After his horrible year in fourth grade, when we sent Zeke to be evaluated, I think I expected the neuropsychologist to say something like "This child is so brilliant and sophisticated that sometimes his frustration with the low level of work in the classroom makes him act out." I can hear you laughing. At least those of you whose children have gone through the rigamarole of testing and diagnosis. I'll bet there are others who are thinking, "That sounds about right. Poor Dylan/Parker/Jayden/Storey is just not getting the stimulation he needs."
I went into the meeting confident that my child's genius would be confirmed. This was the boy, after all, who could recite the planets in order from the sun when he was fifteen months old. Of course he could also recite the names of TV's Arthur and all his classmates, and there didn't actually seem to be much of a difference in how he'd learned both. He's got a great long-term memory. The last thing I was expecting was a diagnosis of ADHD and of the other series of challenges my older son faces. The doctor spent over two hours with us that morning, going over every page of his thick pile of test results. I started crying almost immediately, something fairly typical, I suppose, if the boxes of tissues placed strategically around the office were anything to gauge by.
When I recall it now, it was almost as though, in the days and weeks that followed, I went through a version of Kübler-Ross's stages of grief. First came denial. There was nothing wrong with my son, I insisted. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and to a neuropsychologist every behavior looks like a learning disability. The tests were wrong, administered poorly, graded incorrectly. My boy wasn't hyperactive; he didn't run frantically from place to place, jumping off furniture and breaking dishes. He didn't have attention problems; he could sit for two hours perfecting a Flairpen drawing of Mothra battling Godzilla. Zeke was fine, the problem was school. His teachers didn't understand him; they couldn't see past his (admittedly crappy) attitude to the sensitive brilliance that lay beneath. Moreover, the whole academic enterprise was structured for girls, not for boys. Show me any ten-year-old boy who could sit still for an hour multiplying decimals. It can't be true, I said. ADHD is one of those fad diagnoses, a way to pathologize the behavior of normal boys. The medical and educational establishment wants to drug our children into dull compliance.
Although I've moved beyond the stage of denial, I still think there was some truth to my initial flood of defensiveness. Schools are organized to cater to more sedentary, well-behaved children, to the kinds of kids who can concentrate for hours at a time, even without periodic recess breaks spent crashing madly around a playground. It was also true that Zeke is not hyperactive in the way that laymen think of the disorder; you rarely see him bouncing off the walls.
But even as I was ranting and remonstrating, I knew that I was being unreasonable. While he might not tear a room apart (he's a neat boy), Zeke does have "impulse control" issues. That phrase rang true the moment the neuropsychologist first uttered it. I thought of the impulses Zeke had failed to control: the impulse to use his new pocketknife to shred the seat of his desk chair and the upholstery in the back of the minivan (how does one balance the cost of having to replace leather car upholstery against the pleasure of being able to say to one's husband, "I told you a knife was no gift for a child"?); the impulse to tackle a mean kid who was teasing him; the impulse to knock down his younger siblings' elaborate "setup" (a family term that means a panorama made of small toys, like Playmobils or Legos, or the beloved Hamtaros, tiny plastic hamsters based on the Japanese anime TV series).
The diagnosis of processing-speed delay made sense, too. This was why Zeke was always slow at figuring out the value of his Yahtzee roll. I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him, saying something like, "Come on, Zeke, you know what three times three is." And of course he did. It just took him an extra fraction of a second to come up with the answer. It was a miracle that he could do it at all, with me hollering in his ear.
The next phase I went through was a kind of collapse, in which I actually stopped seeing my son, the boy whom I know better, in many ways, than I know myself. I forgot everything I knew about who he was and what he was capable of, and began to panic that he would become lost in the world. The possibilities for his future, which I had once seen as boundless, suddenly seemed constricted and limited. He would not, as I had promised him since he was a baby, be able to do anything and be anything, with only the limitations of his imagination to constrain him. There were skills that would forever be beyond him, jobs he would never be fit to assume. It was in the throes of this bitter phase that I said to Michael, "If he's got processing-speed problems, he'll never be able to be an airline pilot!"
Doing his best not to smile, Michael said, "I don't think he's ever wanted to be an airline pilot."
"I know that! But if he ever wants to, he won't be able to."
"He won't be able to play in the NBA, either," Michael said. "That's never bothered you."
Indeed I had never lost a moment's sleep over the fact that my son would never be a professional basketball player, or a professional athlete of any kind. Michael's right—I've never cared one whit about my children's athletic limitations. On the contrary, I brag as much about the time Zeke kicked a ball into the opposing team's soccer goal as other parents brag about their children's amateur tennis rankings.
Next Page: But to have my child be limited by something in his brain: that thought tortured me.
