ex-husband as we discussed ways to help Tiny, "Imagine what it must be like to be him." Silence followed as we both digested the fact that our boy had become the stand-out in his school for a history of erratic, destructive, loud, paranoid, angry, and occasionally defiant, behavior. His academic performance was mediocre, but I have always known that within Tiny's body is a sharp, bright mind. How could we help him be who he needed to be?

Tiny is on a low dose of Adderall XR. He takes a multivitamin, which I have begun to give 30 minutes before his ADHD meds instead of at the same time, and two doses of fish oil a day. He sees two specialists who work with children who have ADHD, anxiety, and other emotional disorders. Something interesting is happening. While he is still the busy boy I would expect a boy to be--climbing, running, playing, building forts out of blocks or boxes and knocking them over with a triumphant hurrah--he is communicating far more clearly and causing less and less conflict at school and home. While he has always been Mommy's Tiny, as I call him, he is increasingly pleasurable to do things with. He takes his time to explain in detail why he needs his space/toys not encroached upon instead of yelling and throwing things. He follows directions quickly. His attention span has increased and he spends an hour if not longer on his legos or his elaborate drawings. He is working better toward long-term goals.

The hardship lies in sensitivity, which the addition of fish oil to his routine seems to abate lately. There have been many afternoons where he cries easily or is irritated easily by others. There was a meltdown at school one day last week--but it was only the second one in a month of the new treatment, whereas before, I was being emailed or called nearly daily with reports. Tiny is improving. He is also learning how to listen to his body when he needs to relax or change environments. He charts his own behavior on a calendar beside his activity table at home.

Moments ago, my son came to see me to ask permission to play outside. I told him to change out the t-shirt he was wearing for a long-sleeved shirt and to put socks on. He did as asked and came again to show me he had followed directions. He stood sweetly, his sandy hair framing his precious little face. I pulled him into my lap to tell him what a good boy he was, to say that he was the best boy in the world, and that I believed he was a gift. He tucked his head under my chin and cuddled. Then we talked about how his body was feeling and if he needed help with his occasional headaches (a side-effect). Tiny scooted out the door to play and returned moments later with a calm remark that the neighbor's kids weren't awake to play yet and that he was going upstairs to play legos. And on he went. I can hear him constructing a world and creating a narrative to go along with it--chatting and happy play noises becoming music against the clicking of my keyboard as a write. This scene would have played out in battle only a month or two ago.

I remember crying to my father a few years ago that Tiny was a special needs child and I was so frustrated with his lack of processing and understanding. He was this wild thing that wouldn't learn safety from painful accidents and for whom punishments meant nothing. He always was, though, what I told him this morning: the best boy in the world. And he always will be. We simply see more of the wondrous capacity he has to live happily than we have before. While medication is of great concern, great blessings have abounded because of it. I don't call it a cure-all, nor have I advocated it to other parents yet. Instead, I operate on a wait-and-see basis. Each child's mind and biology are unique. What I have found though is beautiful support from other parents with special children. For this, I thank each of you--keep the support and the ideas coming.

Mother of a Boy

You ever read those italicized notes at the end of an article that describe the writer? There will be some brief mention about what that person does for a living (along with the writing because so few of us can actually live off that) and a little tidbit about her family life: Judy is the mother of an active boy. Every time I read "active boy" I wonder why not just say what it really is: Judy is the mother of a boy. It's superfluous to add "active" really. There is no such thing, therefore no clarifier is needed. Just saying a woman rears a boy should instantly draw feelings of empathy from the reader.

When I learn that an expecting mother is having a boy, I reach out to her in mercy and compassion. "Hold on to your hat," I say. Forget any nice-looking furniture you have, any freshly painted wall, any nice-smelling bathroom. Get ready for all the science projects he'll bring home, like the pet worm my son and his friend tried to sneak in the house last week. Get ready for the fact that while you are trying to cook dinner, he is flushing three toothbrushes down your toilet (yes), hosing his sister against her will outside, or, having found a blue ink pad in your art supplies, he is using it to stamp geometric patterns on your flagstone path in the yard, your minivan, and the neighbors’ brick edging that trims the path to their home. And by the way, it took me days to figure out that it was permanent ink— I had my son scrub it off with a toothbrush and detergent. I should have made him use one of the toothbrushes I had snaked out of the toilet from the first incident I mentioned.

Yes, to say that one is the mother of a boy is description enough. One day at church, there was a woman sobbing outside the doors to the building. She was being comforted by a friend. Concerned, I walked over and asked if they needed help. “It’s ok,” said one woman as she held an arm around the crying one, “She is just raising boys.” No kidding.

We have countless stories about the wild boys among our family and friends. My grandmother tied her second-born to a tree so she could complete chores in peace. An Indiana friend of mine once came home to her son swinging on a rope like Tarzan from the second floor interior balcony of her home. The other stories I have, especially a host of them about my son’s birth father, aren’t even fit for print. While some of these boys I knew grew up okay, others didn’t. My grandmother on her deathbed still obsessively worried about at least one of her sons. I supposed that happens. The people I worry the most about though are the mothers. We are exhausted from cleaning up the damage.

A friend of mine, whose little boy has similar difficulties to my Tiny Man's, described his recent suspension from school. She asked me how she was supposed to keep going—how much could she really take. The next day I walked up to her office and told her Tiny had just been suspended from after-school care. We laughed. It’s the best we can do. Mothers take all our children’s faults and eccentricities to heart. We grew these creatures. They came from us. They are extensions of ourselves. When we see them do things we wouldn’t do (because we were girls), we become unglued. And we need other mothers to sympathize with us because they understand. When I tell men what my son does, most of them say something like, “I did the same stuff.” My husband appears to be an anomaly in this department, the worst story about him being that he jumped off the top of the refrigerator once in a while, usually with his Dad waiting to catch him and encouraging it. At least Tiny is incredibly sweet and affectionate; it’s what has kept him alive this long. By the way, among the things I did to ground my son for his having misbehaved enough to be suspended, I put him in time-out in his room from after school let out until supper time. He could play alone with his own toys—no friends, no TV, no Wii, no dog, no free-ranging it outside. He made do. I caught him emptying buckets of water out his bedroom window to amuse himself. There is no rest for the weary mother of the boy.

While all mothers deserve medals for the hell their boys put them through, there are those of us who deserve special awards for raising a hyperactive boy.  In a recent ADHD article I read, the doctor described raising a child with this disorder as raising a child times five. So, if you are going to call a spade a spade, here it is. This is what my byline should read: The author is an editor, a blogger, and an artist. In addition to bringing home the bacon and trying to maintain snippets of a creative life, she is married to a handsome, brilliant academic and skydiver who she fears could die any day, leaving her solely responsible for her son with ADHD and his sister, who is often grossly disappointed with her brother’s misconduct.

The Commonwealth: Casseroles and Culture

Virginia. It's beautiful here--virgin forest crawling across much of it, shrouding what once sheltered Native Americans and the first colonists. There are still areas of those early settlements that remain preserved, and others, of course, have expanded into contemporary urban populations prideful of their legacy. The English left their mark in a rather distinguished old-country accent, long Os rounding out the speech of the locals whose families weave back to the first peoples. Careful in speech as they are, they are even more careful with the establishing of relationships; it is hard to break into even common society here, and the presence of some of us as transients remains exactly that. Too, the proximity to the culture of the true northern states has ebbed away some of what could have been a hospitable reputation in one of the most elegant states in the fifty. I love living here, but find it curiously confounding. Southern, yet stand-offish. I simply shrug and say to newcomers, "Virginians!" and they say, "We've noticed."

This summer, our household survived two people having surgery; first for my son, then me. Where I grew up, my household would have been blanketed in casseroles and other steaming dishes for days. One or two visitors would have delivered a bottle of wine (when not for the patient, highly recommended for those providing care!). Deep and mid-southerners do more than check on us, they do not believe that the patient is fine, and show up anyway. So with my son's surgery, I hit Mommy-exhaustion by Day 3 of recovery, and when irritated by something his out-of-state father did at that time, I said, in a fatigued tirade to him, "And dammit, I need a casserole, and no one has brought one!" The mind-set of the Virginian is that distance is best, and if you need something, you'll ask for it. The trouble with Deep Southerners like myself is that according to our own traditions, we dare not ask. But, I guess you could say I am learning; right before my surgery, my boss asked me what I needed. I looked at her and said, "A casserole." And she sent one--had it delivered by a local catering company--something my Louisiana girlfriends found uproarious.

While Virginians wish not to intrude upon you unless asked, they think nothing of making oddly direct observations, things my mother would have chastised me for, and often did, in our soft-spoken household. Last year, a parent of a child in my son's class bumped into me at a local eatery. She knew my son, but she and I had never met. So imagine my shock when she introduced herself and said her boy had said Tiny was in frequent trouble at school, and that she had asked him if Tiny was mean, and the boy had said no, that he was actually a nice kid. She told me this, and I thought--if I were permitted in my upbringing to say it to a stranger--"You're shittin' me." I remained speechless for a moment and invented something gracious to say. It's what ladies of the Deep South do instead of saying "You're shittin' me" which we are so clearly thinking.

In Missississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee, if you would see a stream of neighbors coming and going from a gathering near your home, you wouldn't just be invited, you'd be recruited. There is a wonderful scene in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, when a Georgia local knocks on the door of the visiting New York writer for ice, and then brings him to a neighboring bash. He isn't used to this. Apparently, Virginians aren't either. And more than once have I watched a parade of adults and children entering a neighbor's home for parties while waving to us on our porch. I have adapted to this now, too, and have begged my children to just stay inside and avoid any tension. I have taught them households have borders and not everyone should be included all the time. In fact, I have grown to even like this a bit. Keeps things small, manageable even, when it's our turn to host an event. There is something to be said for becoming Virginian.

Nevertheless, where I grew up, we took new people under downy wings of conversation and comfort. We want you to be all right. We ply you with Mama's chess pie and Daddy's cocktails. We send boatloads of prepared meals to the ailing. (Note my favorite quote from my first mother-in-law when she was dying of cancer--she pointed to all the fruit baskets her Florida friends had sent. "Have some fruit. We have fruit out the yang.") We are afraid new people are lonely, left-out, excluded. In Virginia, no one wants to bother you. Or they can't be bothered. In the deeper southern regions, it bothers us that you might be lonely. We 'd rather die than overlook the potential of good company anyway. So imagine my surprise at my office when, in my first days there a year and a half ago, no one came to see me at lunch, ask how "the new girl" was doing, and invite me down for company. I felt terrible. Eventually though, I adapted. When I want company, I head to the group table at the cafe on my floor, when I don't, I eat in my cube. These days, I have too much work anyway.

It is hard to make friends in Virginia. Sure, people are nice here. But having you over is an earned position, not a casually-made offer. A workmate asked me recently if I was going to visit with friends one weekend. "I work and raise children," I said, "I have no close friends in Virginia." He was shocked, "But you are so friendly!" he said. Frankly, I have learned that is probably the cause, as my social tendencies in the very first office I was in here three years ago made me a bit of an outsider. The vibe in that office had been more morgue-cum-library, and I just didn't fit. Being an emotional trainwreck didn't help either, but that story is for another day.

In Lousiana and Mississippi, we had constant events and company. Extended family was a part of daily life. In Tennessee, I had a social schedule that the Queen of England might find exausting. It was moderate in Indiana, and earned after two years of residence there. I maintained many busy nights of fun dinners in Georgia. Here in Virginia, it is different. I lived here six months before my husband and I were invited to anything (with the exception of drinks with his first boss, who used that time to hit on me in a surprise alone moment, so that shouldn't count). Living here has groomed me to choose even more carefully those I might befriend, people who can understand and tolerate the complexity of our step-family arrangement, heavy travel for the kids' visitation, my husband's two jobs, the kids' activities, and a very nuclear family-centric life in general. Maybe, Virginia has been good for me in that way.

The other day, the phone rang with a kind and eager request for coffee and chatter from a parent at my daughter's school, an accomplishment of earning trust. "Who was that?" Tiny asked. "A friend," I said, "Mommy has a friend in Virginia. High five me."