In Which I Spend a Day Alone With Squirrelboy and Also Learn Something New About ADHD

I love my husband. I love my kids. But sometimes I almost wish I were in a divorce situation so that there was someone else to whom I could send one kid at a time. Alone, each of my kids is absolutely amazing. Yes, sometimes Squirrelboy's ADHD intrudes briefly, and Kittygirl's T1D is always in the background. However, it's nearly always a pleasure to spend time with them individually. When they're together, it is often not a pleasure to spend time with them. They nag at each other in a way no one else can nag at either of them, and every single little thing one does can grate on the nerves of the other.

This is one of the many reasons I appreciate the Boy Scouts of America. Beginning in August and stretching through mid-November, Squirrelboy's troop has two weekend campouts a month on average, occasionally three. Mr. Engineer often comes along. On those occasions I get a weekend alone with Kittygirl, which is usually a delight. It's more rare for me to get a weekend alone with Squirrelboy, but it has started to happen thanks to girls being allowed into the Cub Scout program. Mr. Engineer and Kittygirl have gone on two Cub Scout campouts together this fall, which means I have had two solo weekends with Squirrelboy. This past weekend was one of them.

I was a bit nervous at the beginning of the weekend, because Squirrelboy had to spend time on Saturday reviewing the requirements for a merit badge in preparation for a meeting on Sunday and he also had two projects to work on for school. Such things have historically stressed him out and made spending time with him not very much fun. I was pleasantly surprised on Saturday by how things went.

I slept in until almost 10am, which is a rare treat for me. I discovered upon getting ready for the day that Squirrelboy was finishing breakfast, had remembered to take his ADHD medicine (which is notable since he doesn't usually take it on weekends), and was ready to get to work. I expected that I would be talking him through what to do step by step, but that's not what happened.

Yes, there were a handful of small freakout moments when he thought he had lost one of his papers for the merit badge work, but they were all quickly solved and he handled 95% of the review work himself. I was even more impressed when it was time for him to work on his school project, an imaginary conversation for English class in which Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. run into each other at a Starbucks and discuss contemporary voting trend.

The assignment involved looking up the words of both historical figures, paraphrasing them at appropriate points in the conversation, and citing them in APA format. I had no idea how much Squirrelboy had learned that would help him with this task. I thought I might have to drag him through it and look up every citation for him, but I was wrong. He needed just a little bit of guidance and encouragement.

Even though Squirrelboy grew a lot as a student while I was homeschooling him, I sometimes despaired that he would ever be able to do his schoolwork fully independently. He's still not 100% there in 100% of his subjects, but neither are most high school freshmen. He has really stepped up and matured a lot since starting high school. It makes me simultaneously proud and a little nostalgic for the kid who needed me so much.

He even finished in time for us to go to a 5pm showing of The Current War, which I highly recommend.

Incidentally, the same day I hung out with Squirrelboy and mostly just watched him work I ran across an article about ADHD while scrolling through Facebook. It detailed research that shows that the ADHD brain is constantly seeking stimulation. If it can't find stimulation anyway, it may create its own stimulation by provoking an argument. The person with ADHD isn't consciously trying to stir up trouble, it just sort of happens.

This explains so much, both in my life and in Squirrelboy's. Yes, sibling rivalry is a real thing even if neither sibling has ADHD, but, since Squirrelboy is the instigator about 70% of the time, I'm hypothesizing that a decent percentage of his arguments with his sister are just his brain seeking stimulation. It happens to me too. Just the other night I found myself getting really angry at Mr. Engineer and didn't even know exactly why. It just made me feel better to be angry at him.

This is something good to keep in mind if you or someone in your life has ADHD. It doesn't mean that the person with ADHD should be left totally off the hook when they provoke an argument. It's still an important skill to learn to redirect that impulse and seek stimulation elsewhere. Upon reflection, this tendency might be why Squirrelboy went through a brief phase of biting and hitting other kids in his early preschool years. We successfully redirected the impulse.

What knowledge of this does mean, though, is that family members and friends of those with ADHD should be extra thoughtful when responding to unprovoked conflict. It may not be that your child, spouse, sibling, or friend is trying to be a jerk. It may just be that their brain is jerking them around.