Long Legs has in the space of 12 hours driven me absolute potty with a couple of things he's done and in the midst of my ranting to him, he has made me laugh. Rant was ended. I am so glad he has done this and I hope, given it's success rate so far has been 100%, he will keep doing it. You may think it's wrong that I am hoping my 12-year-old son will help keep me calm when it should be the other way around. I do count to 100 on a daily basis. I also lose my rag on a daily basis. I feel like I should know better, and I do, but all the education,
training and knowledge in the world does not prepare you for what it's
actually like on the western front.
I shared a post the other day on my facebook and twitter pages about a mother who said she was glad her son was on medication for his ADHD. If you read the post you would have seen how she felt like the motherhood gig was clearly not her forte because she was such a cranky and impatient mother. Once her son was on medication she realised that she was in fact a good, patient mother. The medication either made her son's issues disappear for the day or were reduced. Having some semblance of 'normality' gave her the patience she needed for when his issues returned at the end of the day once the meds had worn off. As much as it is not PC to say she's happy her son is on meds, she also likes how she feels as a mother because he is. I get that.
I resonated with this piece because there is pretty much not a day that goes by where I don't feel like the worst mother ever because of something I say or do to my boys because of a lack of patience. One is on meds, the other isn't. I would love to say the medication has such a dramatic transformation on my eldest that I don't find him hard work when he is on them. Unfortunately, as much as they do dramatically help his attention and impulsivity, they are not little miracle pills. The Short One's issues cannot be assisted by medication and although I do not find him as exhausting as his brother, he is still fairly draining on a daily basis. I know the combination of both of their issues plus the years of having to deal with them has sucked out my back up reserves of patience and so I literally have my daily reserves to work with. It's a bit like a device being charged up for only 5 minutes as opposed to an all night battery back up; it's going to run out fairly quickly.
If you haven't read the post, here is something else she said. " Lucas isn’t the only one who’s been suffering here. ADHD had been wearing all of us down, especially me, his primary caregiver.
I’d been worrying for so many years that the constant negative feedback
Lucas received at school would condition him to believe that all he
could expect from life was an endless torrent of people begging him to
pay attention and telling him his best wasn’t good enough. A justifiable
concern, for sure. But I nearly overlooked what ADHD had done to the
rest of our family. To me."
So here we go back to the beginning and my hopes that my son will help keep me calm when he has one of his moments. Last night, for the third night in a row, he played up at bed time rolling around in the sleeping back his friend used at the weekend, squirming like a caterpillar under our bed and refusing to come out. He has insisted every night that he wants to sleep in our room, which is not helped by the fact his brother has been sleeping in our room since we returned from the UK in January - that's another story! My husband had a moment of genius when he said the problem was we've turned his fan off because night time temperatures have dropped dramatically this week. He clearly is soothed by the sound of white noise which must block off whatever noises he can hear which hinder him dropping off. We put on calming music on night 2 to give him some noise and left his fairy lights on and off he dropped.
We forgot to do it last night but getting into a routine of giving him these new techniques to help drop off takes us a while. He on the other hand very quickly gets into bad habits which become his routine. His new bedtime routine tends to go on for about half an hour and last night, whilst I persisted for quite a while simply asking him to get up off the floor and go to bed, with a constant answer of 'no', my patience eventually lost and the yelling won. Naturally he was not impressed with me and as I am frequently told when I raise my voice 'you're mean!'. As he stomped off back to his room yelling at me for being a meanie, I yelled at him 'if you won't move, what do you want me to do? You can't just sit there saying no all night?!?' To which he replied 'give me cheese!' We both started laughing, I gave him a cuddle and then put him to bed where he stayed.
Pretty much the same happened this morning, he stole chocolate from the fridge which is something of a habit of his and for which we have told him umpteen times the rules about taking food without asking. So after the third minute of letting steam pour from my ears in fury, I again could not hold it in any longer and yelled 'what bit about the rule, do not take chocolate from the fridge do you not understand? Why do you keep doing it?!' To which he replied 'because I like chocolate.' I really have no argument with that. Cue more laughter. Tonight the fan will be back on, if it is too cold to be facing him, I will simply point it towards a wall but at least the noise will still be there. I will also have a kilo of cheese under my pillow in case of emergencies. Til tomorrow x
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