The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (11 page)

I wasn’t firm enough.

No matter whom I spoke to about the trends I saw in Grant, everyone seemed to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and an overly simplified generalization. None of it felt right.

And then there were the times when it wasn’t just friends and family who were questioning my instincts but my own husband. This was usually because Curt wasn’t around enough to know what I was talking about—he hadn’t witnessed certain behaviors in Grant firsthand. Other times, he seemed to think I was latching on to an excuse for not having control. Every night when he wasn’t home, I’d give him the playbyplay on how Grant had acted, and often he’d find a way to retrain the lens onto something else that didn’t involve Grant. Curt still wasn’t that close with Grant, and each night I reached out in the hope that I could draw them together. Yet something in my communication with Curt was being lost in translation; I didn’t know what I could do to make him see what I was going through.

Curt was also skeptical about the way behavioral illnesses like ADHD were becoming excuses for modern children being disrespectful to their parents. Though Curt himself had been accurately diagnosed with ADHD many years before, and took Adderall to deal with it, he still felt that ADHD was diagnosed too frequently in kids. I, too, had been wary of this suddenly common diagnosis, and I was against medicating kids so casually for it.

But then, in early 2007, as I was starting to think more about Grant’s behavior, I began to notice things about Gehrig as well. He was struggling much more in middle school than he had earlier, which is certainly not abnormal, but for someone so bright, it made no sense. His grades didn’t reflect how intelligent he was. It seemed that over the past couple of years a cycle would repeat itself—he’d find himself far behind and depressed about catching up, and I couldn’t get him to focus or spend nearly enough time on homework. He had a tutor come work with him twice a week, and I was able to check his homework online, but still he would spend more time trying to get out of doing his homework than actually doing it.

At the time, Curt was getting ready to leave for spring training, so I couldn’t rely on him to help me stay on top of Gehrig and his schoolwork. Gehrig and I would go through the same cycle over and over again: I would
exhaust myself chasing him into the dining room, where he was supposed to be working. But as soon as I’d leave the room, he’d wander into another room to do something, anything, besides his homework. He’d go watch television in the den, follow one of the dogs outside to play with it, go into the computer room to email his friends, or worse, to agitate his siblings.

When report cards came out, Gehrig was shocked and sad. After many years as an average student, his grades now reflected that he was below average. He broke into tears right in front of us, but knowing how hard it had been to get him to focus on work, Curt and I were angry with him. We fell back on the approach we always used back then: punishment. We tried to figure out what we could take away from him for a while to show that we were serious and to persuade him to do better. But it’s hard to take something away from a kid who doesn’t treasure anything enough to be worried about losing it—unlike his sister, who would view being docked a sleepover as capital punishment. Gehrig also didn’t have as many friends as he used to. Although he was well liked at school, he didn’t put much effort into socializing after school and on the weekends.

After watching Gehrig struggle with this for a while, I was tired of the fights and concerned about how much he dreaded homework every night. I went online and realized he fit every single symptom on the list for ADHD. Not a few—every one. (What did we do before the Internet?) I printed out one of the lists I found and brought it to Curt in his home office.

“Look at this,” I said, handing the paper to him. Curt glanced over the list of symptoms: not being able to sit still, not being able to concentrate, doing poorly in school despite evidence of high intelligence, difficulty committing to plans and therefore forming close friendships. Curt looked up at me blankly.

“This is Gehrig to a tee,” I insisted. It seemed so obvious to me. But one look at Curt and I knew this would be a battle.

“He just needs more discipline and structure,” he argued. Curt didn’t want to buy into the ADHD idea. He assumed that since Gehrig acted very
much the way he had acted when he was a teenage boy, Gehrig was lazy or just acting like a boy. Here was Curt, who has ADHD and has been medicated for most of his adult life, not seeing the irony and the parallels between himself and his son. He was missing it completely. I could barely contain my frustration. I spent all my time parenting virtually by myself while trying to discipline Gehrig and the others and instill structure. My life as a parent was based on structure. I knew that wasn’t the problem. It wasn’t a matter of intelligence, and it wasn’t a matter of discipline.

“Well, I’m going to have Gehrig tested,” I said, and I made the appointment with the neurologist. Sure enough, the test results came back positive. Now Gehrig needed medication, but I was worried about medicating him. I grew up avoiding medication except when it was desperately needed. But my attempts at getting Gehrig to focus weren’t working. I wanted to help him become the student that I knew he could be. I filled the prescription and he began to take the medication.

My biggest mistake in this was not discussing it with Curt. I didn’t want to fight with him about it, especially after he had given me so much pushback when I’d merely suggested that Gehrig had ADHD. This was pretty much in keeping with our tendency to avoid talking about certain difficult topics. While we were always very open and honest with each other, our lives intersected infrequently because of his baseball schedule. Our time together, and that with our family, was so rare and valuable that many times we’d both table an item we knew would produce conflict. It was one of the unfortunate and unintended consequences of our baseball lives, but we acted that way out of a desire to maximize what little time we had together.

So when the 2007 season started and Curt was too busy to notice, I started Gehrig on Adderall. From day one he had issues with the medication. He didn’t like the way the pills made him feel. Even though he was more focused, he complained of a funny taste in his mouth. He said it also altered his personality and made it so he wasn’t hungry.

“I don’t want to take this stuff, Mom,” he said.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I told him, “but this is important for you. It will help you do better in school, and in life.”

“
Please
can I stop?” he begged.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

Pretty soon, Gehrig decided on his own to stop taking the Adderall. He began by burying the medicine in the soil beneath our houseplants or in the trash. Sometimes he’d just leave it on the counter. I thought he was taking it, but in fact, he wasn’t.

Since he’d only been on the medication the last six weeks of school that year, it was difficult to gauge whether it had worked for him. After that, I stopped filling his prescriptions. I wasn’t going to waste the money, or the medicine. I never gave him medication on the weekends, and there seemed to be no reason to give it to him in the summer.

Although it was hard to discern whether the diagnosis was having any immediate impact, Gehrig’s testing positive for ADHD gave me more confidence in my parental judgment. I had trusted my instincts that there was something wrong with him and I had been right. The only problem was that now I was starting to see some of the same behaviors that led me to be concerned about Gehrig in Gabby and Grant as well.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one. In May, just a few months after Gehrig was diagnosed with ADHD, administrators in our school system let me know that, like Gehrig (and like their dad), both Gabby and Grant seemed to have problems focusing. They thought the two should be tested for ADHD, so I made two appointments with a neurologist for the middle of the summer. (By the way, I went back and checked my horoscope from 2007; it said to buy stock in the company that produces Adderall.)

T
HAT SUMMER OF
2007, when Grant was seven, I enrolled him in day camp. This was the first time I let Grant do something on his own outside school.

It was not a decision I took lightly. I knew full well that I had avoided sending him on his own to anything nonschoolrelated for years and that certain elements of his behavior might make this a bit hard. Gabby went to the same camp, which made me feel a little more comfortable, but still I wasn’t sure. I went back and forth thinking about it for weeks, but in the end I decided that at some point I would have to let him do things most kids enjoy. Summer camp is practically a right of passage where we live, and I convinced myself he was mature enough for summer day camp.

I was wrong.

Every day Gabby would come home with horror stories about the ways Grant had misbehaved that day. Angry and embarrassed, she would tell me how all the kids would be called from the pool to move on to the next activity, and after they all exited the pool, Grant would jump right back in the water. To most people, this would seem to be an obvious lack of respect for the camp counselors. Gabby was routinely uncomfortable with his actions, and I can’t even imagine what labels he was given by the other kids and the counselors that summer.

When I’d go to pick him up at the end of the day, I’d try to ask him about the things Gabby had reported, but he didn’t seem to have any idea what I was talking about. Sometimes I’d try to make a little joke out of it and say, “I hope you didn’t have too rough a day, Grant,” but he wouldn’t say much or anything at all.

In the mornings I would try to prep him, saying things like “Grant, you need to listen to the adults at camp, okay? That’s really important.” Or I’d tell him, “If you want to have friends, you’ve got to get along with people and follow directions.” But no matter what I said to him, Gabby would come home with a list of things Grant had done wrong or ways he’d gotten on people’s nerves.

In the middle of all this, Grant told his counselors that he had lice. When his hair grew to a certain length, it annoyed him, so he would constantly scratch his head. One day when he was scratching, his counselor asked him about it.

“Grant, are you okay?” he asked.

“Uh, my sister had lice,” he explained. “So I probably have them now.” What Grant failed to mention in relaying this news was that Gabby had had lice at the beginning of the previous school year. She’d been clear for months. Of course, the camp called me right away, and I had to go get him. I explained to them that his sister’s case of lice had been close to a year before, but still they made me take him home. I showed up the next day with this kid who had hardly any hair on his head—I’d given him a very short cut so that it would be a long time before it grew back and he started scratching his head again.

They let Grant back into camp, but it didn’t really matter. After about two weeks of hearing Gabby’s upsetting reports about Grant’s behavior at camp, I decided to take him out. It wasn’t working. Instead, I decided to introduce him to football.

Among Grant’s more troubling behaviors was his penchant for running and slamming into people—mostly me. I became Grant’s security blanket at an early age, and for some reason he liked to run toward me and bang his body against mine. As he got bigger, it became harder to take. It started to really hurt! Yet nothing I would do or say could stop him.

It was his habit of bodyslamming me that made me think Grant would like football. Since he wasn’t going to camp anymore and I needed to find something for him to do. I enrolled him in Pop Warner football, a very regimented program. I thought,
Grant is going to love this.
Curt and I both thought this would be the answer to his behavioral issues because it was really strict—bordering on militarylevel strict.

Because he was so young, I went to the practices, held in the early
evenings, where there were lots of other parents, too. Pop Warner is very parent-oriented. I had high hopes for Grant and Pop Warner football—it’s a really great program. But right from the first week, there was trouble. It wasn’t long before all the coaches—there were about seven of them—knew Grant’s name.

Someone was always yelling,
“Grant!”
He was always going the wrong way or not paying attention so he didn’t know to go where he was told. Then I started to join in. I was torn between sitting there silently, letting his coaches try to get his respect, and yelling
“Grant!”
myself to try and help them control him. Sometimes I felt like I was causing even more of a scene.

There was one coach in particular who wasn’t having any of Grant’s behavior. I swear he dragged Grant everywhere by the helmet. He would grab him by the face mask and pull him. On the one hand, I totally understood how that coach felt. How else was he going to get Grant to go where he was supposed to? There was no getting through to him. On the other hand, the coach’s solution seemed pretty harsh, and it upset me. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

The whole thing was baffling to me. I sat there watching everyone else’s kids, who were tough and eager to learn. Meanwhile, Grant had to be dragged around by his coaches. And there would be plays where he would get knocked down and then just lie there in the middle of the field.

Now and then, Grant would parlay his love of bodyslamming into knocking someone else down. Because they determined teams by weight rather than age, Grant, who was a bit bulky for a secondgrader, was in with some kids who were older than he was. During one of the practices, he went in there and started running. Well, he ran right into this fourthgrader and knocked him to the ground. Hard. My jaw dropped. I wondered whether the kid was going to get up and clock him.

Suddenly Grant stood up and turned around to all the parents, put both his arms up, and shouted, “I knocked over a fourthgrader!”

It was hilarious, and all the parents seemed to laugh, too. Of course, two plays later he was lying on the ground himself, and just sitting there. You never knew when he was going to be on, and it was rare when he was.