I mentioned the other day that I had a blog post in me about giftedness, and I'm feeling in the mood to tackle it, although it's complicated and messy in my head. A few years ago, I was talking to my therapist about my own history as a precocious child, and how that was good, and how it was bad, and how it shaped my relationship to school and academic achievement, and she said, "Wow, you really have not got any of this figured out. I can tell because usually you speak so clearly, but when you try to talk about this, you become practically incoherent."
I realized that this was something I needed to work on when the Lego Savant was maybe 20 months old, and we were driving to the library. He had a sippy cup in his hand, with alphabet blocks or something on it, and he was saying, "Letter A...Letter L...Letter B." When he said, "Letter X," I knew he was just saying random letters, because there was no X on the cup.
And then I went to get him out of his car seat, and I saw that the sippy cup said Playtex on it.
"Lego Savant," I said, "Can you show me the letter X?"
And he did.
And I burst into tears.
OK, keeping in mind that I tend to be very emotionally labile, my feelings at realizing that the Lego Savant might be on the bright side made me realize that I had some unresolved issues of my own to work on.
I think I've made some progress.
It helps that I've done some reading on giftedness in the last few years, and learned that my story, which seemed so complicated and incomprehensible to me, is actually an absolutely typical gifted-child story: I was precocious in school, and not served well. In first grade, my teacher made an arrangement for me to go to a second-grade classroom for math, for instance. But when I got to second grade (which happened because my mother refused to let me be skipped to third, because of her own negative experiences being accelerated as a kid), nobody was willing to make an accommodation for me. So I did second-grade math again.
This was the beginning of my disillusionment with school, and was followed by the usual litany: figuring out I was smarter than most of my teachers; being marked down for things that were correct, like using a particular kind of literary device in a piece of writing, because my teacher either didn't recognize it or was sure it was a mistake instead of a deliberate stylistic choice on my part; being restricted to the picture-book side of the library in first and second grade even though I was routinely reading chapter books (my mom got this restriction lifted for me); being put into a completely inadequate pull-out program for a year or two; and so on.
A side story about that pull-out program in elementary school: no one told me why I was being pulled out of class a couple of days a week to go play games with a handful of other kids and a grown-up I didn't know. Based on the other kids in the group, I inferred that I was being pulled out of class because I had trouble making friends. I continued to believe this until I was an adult, when my mother, overhearing me tell a friend that I had been so socially awkward as a child that I had had to go to this special making-friends group, said, "Susan! That was a pull-out program for gifted children!" Maybe someone should have told me at the time.
I got a lot of attention for being precocious and for my academic accomplishments, but I also had a lot of anxiety about it. Being smart mattered so much to me that I was terrified of finding out I wasn't smart, and getting good grades was apparently how you proved you were smart. Any grade less than an A felt like proof that I'd been faking it all along. I adapted to the anxiety by becoming an underachiever. My almost-conscious thought process about this was that if I didn't try, then a good grade proved I was smart--because I'd gotten the A without even trying. On the other hand, a bad grade meant nothing, because it could be blamed on the lack of effort.
Of course, I mostly got good grades anyway, and this led to a long-term strategy of putting in only the minimum effort required to get an A. In my first grad-school foray, after I had turned in my first paper, one of my profs called me into her office. She told me that she had had to give my paper an A, because it was an A paper. At the same time, she could tell that I had put very little effort into it, and that it didn't represent my best work. She wanted me to challenge myself to work harder, to try for my personal best.
This made no sense to me at all. Why would you work harder than you had to for an A? Especially when you'd been told your whole life that the goal was to get an A.
There are many reasons that first grad school foray didn't work out. This was one of them.
I won't digress here to talk about my experience doing an MFA at a school that didn't give letter grades...let's just say it was much, much better.
Anyway, I have learned that all of this--plus my inability to settle on one thing to do with my life--is one of the absolutely typical ways that gifted kids respond to school. I'm not special! I'm like the poster child for Gifted with Academic Anxiety!
So, along comes the Lego Savant, with his "Letter X," and my unresolved issues erupt like a volcano.
My own experiences in school are a big part of why I chose to homeschool my kids. I didn't want them to have the kinds of experiences I'd had. And from my reading, and spending some time on discussion forums for parents with gifted kids, I could see that things hadn't changed much. I didn't want my kids to be bored like I was; I didn't want so much of their time to be wasted; I wanted them to have expansive time to do what they loved, something I got only very occasionally as a child; I didn't want their self-esteem to get mixed up with academic achievement in the unhealthy way mine had.
And, honestly, I was afraid that I'd project my own academic anxieties onto my kids, and pressure them to succeed where I felt I had failed. That I might become the academic equivalent of the guy who pushes his kid to play football because his own football dreams never came true.
(Note: I was not actually an academic failure. But, like Anne Lamott, who says she was in her 30s before she figured out that a B+ is actually a good grade, I was also well into adulthood before I figured out that graduating with High Distinction--but not Highest Distinction--from the University of Michigan actually meant I was successful in college.)
Homeschooling has done much of what I hoped it would for my kids. And one of the things I have liked about it is that I have not had to worry about whether my kids were "gifted" according to any particular definition--they didn't need to score above a certain percentile on an achievement test to qualify for services, for instance. We haven't needed to prove anything to anyone. And I could side-step my own ambivalence about the gifted label by simply not needing to deal with it.
And then...
Some things that had happened to me, that I thought were adaptations to school, turned up in my kids as well. Word Boy, for instance, is such a perfectionist that he will melt down if he doesn't understand his math at first glance. At least I've gotten him past the point of hitting himself over it, but still.
Word Boy and the Lego Savant both suffer from anxiety, inflexibility, high sensitivity, excitability, and a degree of emotional immaturity. I threw tantrums well into high school myself, and I thought this was a reaction to how my parents treated me. Now I know that this is also absolutely typical for some gifted kids. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) Sadly, it is true for the Lego Savant, who one moment can be talking to you about the literary conventions that make movies and TV shows so predictable as if you're in an English literature seminar, and the next minute can be hitting a chair and screaming that he just. can't. cope. and his life is over because we're out of his favorite potato chips and can't get more until payday.
You should see the two of them trying to work across the table from each other. The Lego Savant is talking quietly to himself as he solves some math problems; Word Boy wishes he would just be quiet, already. Meanwhile, the scratching of Word Boy's pencil is driving the Lego Savant mad! And can Word Boy please stop breathing like that?
I make the perfectly reasonable suggestion that one or both of them could go work elsewhere. They both have desks in their bedrooms!
This is when inflexibility kicks in, one of the hardest things we deal with as parents: they can identify a problem, but (especially the Lego Savant) refuse to accept any solutions to it. No, they cannot go work in the other room because they like to work at the table. No, one of them cannot wait and do his seatwork after the other one is done, because they want to do it now. No, they can't just relax and try not to worry about the breathing and the muttering and the scratching of the pencil.
Sometimes, I tell them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20 to 30 kids, all of them writing with pencils! All of them breathing! Some of them with sniffles! Some of them with a tendency to tap their fingers on their desks! Many of them turning pages in books!
This is what passes for a scary story at our house.
What I have been finally admitting the last year or so is that, even though we aren't in school, I can't ignore giftedness as an issue. The kids' constellation of smartness, anxiety, perfectionism, inflexibility, intellectual and social maturity coupled with emotional immaturity--all perfectly typical. And there's a lot for me to learn from the literature on giftedness.
I have very mixed feelings about this. My first attempts to connect with other parents of gifted children were unsuccessful. I couldn't deal what seemed to me a culture of one-upmanship ("My child read at 3." "I'm not sure your child is truly gifted. Mine was calculating cube roots at 2."). And, to be honest, hearing about these kids' achievements threatened to trigger some of my old anxieties about not being smart enough if I wasn't the smartest, now projected onto my kids.
Another digression: How this plays out in my relationship with Raider: Last night, I read him this quote from Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart: "It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisors cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers." (p. 101)
Me: That is a great quote. It encapsulates his argument really well and is a perfect description of the problem.
Raider: It's also an example of chiasmus.
Me: I know what that means, but I couldn't have come up with that word off the top of my head.
A pause.
Me again: I love how smart you are. Except at those moments when I suspect you're smarter than me.
Raider laughs.
Raider, for his part, managed to be a gifted kid and grownup with none of the kinds of baggage I have had. He didn't seem to get the anxiety part. He never over-invested in academic achievement; he never thought his grades proved anything one way or another. He knew he was smart, but he didn't over-value being smart. He didn't invest his identity and self-esteem in it. Periodically he gets a newsletter for people who got the same prestigious scholarship he did to college; the "where are they now" section shows that he is almost literally the only one who isn't a college professor. This bothers him not at all. I'm glad to have him around as a model of what is possible.
Back to my kids.
In my efforts to help them deal with their various issues (and to make parenting them easier, which may be a pipe dream), I started reading up on giftedness. I stuck it out on some of the parenting forums. I read some of the parenting blogs even when they make me roll my eyes ("People think we're so lucky to have gifted kids! Ha! They should see our book budget! They should count their lucky stars they don't have to try to keep up with a kid who wants to study quantum physics at age 8!" The faux-plaints are strong in this community). I tried to be patient with the strings of letters and credentials people put after their children's names ("My daughter Snow, 8, 2e, intellectually OE, IQ 146, Lexile 940..."). And I learned more and more about how absolutely typical my very special unique snowflakes are.
Not that all gifted kids are alike, I should be careful to say. Just that mine are good examples of Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A.
One thing that pushed me into being willing to engage with this whole vexed notion of giftedness was when the boys' excellent therapist, who got the Lego Savant over his elevator phobia and had great rapport with the boys, admitted to me in so many words that he was in over his head and didn't know what to do with my kids. I think this was partly a narrowness of focus on his part--he loves the "behavioral" part of cognitive-behavioral therapy, and much of what my kids deal with doesn't respond to behavioral interventions. Partly I think it reflected a lack of experience with kids like mine. I loved that he was willing to admit he wasn't sure what the next step was, and willing to try to educate himself, but at that point, we decided to take a break from therapy.
And things have stagnated. Behavioral interventions have helped, but I think my kids really need to get into the "cognitive" part of CBT. They need help understanding what's going on for them, and how they can choose to change their thoughts and behavior, rather than simply have us impose behavioral restrictions on them. We've used an audio program called Turnaround that I highly recommend, but we need more help than that. And I need to know whether what I want from my kids--that understanding, that internal motivation to change--is realistic at this time in their lives.
This is why, on Monday, I have an appointment two hours away from home with a therapist who specializes in gifted kids with anxiety. Just five minutes on the phone with her the other day felt like a deep relaxing breath--she knew what I was going to say almost before I said it. She is very familiar with Gifted Kids: Subtype 2A (a designation I made up, in case you wondered). She has experience with them. And she knew exactly what I meant when I said that I wasn't sure whether what we needed was therapy for the kids, or parenting guidance for us.
She's too far away for us to work with very regularly. But I can imagine her helping us in lots of ways: parenting consultations for me, consulting with our local therapist, meeting with the kids occasionally, pointing us to the most useful resources. I have high hopes for this meeting. I will be keeping my fingers crossed.
Her office is right over by Lake Michigan, so Raider took the day off work and we're making this Family Beach Day as well. A fun and ediftying day, I hope.
(You may be thinking: You talk about Word Boy and the Lego Savant. What about the Tiny Tornado? Do you think he is gifted as well? I do. But in very different ways. His path is going to play out very differently from his older brothers', I predict, and I'm excited to help him follow it.)
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Another Satisfied Customer
When I was in my early 20s, and my mom was in her mid-50s, she went to school at our local community college. She hadn't been in school since graduating from high school at the age of 16, but she did well and enjoyed it. She told me one time, though, that when she sat down in class she would take out a clean piece of paper for taking notes, and she would write across the top of it "KYMSUCUJ."
This meant: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until Called Upon, Joanne. It was supposed to keep her from blurting out inappropriate jokes in class.
From this single anecdote, you will readily infer that I am much like my mother. I look like her, I have her sense of humor, I have her tendency to blurt things out, her inclination to the slightly off-color, and her habit of sharing too much information. She is a collector and teller of family stories, as well. Truly, I am an apple that did not fall far from the tree in this case.
My dad, though? At first glance, we are nothing alike. He doesn't think about the past much; or, if he does, he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about much, in general. He's taciturn and cranky. His default facial expression is a forbidding scowl. Once, on a family vacation, my mom, my brother, and I were waiting outside some touristy welcome center while he went in to pick up a map or something. He came out the door, carrying the map and wearing his characteristic frown. My mom said, "Another satisfied customer!" and we all cracked up. This became a running joke which only he failed to see the humor in.
In the last couple of years, though, I've noticed some of the ways he influenced me. That he was not just something to react against in my childhood and young adult years.
My two oldest kids are left-handed, color-blind boys. In this, they are the image of their grandfather. Word Boy's big square head? Grandpa. The Lego Savant's ability to build anything, and his interest in mechanisms? Grandpa.
Their rigidness and inflexibility? Grandpa, too. Since he always had power over me, I saw him as ridiculously controlling. My dad believes there is one right way to do everything, and that way is his way. (I've probably told you the story from when I was a teenage girl with long, thick hair, and my dad got mad at me for using too much shampoo. He showed me how much shampoo he used--a tiny dot in the palm of his hand--and informed me that this was how much I should also use. This from a man who was already bald when he got married at the age of 24.)
I watch my kids, though, and wonder how much of my dad's tendency to be controlling was about his own emotional comfort. When I watch Word Boy struggle with perfectionism, or fall to pieces when presented with a question that has no single right answer, I see my dad. When the Lego Savant tries to micro-manage the whole family so that his environment can be comfortable for him, I see my dad. When I think about my own inflexibility--which I didn't fully recognize until I became a mom and had less control over my time and environment than I'd ever had before--I see myself in my dad, and my dad in me. I recently read a blog post (which I can't find now but will link to if it turns up) in which the writer said, "I have to write 'be spontaneous' in my calendar, or I'll forget to do it," and that is a pretty good description of me, as well. I used to think my dad was very controlling of his loved ones because we were his loved ones, and that he was trying to take care of us and keep us safe by guiding us very carefully, with attention to every minute detail.
I still think that.
But now I wonder if he wasn't also managing some form of the anxiety that seems to run in our family. Or suffering from a mild version of anxiety's stepsibling, obsessive-compulsive disorder (my first actual psychiatric diagnosis was "Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendences." Now I wonder if they shouldn't just print that right on the birth certificates of new babies born into my family).
I'm like my dad in other ways, too, if you look behind the superficial. My dad keeps busy building things, fixing things, planning to build things. He spent most evenings and weekends throughout my childhood in his very well-equipped garage, doing god only knows what with power tools. My brother is like this, too--they live next door to each other and have quite the impressive pole barn workspace, with heat and a little fridge and microwave. My brother has build a dune buggy (from scratch!) and a race car (from a regular car) out there.
I used to think my dad and I were not alike: he works with his hands, whereas I am a word person. While he's rebuilding an engine, I'm reading something or writing something or taking a class on something. If my home needs a minor repair, I can live with that quite comfortably for a good long time--indeed, I recently noticed something small that needed fixing ( I can't remember what now) and realized that it had been broken for six months and it had never occurred to me to fix it.
My dad, on the other hand, read exactly one book the whole time I was growing up (though he and my mom have been hooked on audiobooks they listen to together for some years now).
So, just how are we alike in all this?
We both like to be busy. We both are always planning and doing projects. We are both quick to volunteer our expertise--you need a new driveway poured? He's there. You need a press release written for your non-profit organization? I'm happy to do that for you.
My dad, despite his habitual scowl, has a wonderful capacity for maintaining relationships, as well. All the years I was growing up, we only went on three vacations-for-vacation's-sake. But we traveled a lot. We spent many weekends at my grandma and grandpa's house in the woods up north; we drove as often as twice a year to Virginia, where we visited my dad's best friend Kevin and his family. We probably logged thousands of miles around Michigan visiting my dad's counsins and aunts and uncles and old friends from high school or college. We were always off to see somebody.
Even now, when my parents take their annual RV trek to the warmth of the southwest, they give much of their time to meeting up with relatives and friends in Arizona and southern California.
My dad and Kevin have been close friends since they were in the Army together in the 50s, and they have probably seen each other 2-3 times a year almost every year for all that time. My dad's other best friend, John, was his office mate when they were both hired as entry-level engineers at GM in the early 60s. Sometimes when Kevin makes one of his rare visits to Michigan, John and Kevin and my dad sit around the dining room table drinking beer, and John and Kevin have drunken pseudo-arguments about which one is really my dad's best friend. At least, they used to when I was young.
Like my dad, I love old friends--I keep saying that one of the benefits of middle age that nobody tells you about in advance is that you start to have friends you've known for 20, 30, 35 years. Like my dad, I rarely travel just to go see a place. Though I am not close to my extended family, I'm very close to an extended chosen family and I travel multiple times a year to be with these people. When I worry that I might lose a friend, because someone moves away, for instance, I think of my dad and the role model he is for not letting mere geography control his relationships.
(And I have many pleasant mental images of my dad laughing with his friends. He can relax the scowl when he's around them--or around his grandkids.)
I suppose I've been a cliche all my life--hard at work differentiating from my parents as a young adult, finding more common ground as a no-longer-young adult. But I would say that this is also one of the satisfactions of middle age for me.
My dad spent the day at my house today, working on fixing up my breezeway. He's putting in all-new screens, a new floor, and new doors. I worked on my front yard, weeding and moving some things around and getting ready for a big delivery of mulch. Partway through the day, I posted this as a status update on Facebook:
I have just peeked my head into the breezeway to admire my dad's work. We chat a bit.
Me: Well, I'm going to get back to work in the front yard.
Dad: Why don't you get those kids out here to help you?
I laugh.
Dad: Why are you all "ha ha"? They're old enough.
Me: I know. And they will help. They like helping in the yard. I'm laughing because I'm 46 years old and you're still bossing me around.
Dad: Well, that's the way I am.
Me: I know. That's why I laughed instead of getting mad.
We both laugh and then we go about our business.
This meant: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until Called Upon, Joanne. It was supposed to keep her from blurting out inappropriate jokes in class.
From this single anecdote, you will readily infer that I am much like my mother. I look like her, I have her sense of humor, I have her tendency to blurt things out, her inclination to the slightly off-color, and her habit of sharing too much information. She is a collector and teller of family stories, as well. Truly, I am an apple that did not fall far from the tree in this case.
My dad, though? At first glance, we are nothing alike. He doesn't think about the past much; or, if he does, he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about much, in general. He's taciturn and cranky. His default facial expression is a forbidding scowl. Once, on a family vacation, my mom, my brother, and I were waiting outside some touristy welcome center while he went in to pick up a map or something. He came out the door, carrying the map and wearing his characteristic frown. My mom said, "Another satisfied customer!" and we all cracked up. This became a running joke which only he failed to see the humor in.
In the last couple of years, though, I've noticed some of the ways he influenced me. That he was not just something to react against in my childhood and young adult years.
My two oldest kids are left-handed, color-blind boys. In this, they are the image of their grandfather. Word Boy's big square head? Grandpa. The Lego Savant's ability to build anything, and his interest in mechanisms? Grandpa.
Their rigidness and inflexibility? Grandpa, too. Since he always had power over me, I saw him as ridiculously controlling. My dad believes there is one right way to do everything, and that way is his way. (I've probably told you the story from when I was a teenage girl with long, thick hair, and my dad got mad at me for using too much shampoo. He showed me how much shampoo he used--a tiny dot in the palm of his hand--and informed me that this was how much I should also use. This from a man who was already bald when he got married at the age of 24.)
I watch my kids, though, and wonder how much of my dad's tendency to be controlling was about his own emotional comfort. When I watch Word Boy struggle with perfectionism, or fall to pieces when presented with a question that has no single right answer, I see my dad. When the Lego Savant tries to micro-manage the whole family so that his environment can be comfortable for him, I see my dad. When I think about my own inflexibility--which I didn't fully recognize until I became a mom and had less control over my time and environment than I'd ever had before--I see myself in my dad, and my dad in me. I recently read a blog post (which I can't find now but will link to if it turns up) in which the writer said, "I have to write 'be spontaneous' in my calendar, or I'll forget to do it," and that is a pretty good description of me, as well. I used to think my dad was very controlling of his loved ones because we were his loved ones, and that he was trying to take care of us and keep us safe by guiding us very carefully, with attention to every minute detail.
I still think that.
But now I wonder if he wasn't also managing some form of the anxiety that seems to run in our family. Or suffering from a mild version of anxiety's stepsibling, obsessive-compulsive disorder (my first actual psychiatric diagnosis was "Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendences." Now I wonder if they shouldn't just print that right on the birth certificates of new babies born into my family).
I'm like my dad in other ways, too, if you look behind the superficial. My dad keeps busy building things, fixing things, planning to build things. He spent most evenings and weekends throughout my childhood in his very well-equipped garage, doing god only knows what with power tools. My brother is like this, too--they live next door to each other and have quite the impressive pole barn workspace, with heat and a little fridge and microwave. My brother has build a dune buggy (from scratch!) and a race car (from a regular car) out there.
I used to think my dad and I were not alike: he works with his hands, whereas I am a word person. While he's rebuilding an engine, I'm reading something or writing something or taking a class on something. If my home needs a minor repair, I can live with that quite comfortably for a good long time--indeed, I recently noticed something small that needed fixing ( I can't remember what now) and realized that it had been broken for six months and it had never occurred to me to fix it.
My dad, on the other hand, read exactly one book the whole time I was growing up (though he and my mom have been hooked on audiobooks they listen to together for some years now).
So, just how are we alike in all this?
We both like to be busy. We both are always planning and doing projects. We are both quick to volunteer our expertise--you need a new driveway poured? He's there. You need a press release written for your non-profit organization? I'm happy to do that for you.
My dad, despite his habitual scowl, has a wonderful capacity for maintaining relationships, as well. All the years I was growing up, we only went on three vacations-for-vacation's-sake. But we traveled a lot. We spent many weekends at my grandma and grandpa's house in the woods up north; we drove as often as twice a year to Virginia, where we visited my dad's best friend Kevin and his family. We probably logged thousands of miles around Michigan visiting my dad's counsins and aunts and uncles and old friends from high school or college. We were always off to see somebody.
Even now, when my parents take their annual RV trek to the warmth of the southwest, they give much of their time to meeting up with relatives and friends in Arizona and southern California.
My dad and Kevin have been close friends since they were in the Army together in the 50s, and they have probably seen each other 2-3 times a year almost every year for all that time. My dad's other best friend, John, was his office mate when they were both hired as entry-level engineers at GM in the early 60s. Sometimes when Kevin makes one of his rare visits to Michigan, John and Kevin and my dad sit around the dining room table drinking beer, and John and Kevin have drunken pseudo-arguments about which one is really my dad's best friend. At least, they used to when I was young.
Like my dad, I love old friends--I keep saying that one of the benefits of middle age that nobody tells you about in advance is that you start to have friends you've known for 20, 30, 35 years. Like my dad, I rarely travel just to go see a place. Though I am not close to my extended family, I'm very close to an extended chosen family and I travel multiple times a year to be with these people. When I worry that I might lose a friend, because someone moves away, for instance, I think of my dad and the role model he is for not letting mere geography control his relationships.
(And I have many pleasant mental images of my dad laughing with his friends. He can relax the scowl when he's around them--or around his grandkids.)
I suppose I've been a cliche all my life--hard at work differentiating from my parents as a young adult, finding more common ground as a no-longer-young adult. But I would say that this is also one of the satisfactions of middle age for me.
My dad spent the day at my house today, working on fixing up my breezeway. He's putting in all-new screens, a new floor, and new doors. I worked on my front yard, weeding and moving some things around and getting ready for a big delivery of mulch. Partway through the day, I posted this as a status update on Facebook:
I have just peeked my head into the breezeway to admire my dad's work. We chat a bit.
Me: Well, I'm going to get back to work in the front yard.
Dad: Why don't you get those kids out here to help you?
I laugh.
Dad: Why are you all "ha ha"? They're old enough.
Me: I know. And they will help. They like helping in the yard. I'm laughing because I'm 46 years old and you're still bossing me around.
Dad: Well, that's the way I am.
Me: I know. That's why I laughed instead of getting mad.
We both laugh and then we go about our business.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The Child You Don't Want
I have had a cold since Friday afternoon. I spent most of the weekend in my big chair, while David and the kids brought me tea and the like. It hasn't been a bad cold, but because of a persistent cough, I wasn't able to sleep more than about an hour at a time, with hours of late-night TV in between. Last night, desperate to get some rest, I took a vicodin, and slept for about 6 hours.
Today, I felt more energetic, because of the sleep, but also kind of off and flaky because of the drug hangover. Or because of the combination of the drug hangover and the cold. Or something.
Anyway, many things happened today to remind me that I was not at my best. I loaded the dishwasher but discovered hours later I hadn't turned it on. I went to Hobby Lobby with a short list of supplies I needed for my next arigurumi project. In the parking lot, I spontaneously decided it was a good time to clean out some tissues and napkins and random bits of paper that had accummulated in the front seat and floor of my van. Only after I'd shoved the mess into a reeking garbage bin outside the store did I realize that I'd managed to crumple up my shopping list and toss it in there, too. I did OK, though I bought the wrong size crochet hook, and tomorrow I'll have to go back for one more skein of yarn.
And then, I took Word Boy and the Tiny Tornado to the bookstore after preschool, and it was only after we were out of the car and starting to walk toward the store that I realized I'd left the van running. I haven't done that since early in Word Boy's life, when I was seriously sleep-deprived from his round-the-clock nursing schedule. That time, I left it in gear, too, and it slowly drove itself into the garage door with Word Boy inside it.
My brain remains fuzzy and fragmented. And yet! I have resolved to write every day, so I will write something.
At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I heard Amy Julia Becker talk about her recent book, A Good and Perfect Gift. It's a momoir, in this case about Becker's daughter Penny, who was diagnosed with Down Syndrome shortly after birth. Becker was an excellent speaker. One of the things I like about the FFW is the opportunity it gives me to hear from people whose beliefs are very different from my own but who are thoughtful and self-aware. Becker is pro-life, and one of her concerns is the high rate of abortion of babies with Down Syndrome; she said that just over 50% of babies who are diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted now. She also talked about some recently-developed blood tests that can allow the detection of chromosomal abnormalities early in pregnancy and without risky and invasive procedures like amniocentesis, which she expects to increase that percentage.
If everyone who was pro-life were like Becker, though, we'd have a very different conversation about abortion taking place in America. During the Q&A, an audience member asked, with great intensity, "What do you do if you encounter a woman who is thinking of aborting her baby with Down Syndrome?" Her tone suggested to me that what she really wanted to know was how to stop her.
Becker said that she thinks many families fear having a baby with Down Syndrome because they don't have a good understanding of what these children are likely to be like, what they might be capable of, what good qualities they are likely to have. She thinks it's too bad that most people probably don't know any families with Down Syndrome kids, that they don't have a model of what is both positive and challenging about raising these kids. So, she said, if the woman is open to it, you might offer her some information, or some opportunities to meet some families raising Down Syndrome kids. She thinks that if more people knew more about Down Syndrome, they'd be more willing to raise these kids.
But, she said, the most important thing is to be compassionate, because this woman is disappointed, and probably frightened, and facing a hard choice. And, she said, ultimately, you have to respect that it is her choice to make, and refrain from judgment or any words or actions that will add to her burden.
Well. Rock on, Amy Julia Becker.
In her response to another question--I don't remember the question--Becker said that someone had told her once thats having a child born with an obvious disability is not that different from having any old ordinary baby. "You just find out that much sooner that you got the child you didn't want."
Every parent in the audience chuckled and nodded knowingly.
I think most parents have to deal, at some point, and to a greater or lesser extent, with figuring out that there is something they were hoping for from parenting that they're not going to get. My friend Farina Endfen is a tough, authority-defying, mess-loving type of person. She looked forward to mucking through swamps with her son, catching frogs and lizards, and looking under logs for crawly things. Her son, it turns out, doesn't so much care to be outside, or to get messy that way. In the realm of parental disappointments, this is a small one. But it requires mindfulness to negotiate nonetheless--the awareness that your child is an autonomous person and not your pet or your doll, the willingness to accept the differences between you, to support your kid in being the kid he is, to manage your own disappointments, large or small, and not expect your child to carry that burden for you.
David and I sometimes joke that parenting the Tiny Tornado is a great blessing because she completely strips away any illusion we might have had that we were in control, that we could "instill" our children with certain virtues or interests. I remember saying to my friend Carolyn, back when the Tornado was maybe 2, that I was having to learn a whole new parenting style with her. Carolyn said, "Detachment?" And she was right.
Today I was reminded--not that I needed to be--that you don't always get what you want. I have this vision of what it is like to take kids to the bookstore; they browse contentedly, they choose a book or two, we pay our bill, they start reading in the car on the way home. Because I love books and I want my kids to love them, too.
Some of this happens. They choose books; we pay for them; they start reading on the way home. Recently the Lego Savant has begun tearing through a series of novels, staying up late to read, spending the whole of a day caught up in a book. I'd have been perfectly happy with him if this had never happened--but I'm glad it did. I hoped I would have at least one kid who was, at least some of the time, a voracious reader.
But bookstore trips never go the way I picture them in my mind. The Lego Savant didn't come to the bookstore with us; he knew exactly what books he wanted (#8 and #9 in the Ranger's Apprentice series, and he was happy to have me pick them up for him). Word Boy wanted a manga, either a Warriors graphic novel or a Legend of Zelda book. The store was sold out of most of the Warriors graphic novels, but he hadn't read the one they had in stock, so he chose that.
The problem started when the Tiny Tornado chose the same book.
Obviously, she can't read it. But she loves to look at the pictures and make up her own story about what's happening, and she loves to have the same kinds of books her older brothers do. It gives her tremendous pleasure. And my philosophy of book selection is that kids should pretty much be able to choose whatever book they want; we will steer them away from books that have content we think might be uncomfortable for them (no suspense novels for the Lego Savant!) and if they ever headed for something I thought was truly inappropriate, I'd steer them elsewhere. But I'm not going to say nay just because she chose a book she can't actually read yet.
Anyway, Word Boy fell to pieces. He had been sitting on a couch in the kids' area, reading his book and waiting for us to make up our minds, and when he saw what the Tiny Tornado had chosen, he had a fit. He went boneless, and fell onto the couch. He began to shudder and "huff"--breathing rapidly and making little noises. It's an anxiety attack.
Why? Several reasons:
1. He did not want the Tiny Tornado to choose the same book he did, because that makes it not special
2. It is #3 in a series and she had not "read" #1 or #2; reading the books in order is very important.
3. She can't even read it!
4. If she just wants to look at the pictures, the Zelda manga have much better illustrations for that.
5. The Lego Savant might try to get her to give him the book, and she might agree, and sthen she might change her mind and then there might be a big fight (this is such a typical scenario that I told her I would buy her that book on the condition that she under no circumstances give it away to her older brother).
How do I handle this kind of thing? I said, "No. You can't do that here. If you can pull yourself together to walk to the checkout, I will buy that book for you. If you can't behave appropriately, I will put that book back on the shelf."
He huffed and shuddered and whined.
I said, "The Tiny Tornado and I are going to the checkout. If you can pull yourself together to come with us, I will buy the book."
And so the Tiny Tornado and I headed to the checkout, and after a moment Word Boy got off the couch and followed along.
As we walked to the car, he said, "I really felt like everything was going to be horrible, but it's not really horrible at all."
I said, "Yes. Your anxiety likes to tell you those kinds of lies. But usually the horrible thing doesn't happen, and if it does, it's not as horrible as you expected, and even if it's pretty bad, you often find out that you can deal with it."
It's very draining, even now that I've learned that not engaging is the fastest route to the end of the fit, and am not letting myself be sucked into it with him. It would only have been worse if the Lego Savant had been there, because he gets embarrassed when Word Boy does this kind of thing in public and jumps into his own anxiety-management mode, which is the effort to control everything around him, starting with Word Boy, and then to use his dissatisfaction with the present moment as a jumping-off point to complain about everything that bothers him about his siblings, me, our home, our yard, his life.
It's extra-hard when their issues feed on each other. You should see them some days, doing seatwork at the dining room table. The Lego Savant has aversions to many sounds and smells, and depending on his general mood and how strained his resources have been, he can be driven mad by Word Boy's breathing or the scratch of his pencil. But, in typical Lego Savant fashion--"flexible" not being a word one would readily apply to him--he will refuse such obvious solutions as taking himself to work in his bedroom. Meanwhile, the Lego Savant likes to talk quietly to himeself as he works, especially when he's solving math problems, and this drives Word Boy crazy because it can be challengings trying to solve your own math problem when someone is sitting across from you muttering, "5 and 8 is 13, carry the one, so that's 60, 63, OK..."
I have been known, on occasion, to point out to them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20-30 kids, all of whom would be breathing, many of whom would have scratchy pencils, some of whom would be congested and making gross sniffling noises, and that they themselves would be discouraged from muttering, from drawing little monsters in the margins of their math workbooks, from getting up for a snack to help them concentrate ("Mom! Why does he have to crunch like that?"). It falls on deaf ears; they both want the problems between them to be solved by the other one changing his behavior. I have made little headway in getting them to see the options that are available to them in terms of modifying their own behavior.
I didn't mean to sound whiny. This is all one of the pieces that's hard, a problem I continue to delude myself that I should be able to solve. If I could just open their brains and pour in what has taken me decades to learn about living with and managing anxiety and inflexibility and sensitivity! I want it to be easier for them than it was for me, and I want it to be easier for them than it is. I always thought that if I were the right kind of parent, it would be.
Today, I felt more energetic, because of the sleep, but also kind of off and flaky because of the drug hangover. Or because of the combination of the drug hangover and the cold. Or something.
Anyway, many things happened today to remind me that I was not at my best. I loaded the dishwasher but discovered hours later I hadn't turned it on. I went to Hobby Lobby with a short list of supplies I needed for my next arigurumi project. In the parking lot, I spontaneously decided it was a good time to clean out some tissues and napkins and random bits of paper that had accummulated in the front seat and floor of my van. Only after I'd shoved the mess into a reeking garbage bin outside the store did I realize that I'd managed to crumple up my shopping list and toss it in there, too. I did OK, though I bought the wrong size crochet hook, and tomorrow I'll have to go back for one more skein of yarn.
And then, I took Word Boy and the Tiny Tornado to the bookstore after preschool, and it was only after we were out of the car and starting to walk toward the store that I realized I'd left the van running. I haven't done that since early in Word Boy's life, when I was seriously sleep-deprived from his round-the-clock nursing schedule. That time, I left it in gear, too, and it slowly drove itself into the garage door with Word Boy inside it.
My brain remains fuzzy and fragmented. And yet! I have resolved to write every day, so I will write something.
At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I heard Amy Julia Becker talk about her recent book, A Good and Perfect Gift. It's a momoir, in this case about Becker's daughter Penny, who was diagnosed with Down Syndrome shortly after birth. Becker was an excellent speaker. One of the things I like about the FFW is the opportunity it gives me to hear from people whose beliefs are very different from my own but who are thoughtful and self-aware. Becker is pro-life, and one of her concerns is the high rate of abortion of babies with Down Syndrome; she said that just over 50% of babies who are diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted now. She also talked about some recently-developed blood tests that can allow the detection of chromosomal abnormalities early in pregnancy and without risky and invasive procedures like amniocentesis, which she expects to increase that percentage.
If everyone who was pro-life were like Becker, though, we'd have a very different conversation about abortion taking place in America. During the Q&A, an audience member asked, with great intensity, "What do you do if you encounter a woman who is thinking of aborting her baby with Down Syndrome?" Her tone suggested to me that what she really wanted to know was how to stop her.
Becker said that she thinks many families fear having a baby with Down Syndrome because they don't have a good understanding of what these children are likely to be like, what they might be capable of, what good qualities they are likely to have. She thinks it's too bad that most people probably don't know any families with Down Syndrome kids, that they don't have a model of what is both positive and challenging about raising these kids. So, she said, if the woman is open to it, you might offer her some information, or some opportunities to meet some families raising Down Syndrome kids. She thinks that if more people knew more about Down Syndrome, they'd be more willing to raise these kids.
But, she said, the most important thing is to be compassionate, because this woman is disappointed, and probably frightened, and facing a hard choice. And, she said, ultimately, you have to respect that it is her choice to make, and refrain from judgment or any words or actions that will add to her burden.
Well. Rock on, Amy Julia Becker.
In her response to another question--I don't remember the question--Becker said that someone had told her once thats having a child born with an obvious disability is not that different from having any old ordinary baby. "You just find out that much sooner that you got the child you didn't want."
Every parent in the audience chuckled and nodded knowingly.
I think most parents have to deal, at some point, and to a greater or lesser extent, with figuring out that there is something they were hoping for from parenting that they're not going to get. My friend Farina Endfen is a tough, authority-defying, mess-loving type of person. She looked forward to mucking through swamps with her son, catching frogs and lizards, and looking under logs for crawly things. Her son, it turns out, doesn't so much care to be outside, or to get messy that way. In the realm of parental disappointments, this is a small one. But it requires mindfulness to negotiate nonetheless--the awareness that your child is an autonomous person and not your pet or your doll, the willingness to accept the differences between you, to support your kid in being the kid he is, to manage your own disappointments, large or small, and not expect your child to carry that burden for you.
David and I sometimes joke that parenting the Tiny Tornado is a great blessing because she completely strips away any illusion we might have had that we were in control, that we could "instill" our children with certain virtues or interests. I remember saying to my friend Carolyn, back when the Tornado was maybe 2, that I was having to learn a whole new parenting style with her. Carolyn said, "Detachment?" And she was right.
Today I was reminded--not that I needed to be--that you don't always get what you want. I have this vision of what it is like to take kids to the bookstore; they browse contentedly, they choose a book or two, we pay our bill, they start reading in the car on the way home. Because I love books and I want my kids to love them, too.
Some of this happens. They choose books; we pay for them; they start reading on the way home. Recently the Lego Savant has begun tearing through a series of novels, staying up late to read, spending the whole of a day caught up in a book. I'd have been perfectly happy with him if this had never happened--but I'm glad it did. I hoped I would have at least one kid who was, at least some of the time, a voracious reader.
But bookstore trips never go the way I picture them in my mind. The Lego Savant didn't come to the bookstore with us; he knew exactly what books he wanted (#8 and #9 in the Ranger's Apprentice series, and he was happy to have me pick them up for him). Word Boy wanted a manga, either a Warriors graphic novel or a Legend of Zelda book. The store was sold out of most of the Warriors graphic novels, but he hadn't read the one they had in stock, so he chose that.
The problem started when the Tiny Tornado chose the same book.
Obviously, she can't read it. But she loves to look at the pictures and make up her own story about what's happening, and she loves to have the same kinds of books her older brothers do. It gives her tremendous pleasure. And my philosophy of book selection is that kids should pretty much be able to choose whatever book they want; we will steer them away from books that have content we think might be uncomfortable for them (no suspense novels for the Lego Savant!) and if they ever headed for something I thought was truly inappropriate, I'd steer them elsewhere. But I'm not going to say nay just because she chose a book she can't actually read yet.
Anyway, Word Boy fell to pieces. He had been sitting on a couch in the kids' area, reading his book and waiting for us to make up our minds, and when he saw what the Tiny Tornado had chosen, he had a fit. He went boneless, and fell onto the couch. He began to shudder and "huff"--breathing rapidly and making little noises. It's an anxiety attack.
Why? Several reasons:
1. He did not want the Tiny Tornado to choose the same book he did, because that makes it not special
2. It is #3 in a series and she had not "read" #1 or #2; reading the books in order is very important.
3. She can't even read it!
4. If she just wants to look at the pictures, the Zelda manga have much better illustrations for that.
5. The Lego Savant might try to get her to give him the book, and she might agree, and sthen she might change her mind and then there might be a big fight (this is such a typical scenario that I told her I would buy her that book on the condition that she under no circumstances give it away to her older brother).
How do I handle this kind of thing? I said, "No. You can't do that here. If you can pull yourself together to walk to the checkout, I will buy that book for you. If you can't behave appropriately, I will put that book back on the shelf."
He huffed and shuddered and whined.
I said, "The Tiny Tornado and I are going to the checkout. If you can pull yourself together to come with us, I will buy the book."
And so the Tiny Tornado and I headed to the checkout, and after a moment Word Boy got off the couch and followed along.
As we walked to the car, he said, "I really felt like everything was going to be horrible, but it's not really horrible at all."
I said, "Yes. Your anxiety likes to tell you those kinds of lies. But usually the horrible thing doesn't happen, and if it does, it's not as horrible as you expected, and even if it's pretty bad, you often find out that you can deal with it."
It's very draining, even now that I've learned that not engaging is the fastest route to the end of the fit, and am not letting myself be sucked into it with him. It would only have been worse if the Lego Savant had been there, because he gets embarrassed when Word Boy does this kind of thing in public and jumps into his own anxiety-management mode, which is the effort to control everything around him, starting with Word Boy, and then to use his dissatisfaction with the present moment as a jumping-off point to complain about everything that bothers him about his siblings, me, our home, our yard, his life.
It's extra-hard when their issues feed on each other. You should see them some days, doing seatwork at the dining room table. The Lego Savant has aversions to many sounds and smells, and depending on his general mood and how strained his resources have been, he can be driven mad by Word Boy's breathing or the scratch of his pencil. But, in typical Lego Savant fashion--"flexible" not being a word one would readily apply to him--he will refuse such obvious solutions as taking himself to work in his bedroom. Meanwhile, the Lego Savant likes to talk quietly to himeself as he works, especially when he's solving math problems, and this drives Word Boy crazy because it can be challengings trying to solve your own math problem when someone is sitting across from you muttering, "5 and 8 is 13, carry the one, so that's 60, 63, OK..."
I have been known, on occasion, to point out to them that if they were in school, they'd be in a room of 20-30 kids, all of whom would be breathing, many of whom would have scratchy pencils, some of whom would be congested and making gross sniffling noises, and that they themselves would be discouraged from muttering, from drawing little monsters in the margins of their math workbooks, from getting up for a snack to help them concentrate ("Mom! Why does he have to crunch like that?"). It falls on deaf ears; they both want the problems between them to be solved by the other one changing his behavior. I have made little headway in getting them to see the options that are available to them in terms of modifying their own behavior.
I didn't mean to sound whiny. This is all one of the pieces that's hard, a problem I continue to delude myself that I should be able to solve. If I could just open their brains and pour in what has taken me decades to learn about living with and managing anxiety and inflexibility and sensitivity! I want it to be easier for them than it was for me, and I want it to be easier for them than it is. I always thought that if I were the right kind of parent, it would be.
Monday, April 30, 2012
The Trouble with Word Boy
I have a small e-mail list of friends I send long rambly notes to pretty regularly. Except not lately. A couple of months ago, I started one of these e-mails like this:
It's also true that I am tremendously busy. I tend to be on the go all day long these days, between the house and errands and homeschooling and keeping the Tiny Tornado from setting things on fire. And then, once we get the kids to bed in the evening, I just want my down time. I settle into The Big Chair and read, or sometimes watch TV (if I can pry the remote out of David's hands--he takes his downtime at night by playing video games). Lately, since I took up amigurumi a couple of weeks ago, I might listen to an audiobook while I crochet. So, no urgency to write, no time to write: no writing. Except that I miss it. And I think it's pretty important in my life. And I have a book project in mind that I want to do something with--I've wanted to write a book since I was, what, 3? 4? And no matter how good my life is otherwise (and it is very good), I'm going to regret it on my death bed if I never do it. Even if it's a bad book. Even if no one ever reads it.
So, I decided that in May I would commit to writing 750 words every day. Not necessarily project-related words. Just words. Just practicing. Just seeing what writing might be like in this new time in my life when I am in so much less pain than I ever have been before in my adult life, and so much less driven by anxiety. I suppose it's a good sign that I felt like getting started a day early.
But what shall I write about today?
One thing that has been heavy on my mind is that Word Boy is struggling with anxiety and perfectionism. None of us is exactly the most flexible or resilient of people (except the Tiny Tornado, who swam in from outside our gene pool), and Word Boy has hit a rough patch. He doesn't like questions that don't have right answers; he gets upset if he doesn't understand his math the moment he looks at the page; an art curriculum that gave him open-ended "try this!" assignments reduced him to panic attacks. His perfectionism cripples him; he has practically no problem-solving skills because he's so afraid of getting the wrong answer; he worries so much about making other people happy that it is like pulling teeth to get him to say what he wants.
At least we're past the roughest stage, when he was having anxiety attacks that lasted for hours at a time. Now his "fits," as we call them, during which he breathes rapidly and his whole body shudders, are usually quite short. The improvement has been primarily because of behavioral interventions--to the extent that he can control these things, we have encouraged him to control them, by sending him out of the room to get himself together, say, or simply flogging him along to whatever needs to be done--I remember at the Midwinter Gathering in February, he started to have a fit about going to childcare (which he loved! So, what the heck with the fit?) and I pretty much pushed him down the hall to the childcare room, where he pulled himself together within a couple of minutes of my leaving him, and went on to have a great afternoon. If I'd engaged with him, we could have been stuck all afternoon.
So, now he still has multiple fits per day, at unpredictable intervals, but they're usually short. Still, we'd rather see even fewer of them, and, more importantly, I'd like to see some progress on the cognitive side of things: improvements in his perfectionism, improvements in his problem-solving skills, improvement in his resiliency when faced with minor setbacks.
I don't quite know how to get that. We were seeing an excellent therapist, but by his own admission Word Boy's problems were outside his area of expertise--he was super-good on the specific behavioral stuff (witness the complete extinction of The Lego Savant's elevator phobia, for instance) but completely lost when it came to sussing out the underlying mental issues and helping the kids deal with them. I am looking for someone else--there is a therapist I heard of on the west side of the state who specializes in anxiety in gifted kids, and I'm going to at least ask her for a consultation or a referral. She's probably too far away to work with regularly, but hopefully she's willing to be a resource. Maybe she'd even be willing to consult with Word Boy's old therapist--with whom he has great rapport, and who is willing to educate himself.
The gifted thing matters. I used to think it didn't, and I felt that one advantage of homeschooling was that I didn't have to worry about whether my kids fit some criterion for "giftedness" or not. I have, or at least did have when I was younger, a whole array of issues related to being identified as a gifted kid, and the services I did, and did not, receive, and I have been glad to avoid having to navigate that for them within a school system. I also have dormant issues around academic achievement and hoped that by homeschooling I could avoid re-awakening them, and avoid passing them on to my children.
But the pattern of Word Boy's perfectionism and anxiety is a classic pattern for gifted kids. So I find myself seeking out information on raising gifted kids. Less of it is useful than I had hoped, and it brings me into contact (so far, only virtually) with a lot of parents who are interested in doing competitive bragging and arguing about whether each other's kids are truly gifted.
Somewhere out there have to be parents and teachers and therapists who have helped kids navigate this as well as it can be navigated. I met one parent just last weekend, a friend-of-a-friend whose kids are grown now but who recognized exactly the kinds of issues we're dealing with, and I glommed onto her like a drowning woman. When she had pried my frantic arms from around her neck and gotten her breath back, she said sure, she'd be glad to talk to me about this stuff. So that's one resource, and a very important one. But I need more. I didn't get effective treatment for my anxiety until I was in my late 20s, and I want to do better by my smart, sweet, splendid children. And I want support for me and David--so we know that we're doing the best we can.
And now--on to all that I've been neglecting: the dishes, the kids, the laundry, my shower, the homeschooling. We are doing a science experiment with radish seedlings and they need to have something done every single day, so there's no slacking on that (I called it "The Tyranny of the Radish Curriculum" and my friend Margaret said, "That right there is a chapter title." So I wrote it down.) Tomorrow: the Tiny Tornado wants a boy swim suit.
A woman whose blog I read recently posted about seeking treatment for her depression, and being really optimistic about a new medication, but worrying that being too happy would stop her from writing. I could have told her she had good reason to worry. I feel like the last few months I just haven't ever gotten to that point I used to get to, where I felt this incredible urgency to write and was going to pop if I didn't get a chance to. I blame my neurologist.
Many of you know that I have been seeing a terrific headache specialist since October. Despite some ups and downs, and some failed medication experiments, and some tweaking, I can tell you that the results have been hardly less than miraculous. After trying a couple of things that didn't help, he put me on Effexor--it's an anti-depressant, but has been very effective at treating Chronic Daily Headache as well. Well, for me, not only has it dramatically improved my headaches, but the anti-depressant part of it has eliminated Psycho Screamer Mom from my PMS (I might get a little bit cranky these days) and also made me more cheerful than I ever knew was possible. I mean, it's more than just not being anxious. It's being basically happy. I've never been a basically cheerful person; I've always tended to be kind of melancholy. This happy thing is really wonderful. I had no idea life could be like this.
It's also true that I am tremendously busy. I tend to be on the go all day long these days, between the house and errands and homeschooling and keeping the Tiny Tornado from setting things on fire. And then, once we get the kids to bed in the evening, I just want my down time. I settle into The Big Chair and read, or sometimes watch TV (if I can pry the remote out of David's hands--he takes his downtime at night by playing video games). Lately, since I took up amigurumi a couple of weeks ago, I might listen to an audiobook while I crochet. So, no urgency to write, no time to write: no writing. Except that I miss it. And I think it's pretty important in my life. And I have a book project in mind that I want to do something with--I've wanted to write a book since I was, what, 3? 4? And no matter how good my life is otherwise (and it is very good), I'm going to regret it on my death bed if I never do it. Even if it's a bad book. Even if no one ever reads it.
So, I decided that in May I would commit to writing 750 words every day. Not necessarily project-related words. Just words. Just practicing. Just seeing what writing might be like in this new time in my life when I am in so much less pain than I ever have been before in my adult life, and so much less driven by anxiety. I suppose it's a good sign that I felt like getting started a day early.
But what shall I write about today?
One thing that has been heavy on my mind is that Word Boy is struggling with anxiety and perfectionism. None of us is exactly the most flexible or resilient of people (except the Tiny Tornado, who swam in from outside our gene pool), and Word Boy has hit a rough patch. He doesn't like questions that don't have right answers; he gets upset if he doesn't understand his math the moment he looks at the page; an art curriculum that gave him open-ended "try this!" assignments reduced him to panic attacks. His perfectionism cripples him; he has practically no problem-solving skills because he's so afraid of getting the wrong answer; he worries so much about making other people happy that it is like pulling teeth to get him to say what he wants.
At least we're past the roughest stage, when he was having anxiety attacks that lasted for hours at a time. Now his "fits," as we call them, during which he breathes rapidly and his whole body shudders, are usually quite short. The improvement has been primarily because of behavioral interventions--to the extent that he can control these things, we have encouraged him to control them, by sending him out of the room to get himself together, say, or simply flogging him along to whatever needs to be done--I remember at the Midwinter Gathering in February, he started to have a fit about going to childcare (which he loved! So, what the heck with the fit?) and I pretty much pushed him down the hall to the childcare room, where he pulled himself together within a couple of minutes of my leaving him, and went on to have a great afternoon. If I'd engaged with him, we could have been stuck all afternoon.
So, now he still has multiple fits per day, at unpredictable intervals, but they're usually short. Still, we'd rather see even fewer of them, and, more importantly, I'd like to see some progress on the cognitive side of things: improvements in his perfectionism, improvements in his problem-solving skills, improvement in his resiliency when faced with minor setbacks.
I don't quite know how to get that. We were seeing an excellent therapist, but by his own admission Word Boy's problems were outside his area of expertise--he was super-good on the specific behavioral stuff (witness the complete extinction of The Lego Savant's elevator phobia, for instance) but completely lost when it came to sussing out the underlying mental issues and helping the kids deal with them. I am looking for someone else--there is a therapist I heard of on the west side of the state who specializes in anxiety in gifted kids, and I'm going to at least ask her for a consultation or a referral. She's probably too far away to work with regularly, but hopefully she's willing to be a resource. Maybe she'd even be willing to consult with Word Boy's old therapist--with whom he has great rapport, and who is willing to educate himself.
The gifted thing matters. I used to think it didn't, and I felt that one advantage of homeschooling was that I didn't have to worry about whether my kids fit some criterion for "giftedness" or not. I have, or at least did have when I was younger, a whole array of issues related to being identified as a gifted kid, and the services I did, and did not, receive, and I have been glad to avoid having to navigate that for them within a school system. I also have dormant issues around academic achievement and hoped that by homeschooling I could avoid re-awakening them, and avoid passing them on to my children.
But the pattern of Word Boy's perfectionism and anxiety is a classic pattern for gifted kids. So I find myself seeking out information on raising gifted kids. Less of it is useful than I had hoped, and it brings me into contact (so far, only virtually) with a lot of parents who are interested in doing competitive bragging and arguing about whether each other's kids are truly gifted.
Somewhere out there have to be parents and teachers and therapists who have helped kids navigate this as well as it can be navigated. I met one parent just last weekend, a friend-of-a-friend whose kids are grown now but who recognized exactly the kinds of issues we're dealing with, and I glommed onto her like a drowning woman. When she had pried my frantic arms from around her neck and gotten her breath back, she said sure, she'd be glad to talk to me about this stuff. So that's one resource, and a very important one. But I need more. I didn't get effective treatment for my anxiety until I was in my late 20s, and I want to do better by my smart, sweet, splendid children. And I want support for me and David--so we know that we're doing the best we can.
And now--on to all that I've been neglecting: the dishes, the kids, the laundry, my shower, the homeschooling. We are doing a science experiment with radish seedlings and they need to have something done every single day, so there's no slacking on that (I called it "The Tyranny of the Radish Curriculum" and my friend Margaret said, "That right there is a chapter title." So I wrote it down.) Tomorrow: the Tiny Tornado wants a boy swim suit.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Taking the Plunge
Today, Eric, who is ten, went down the water slide for the first time...and the second, third, fourth, and at least fifth times, too, because the water slide is awesome. His friend Alexander encouraged him to do it--and Eric was overheard telling Alexander, "Thank you for talking me into it." But he also told me, "I was really nervous, but then I thought about Turnaround and I just decided to do it."
Turnaround is a cognitive-behavioral based anxiety program for children, and we've been using it for the last few months. Created by psychologists, it's an audio and workbook program with ten sessions. It's organized into a narrative about six kids with anxiety who go camping with their counselors. Each of the kids in the stories represents a certain form of anxiety: separation anxiety, perfectionism, panic attacks, general anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety. Each of the ten sessions either educates the kids about their anxiety--what it is, where it came from, how common it is, or helps them learn to recognize and name their distorted thinking, or offers strategies for dealing with specific situations. Or, often, some combination of those things.
For instance, several early sessions focused on various forms of distorted thinkings--what the program calls "Wacky Thoughts," including all-or-nothing thinking, mind-reading, making predictions ("It will never work out"), and "Dark Shades," which lead you to look for "problems, dangers, and bad stuff."
The last two sessions, though, have been especially useful for both Eric and Carl: Day 7, "Madison's Crushed Hope," and Day 8, "Taking the Plunge"--which is the one Eric specifically thought of today when he was wanting to try the water slide.
"Madison's Crushed Hope" introduced the boys to the idea that when you are learning something new, there will inevitably be a period of time during which you will feel like you are failing at it. At this point, it's easy for anxious kids to bail out, to say, "I didn't want to do that anyway, it's dumb," or to otherwise avoid the situation. But, the program says, if you find a way to persevere, you will eventually get to a stage of feeling confident and encouraged by your progress.
In their workbooks, the boys were asked to think about things they were interested in learning or working on, and consider whether they'd experienced this. Both boys immediately were able to answer this. Eric said that he used to be in the "crushed hope" stage about handwriting, and about reading, but that he got past that to feeling encouraged about those two things. Carl recognized immediately that he's been struggling with crushed hope in his attempts to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike; in fact, just a few days before we listened to this session, he had said, "I don't think I want to learn to ride a two-wheeler." David and I immediately recognized what was going on--he was feeling discouraged and wished he could just give up. It was interesting to me that, once this phenomenon was pointed out to him, he could see it, too.
The last session we've listened to was number 8 (of 10), Taking the Plunge, which told the kids, among other things, that it can be important not to let yourself spend too much time thinking about something, but to just find a way to jump in and do it--otherwise you reinforce your anxiety, and it can get harder and harder to take action. That's what Eric was thinking of when he decided to try the waterslide. He said to me on the way home from the waterpark, "I took the plunge, Mom!"
He did. And he was immediately rewarded for it because going down the waterslide was fun. But he also told me that sometimes it's hard for him not to be able to do the things his friends can--to cimb as high in the tree, or jump into the pool. Or go down the waterslide. And now he can go down the waterslide, and this way that his anxiety keeps him from feeling fully at ease with his friends has been diminished.
I am really impressed with Turnaround. It's very well-produced; the voice actors, both adults and chlildren, are very good. The design of the packaging and workbook is very well done, and the content is excellent. This program takes cognitive-behavioral techniques and presents them in ways that make a lot of sense to the kids. There are also two CDs for parents that cover anxiety and CBT in more technical terms, and that also talk about how to be your child's ally, and how to remain connected with your child when their anxiety is wearing you out and making your family life harder.
My only quibble is one of the characters, Crank. Crank is a personification of the adrenal system, essentially, and is used to help kids understand the physical sensations that can accompany anxiety. My complaint about Crank is that he is personified as a samurai warrior, and the voice acting for his character edges a little too close to ethnic stereotype for me to feel entirely comfortable listening to him.
We got Turnaround because we thought Eric needed something, but we weren't sure he needed therapy or, honestly, that we could cope with a commitment to therapy given our other responsibilities. I had read a lot of books for parents of anxious kids, and they were helpful, but it was hard to put their information into practice because Eric resisted hearing things from me. Turnaround talks right to the kids, which has worked much better for us, and it also gives us a structure for talking about these issues when we're not right in the middle of a meltdown. When I ordered it, I thought of it as a thing we would try to see whether it would save us from needing to go ahead with therapy. So far, I think it's going to be enough for Eric.
There are 10 sessions in the program, and you can do a couple of them a week. We never manage that, we've been working through it much more slowly than that. But I expect that once we have finished all ten, we will simply go back and start listening to them again from the beginning, to help the lessons sink in.
I've been so impressed with the program that I've been recommending it left and right to other parents of anxious kids. I feel like I'm being able to give Eric and Carl tools, at the ages of 7 and 10, that I didn't have for dealing with my anxiety until I was almost 30, and it's giving our whole family a shared vocabulary for describing thoughts, emotions, and coping strategies.
And you can see for yourself, from Eric's experience with the waterslide, that he is really taking it in and putting it to use. It has been such a gift to our family.
Turnaround is a cognitive-behavioral based anxiety program for children, and we've been using it for the last few months. Created by psychologists, it's an audio and workbook program with ten sessions. It's organized into a narrative about six kids with anxiety who go camping with their counselors. Each of the kids in the stories represents a certain form of anxiety: separation anxiety, perfectionism, panic attacks, general anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social anxiety. Each of the ten sessions either educates the kids about their anxiety--what it is, where it came from, how common it is, or helps them learn to recognize and name their distorted thinking, or offers strategies for dealing with specific situations. Or, often, some combination of those things.
For instance, several early sessions focused on various forms of distorted thinkings--what the program calls "Wacky Thoughts," including all-or-nothing thinking, mind-reading, making predictions ("It will never work out"), and "Dark Shades," which lead you to look for "problems, dangers, and bad stuff."
The last two sessions, though, have been especially useful for both Eric and Carl: Day 7, "Madison's Crushed Hope," and Day 8, "Taking the Plunge"--which is the one Eric specifically thought of today when he was wanting to try the water slide.
"Madison's Crushed Hope" introduced the boys to the idea that when you are learning something new, there will inevitably be a period of time during which you will feel like you are failing at it. At this point, it's easy for anxious kids to bail out, to say, "I didn't want to do that anyway, it's dumb," or to otherwise avoid the situation. But, the program says, if you find a way to persevere, you will eventually get to a stage of feeling confident and encouraged by your progress.
In their workbooks, the boys were asked to think about things they were interested in learning or working on, and consider whether they'd experienced this. Both boys immediately were able to answer this. Eric said that he used to be in the "crushed hope" stage about handwriting, and about reading, but that he got past that to feeling encouraged about those two things. Carl recognized immediately that he's been struggling with crushed hope in his attempts to learn to ride a two-wheeled bike; in fact, just a few days before we listened to this session, he had said, "I don't think I want to learn to ride a two-wheeler." David and I immediately recognized what was going on--he was feeling discouraged and wished he could just give up. It was interesting to me that, once this phenomenon was pointed out to him, he could see it, too.
The last session we've listened to was number 8 (of 10), Taking the Plunge, which told the kids, among other things, that it can be important not to let yourself spend too much time thinking about something, but to just find a way to jump in and do it--otherwise you reinforce your anxiety, and it can get harder and harder to take action. That's what Eric was thinking of when he decided to try the waterslide. He said to me on the way home from the waterpark, "I took the plunge, Mom!"
He did. And he was immediately rewarded for it because going down the waterslide was fun. But he also told me that sometimes it's hard for him not to be able to do the things his friends can--to cimb as high in the tree, or jump into the pool. Or go down the waterslide. And now he can go down the waterslide, and this way that his anxiety keeps him from feeling fully at ease with his friends has been diminished.
I am really impressed with Turnaround. It's very well-produced; the voice actors, both adults and chlildren, are very good. The design of the packaging and workbook is very well done, and the content is excellent. This program takes cognitive-behavioral techniques and presents them in ways that make a lot of sense to the kids. There are also two CDs for parents that cover anxiety and CBT in more technical terms, and that also talk about how to be your child's ally, and how to remain connected with your child when their anxiety is wearing you out and making your family life harder.
My only quibble is one of the characters, Crank. Crank is a personification of the adrenal system, essentially, and is used to help kids understand the physical sensations that can accompany anxiety. My complaint about Crank is that he is personified as a samurai warrior, and the voice acting for his character edges a little too close to ethnic stereotype for me to feel entirely comfortable listening to him.
We got Turnaround because we thought Eric needed something, but we weren't sure he needed therapy or, honestly, that we could cope with a commitment to therapy given our other responsibilities. I had read a lot of books for parents of anxious kids, and they were helpful, but it was hard to put their information into practice because Eric resisted hearing things from me. Turnaround talks right to the kids, which has worked much better for us, and it also gives us a structure for talking about these issues when we're not right in the middle of a meltdown. When I ordered it, I thought of it as a thing we would try to see whether it would save us from needing to go ahead with therapy. So far, I think it's going to be enough for Eric.
There are 10 sessions in the program, and you can do a couple of them a week. We never manage that, we've been working through it much more slowly than that. But I expect that once we have finished all ten, we will simply go back and start listening to them again from the beginning, to help the lessons sink in.
I've been so impressed with the program that I've been recommending it left and right to other parents of anxious kids. I feel like I'm being able to give Eric and Carl tools, at the ages of 7 and 10, that I didn't have for dealing with my anxiety until I was almost 30, and it's giving our whole family a shared vocabulary for describing thoughts, emotions, and coping strategies.
And you can see for yourself, from Eric's experience with the waterslide, that he is really taking it in and putting it to use. It has been such a gift to our family.
Friday, September 3, 2010
A Compendium of Bits & Pieces about Anxiety
A friend asked me a few weeks ago if I would consider writing some about my experience with anxiety, and I said yes, but I haven't done it yet. And then I remembered that I have in fact done it, in the past. Here are a couple of links to posts at an old dead blog of mine:
I will add that I had an untreated anxiety disorder from early childhood until I was in my late 20s, when we stumbled upon it while doing couples therapy. Until then, I thought pretty much everybody was as crazy as I was, though that's not strictly true: I did try to get help. In middle school, I asked my parents to take me to a psychiatrist and they refused; in college, I asked them to help me get therapy and they refused. When I was in graduate school the first time (at Rutgers, in the late 80s), I did get therapy for awhile and it helped some. But it was a revelation to me to find out that most people did not live in constant fear, or with the constant sense that everyone was watching and judging them. An even bigger revelation to consider that I might become one of those other people.
Interestingly, things really fell apart for awhile after I first recognized my anxiety disorder--as I said in one of the links up there, it was like all my dysfunctional coping mechanisms fell away long before I had new, functional ones to replace them. It was a bad, bad time.
Regular generic talk therapy helped in the sense that I came to have a pretty good understanding of what anxiety was, and what mix of temperament and upbringing had constructed mine. But the anxiety itself didn't really improve. Either my doctor or my therapist (I don't remember now) suggested I try cognitive-behavioral therapy, and seeing a good cognitive-behavioral therapist got me over the hump literally in a manner of weeks; I also saw a psychiatrist and used medication for awhile, which was such a life-saver that I kicked myself for resisting it for so long.
Being a person who is recovered from anxiety doesn't mean I don't have anxiety; I'll always be an anxious-ish person with a racing brain. Recovery means I don't have anxiety that interferes with my life, that I have very good coping mechanisms, that I recognize the early signs that a bad patch might be coming and know how to get help quickly. For me, one early sign is what I call "morbid fantasies," these images that jump into my mind of, say, one of my children crumpled, severely wounded, at the foot of a play structure at the playground, or of someone walking out of the water carrying my child's limp, drowned body. I know how to stop a morbid fantasy before it turns into a full-blown inner brain-movie, but if I start having them regularly, something needs to be attended to.
Sometimes I think things are pretty bad, and then I read that second link and I remember that I spent the first 25, 30 years of my life simply dominated by my anxiety. I remember being paralyzed over what to wear to my department orientation at Rutgers because of how people might judge me, good or bad, depending on the choice I made (my therapist at the time: "Su, a little hint here: nobody is paying that much attention to you." This was surprisingly helpful). I remember bursting into tears on a bus at the University of Michigan because I overheard someone I didn't know in a seat near me mention a friend of hers whose gpa was better than mine. I remember 1000 times not trying something because the fear of failing at it was stronger than the hope of success. I remember many times when my revving brain led to overly-dramatic behavior; sometimes I think I ought to make a list of people who were my friends and lovers before I was 26 or 27 and write them all letters of apology for the ways my insecurity strained our relationships (Carol, Jim, and Bill from freshman year at Oakland: this especially applies to you). Likewise my students from the first 3 years or so I was teaching, when my anxiety was so bad that it was much too common for me not to make it to class at all.
I hardly believe it myself, it's been so long since things have been that bad. I am lucky David stuck with me through the falling-completely-apart-and-recovering period, though I'm pretty sure he thinks it was worth it. It is such ancient history now.
Three more things:
Awhile ago, somebody asked at Ask.Metafilter.com, "What does it feel like to have anxiety?" The answers are worth reading (mine is in there, the same as one of the links above.)
One of my children has anxiety. It is a great balm to me to see how much better he is doing than I was at that age. I did recently have a conversation with my old therapist about how to know whether he needs treatment, and she gave me a great rule of thumb for figuring it out: if his anxiety keeps him from doing things he wants to do, or affects his relationships. So far, so good. But I've been applying CBT stuff I know to him: for instance, even though he is afraid of elevators and parking garages, I get him into elevators and parking garages pretty regularly. Avoiding a thing you're afraid of just reinforces the fear.
The other day, I found this as a saved draft for the blog, a fragment that never really got enough to a point that it was worth posting. But it is also a little picture of anxiety, so I'll share it here:
When we were in the middle of our custody dispute with Yehva's birthfather, I would sometimes have days when I could not stop thinking about what it would be like to lose her. My brain would just keep playing the movie of There Goes Yehva, and its blockbuster sequel, Life Without Yehva. I have an anxious mind and an active imagination, and they could put together a three-reel tear-jerker for me on a moment's notice. I know a thousand ways to distract, quiet, and re-direct my mind when it gets like that. And if that wasn't enough, these little pills my doctor gave me were supposed to be like pouring oil on the water, they were supposed to settle the waves.Mostly, it all worked. But sometimes--usually just after I'd had a phone conversation with our lawyer and her voice had reminded me that all of this actually was happening to us in the real world--nothing was enough. I had to watch the movies, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.But I couldn't just watch the movies. I had Yehva's diapers to change, and Eric's toast to cut neatly into triangles, and Carl's endless questions to answer, and the dishes to wash, and the parrots to feed. So some days, I watched the movies and they were so sad that tears just flowed quietly down my cheeks the whole time, tears for my present fears and my future grief. I could give a bath, grill a cheese sandwich, clean a toilet, pour juice--all with the tears just coming down as if they were a thing my body just had to do right then, like breathing.I have a little flair for the dramatic.David was not subject to this sort of thing. He has a constitutional tendency to be content with things the way they are, and a quiet optimism. His brain doesn't show him crazy movies all day long; it says things like, "life is good," and "everything is going to work out OK," and "nothing to worry about," and "my, my, my, that's just fine, isn't it?"I am grateful for David's phlegmatic brain, because two people like me going through a thing like that together would have just flown to pieces.I can't remember why I started telling this story.
I said in one of the old blog posts I linked above that one of the great gifts of my life is that I respond very well to therapy. Short of not having an anxiety disorder at all, which would have been better, that's true. I know people, I have people in my life right now, who are treatment-resistant, and it's so hard to watch them be stuck in that place of pain and to see their brains convince them over and over that none of the steps that their friends or their therapists suggest to them will do any good, so why bother trying? My therapist told me once, "I like working with you...when I suggest you try something, you always come back the next week and tell me you tried it." Well, sure. That's what I'm paying her for, right? I wish nobody I loved had mental problems or mood disorders, but, barring that, I wish they could all be as susceptible to treatment as I have been.
I also cannot recommend cognitive-behavioral therapy enough. Maybe it's not for everybody, but sorting out my own temperament and brain chemicals and all the things my mom said to me when I was 14 and the way my dad did thus-and-such was very interesting, to be sure, but it didn't fix me. Seeing a therapist who just really did not much care about my relationship with my mother but who would send me home with a to-do list and who taught me all kinds of good ways to stop my revving brain and re-direct anxious thoughts is what did it for me. Maybe I needed the other piece first, or in addition, maybe CBT wouldn't have helped without it. But I do not think I would ever have recovered without CBT.
Oh, finally, the book I found most helpful (though you have to be careful reading books about anxiety, as it's possible they'll just give you other things to be anxious about. Thanks to this book, my anxiety improved. But I also briefly developed a fear of driving on freeways, and had one panic attack, after reading about them in this book. So, handle with care, and perhaps only under the supervision of a trained professional): The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook.
That's it for now. Some bits and pieces. I do wish I could reach every person living with untreated anxiety and show them a glimpse of what is possible. That someday you could be so recovered that you can hardly remember what life used to be like.