Maternally Challenged

The ADD Kid

Our oldest, Rebecca, is 10. She is an amazing kid: wonderfully kind, funny, smart, a sucker for animals. She has her own pet-sitting business. She's in the talented and gifted program at school. She also has ADD.

Some people don't understand this. There was the neighbor, for instance, who scoffed when I told her that Rebecca had seen the neighbor's cat in our yard, right before we had to take our cat to the vet due to a bite. "This is the kid who lost my house key," the neighbor said. "Well, you believe her if you want to." And the fact is that, yes, Rebecca did lose this lady's house key when she was pet-sitting for them; she went to a movie and put it in her jeans pocket, refusing to leave it at home because the key was "my responsibility, Mom." So of course she misplaced it, and she was embarrassed, and she cried, but the damage was done. Rebecca was right about the neighbor's cat, by the way--I've seen it half a dozen times in our yard since myself--but that doesn't matter. "I am well aware of Rebecca's issues," the neighbor said icily when I tried to explain to her that ADD has nothing to do with character or trustworthiness. A kid who can lose a house key is...well, what else need be said? Whether Rebecca was just born defective, or whether her defects are the result of our lousy parenting I don't know, though I'm sure my neighbor has it all figured out. When she sees me now, she gives me a big fake smile. My children are quiet and well-behaved! her smile says. Yours are unruly and loud. That makes me a good mom, and you a bad mom. Isn't it obvious?

Kids with ADD can be brilliant or average; ADD is not a mark of intelligence. ADD is like having a musical group which lacks a conductor. The group may be a garage band; it may be the London Philharmonic--but whatever it is, it has trouble getting its act together. When something is out of Rebecca's sight, it's gone--pffft! She has trouble writing things down (and her handwriting is awful anyway)--but she's a whiz at the computer. She knows how to program the remote way better than I do. Her mind works on large concepts--she's the kid who asked me recently, "Mom, what is a liberal?"--but ask her what her math assignment is and you'll draw a blank stare. It's frustrating as hell to live with. To be the person experiencing it must be frustrating as hell to the 10th power--and this probably explains why ADD kids are prone to tantrums. Rebecca's tantrums are legendary. The first one she ever threw, at 18 months, got the two of us kicked out of public building in downtown Washington D.C. As she got older, she managed to keep herself more or less together at school. Home was where she let the fury out, and the person who got the full force of it was usually me. That's a whole book, right there.

ADD causes social problems. Kids with ADD tend to interrupt a lot; they have no brake between brain and mouth. To other people, this probably seems rude. Sometimes Rebecca conveys the impression of being completely tuned out of what's being said to her. I know that she's probably heard it, but other people think she is zoned out or just showing how bored she is with them. She also has trouble reading social cues: if someone brushes up against her in the hall, she's unable to tell whether it was purely accidental or some kind of harassment--and the default option, for her, is to get mad. "Maybe she didn't mean to, honey." "Yes she DID, I hate her and I'll never speak to her again!"  And I wasn't there. How do I know?

Rebecca has two or three good friends, girls I cherish because they are capable of seeing past her quirks and able to appreciate who she is--but they have other friends, too, and schedules of their own. Most kids just give her a wide berth. There are two moms of my acquaintance--the cat lady is one--who do not allow their children to play with her. Or maybe it's me they object to; since I've obviously screwed up Rebecca, they may be afraid my bad parenting will taint their own children. Whatever the reasons, the consequence is that Rebecca spends a lot of time by herself. Two days ago, I was telling her a funny story about a trip to Paris I made with my friend Ann 20 years ago, and the misadventures we had there. The stories had Rebecca laughing, a sound I love to hear, and so I didn't think too much about it when she said, "I wish I had a friend like that." But later, it dawned on me what she meant: she wanted a friend she could be wholly herself with, a friend for whom she was not "my friend with ADD"  or "my friend with the problems" and not a friend who, she secretly suspects, has to "put up" with her at times. Maybe she already does, and she just doesn't give those friends enough credit. I don't know. All I know is that she is lonely. She rarely complains. But I know.

If you are a parent and you have a kid with ADD, you have a new part-time job. It's called "writing memos to teachers." Also chauffeuring: there's a formidable array of doctor and therapist appointments that go along with this, not to mention social skills groups--if you're lucky enough to find one near you. You also get to experience grammar school and middle school (and high school, too, I'm sure) all over again. When your kid has homework, you have homework. This weekend was science fair weekend. I loathe science fair--to me, it teaches kids to hate science--but there it is, it has to be done, and around here it meant last night about a three-hour siege of screaming and tears and threats to leave home and wails of  "I HATE THIS!!" When it was all over, my hands were shaking and my husband was tight-lipped and furious. It's like that a lot around here. Other families have regular old weekends going to the mall or to soccer games or just hanging out at home. At our house, it's a terrific weekend if we get through it without a meltdown.

At a party a week ago, I sat beside a woman whose son is now in his mid 30s. The son had ADD, or some kind of learning disability, but when he was in grammar school people didn't know as much about ADD and so he was never diagnosed. He was hard to handle--rebellious, refused to do his homework, an academic underachiever despite his obvious intelligence. His parents were at a loss. "Did you ever feel like other parents blamed you?" I asked her. "Of course," she answered quietly. "All the time." Her son is doing okay these days; he has a job and a stable relationship after many years of turmoil. She told me that he'd called her one day, out of the blue, to say, "Thanks, Mom, for being such a great mom."

She was thunderstruck. "Honey, what did I ever do right?" she asked.

"You never gave up on me," he said, and as she told me this story, tears ran down her face.

This morning, I was in my office Googling "ADD" and "private schools" when Rebecca crept into the room behind me. "I'm sorry, Mom," she said quietly. I turned and put my arms around her, my head against her chest, and I could hear her heart beating. She knows I love her; I didn't have to say it. And she knows this, too: I will never give up on her.

What Really Matters in Rathergate

Say you need to lose weight. So when you go out to lunch with a friend, you order a Diet Coke. The waitress brings you your drink and with the first sip you're not totally sure that it's Diet Coke, with zero calories; you think it may be regular sugar-laden Coke, with 100 calories. So you ask your companion, who tastes it and says, "Nope, that's not Diet Coke." This gets your back up. By God, you ordered Diet Coke, and the waitress wrote it down. Your intentions were honorable. Therefore, what you're drinking is Diet Coke, with zero calories, you say, and you chug it down. The End.

As anyone who has ever been on a diet can attest, honorable intentions don't count; what counts is what actually goes into your body. And we can also attest that in the great scheme of things, 100 calories here or there does not break a diet. Self-deception, however, surely will. And from here--in a gigantic leap--we get to  Dan Rather vs. CBS.

Okay, stick with me here. Start out with a basic, underlying premise. All the evidence shows that you are, in fact overweight. Similarly, the evidence we have--in a story first broken in early September 2004 by the Boston Globe--shows that George W. Bush did weasel out of his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War.

At the restaurant, you intend to order Diet Coke. Similarly, Dan Rather and CBS, I'm sure, started out with the intention to report honestly and advance the Globe story.

In the larger scheme of things, 100 calories more or less doesn't really matter. And, in the larger scheme of things, the story that CBS aired in September 2004 didn't really advance the Globe's story all that much. At best, it would have filled in a few details--a fact that all the hype has managed to obscure.

Anyway, you get your order--but is it really Diet Coke? Your companions taste it and say no. But you point to the order the waitress wrote down: it says right here, "Diet Coke." That's your story, and you're sticking to it. Likewise, Dan Rather says now that those "never-before-seen memos" that CBS based its story are real, goddamn it, and that everything they say did, in fact, actually happen. But your companion points out that just because it says "Diet Coke" in the waitress's handwriting, it doesn't prove you actually had Diet Coke. Likewise, informed observers who have looked at those much-hyped memos have concluded that they don't prove anything either, and in fact are probably forgeries. Does anybody think at this point: what difference does all of this make? Heck, no! What happens next is an eye-gouging, hair-pulling barroom brawl over issues of personal integrity and the authenticity of a piece of documentation. What fun!

What we have here, on all fronts, is a massive case of myopia. Just as most of us like to believe that we're eating a healthy diet and that we're not really overweight, statistics and mirrors be damned, Dan Rather continues to insist that those memos are authentic. My media brethren, meanwhile, are obsessed with those pieces of paper--what they mean, whether it can be proved, the motive behind Rather's lawsuit, the odds on whether CBS will settle, the titillating facts that might come out if it doesn't, and so on.

The larger point here, which the mainstream media and the blogging world alike seem to have forgotten, is that we have a wartime Commander in Chief who has no trouble sending tens of thousands of young Americans into harm's way into Iraq under dubious pretenses--but who, when it was his own turn to serve his country, couldn't be bothered.

The media's delusion here is that the Dan Rather controversy is an earth-shattering deal. It's not. It has little significance except as a cautionary tale of sloppy journalism and the immense, some might say outsized, value that one of the exemplars of mainstream journalism places on his personal reputation--including, so help me God, his reputation as "the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes" (p. 23 of the complaint). (It's clearly a painful thing, losing one's exalted place in the old-media hierarchy). No, the real story here, brought to light by a few diligent journalists who did follow the rules of good journalism, is the character of our President. That's something history will be judging for a very long time--and if we all can't figure that out, we're in more trouble than I thought.

New Game, Old Rules Part II

There's a fascinating interview in Salon today with Robert Draper, author of the new book on George W. Bush, entitled (ominously, to me) Dead Certain. There will be lots of opinions about the picture of our President painted by the book, but what struck me most was Draper's explanation of how he, of all people--a mere freelance reporter from Texas--managed to penetrate the force field that seems to surround this White House. How did he manage to get all those interviews with Bush, when nobody inside the Beltway has pulled this off?

"It was Journalism 301," said Draper. "I would interview one guy and it would go well. And he'd say, yeah, sure, you can come back. And I'd say, by the way, you mentioned so-and-so in the interview. Do you know how to get in touch with him? And then I'd drop the name of the person I [then] interviewed. And so I moved closer and closer inside the circle....I don't have any particular gifts as a reporter. I don't have an interviewing technique that spellbinds people. Which is a long-winded way of saying I really don't know how. I just kind of plodded along. I think it meant a lot to this president -- it's the sort of thing that does mean a lot to him -- that I never asked it to be handed to me on a silver platter."

Just read that paragraph one more time, and think about certain key words and phrases--i.e. "Plodding." "Journalism 101." "I never asked it to be handed to me on a silver platter."

From this you can infer a great deal about standard reporting practices for much (way too much) of the inside-the-Beltway media.

New Game, Old Rules

Okay, I'm departing from mom role here to rejoin the journalism tribe, and spout some media criticism.

There's a terrific piece posted this week by Jay Rosen, a well-known media critic and professor of journalism at New York University, on why the press has been so completely cowed by the Bush Administration. His thoughts are the latest in a conversational thread started by my other favorite media critic, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who posted a piece this week about the Washington media's reverence for Karl Rove--an example, Greenwald says, of the inside-the-Beltway media's biggest failing, which Rosen has identified as the desire to be "savvy." Being "savvy" means being close to the insiders, which means putting yourself in a position where you need the Karl Roves of this world so much you can't possibly write anything that would piss them off--a fact which Karl Rove knew and has exploited brilliantly.

Two days ago, Rosen elaborated on his original point, saying that the desire to be "savvy" doesn't begin to explain all of the media's failures (and by that, I mean the failure to aggressively question the Bush Administration's claims on everything from global warming to Guantanamo to WMD). The other part of the reason, he says, is the sheer audacity of what the Bush people have been doing in the name of "conservatism"--a radical rewriting of the Constitution, or at least a strong attempt to do this, in order to define the executive branch not as equal with the other two, but as more powerful. The other part of the explanation, Rosen thinks, was "a dearth of imagination. Most of the people in the capital press—the correspondents, and their bosses— could not imagine what it was going to take to maintain any sort of watchdog role under Bush. They never dreamed that their routines could be so ill-matched to the moment."

Well, yes and no. Yes, it was a dearth of imagination, all right--but not the imagination to come up with all new journalistic rules. It was the failure to imagine that maybe what needed to happen was to dust off the old rules.

Here's an example. I got in my car last week and turned on the XM radio to hear Bob Edwards on NPR interviewing Gene Weingarten, who was my editor in the Washington Post Style section some years back. I really like Gene. He is a funny, funny guy, and a wicked good editor. Edwards was questioning him about why reporters do some of the things they do, and Gene was being his usual outrageous, provocative self--that is to say, a self-described flaming liberal--while Bob Edwards played straight man. But one part of what Gene said really got me. It was the part where he said that every four years politicians roll out the old "let's pass a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning," and that journalists cover this dutifully while rolling their eyes "because everybody [in the press] knows what's going on."

Gene was being funny in this interview, but when he spoke those words he spoke the literal truth; I know this from my own experience. Flag-burning is in the top 10 non-issues of all time, right beneath Paris Hilton, everybody knows this, and yet journalists write this story straight every time it comes up. They feel it is their obligation. It's a classic example of standard old-rule fair-and-balanced reporting.

"Fairness" is an article of faith among all the reporters I know, and yet too often reporters interpret it as being fair to one's sources, not fair to the facts (and for that way of putting I must credit The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel).  Yet, taken literally, merely being fair to one's sources absolves the reporter of one of his or her most important responsibilities, which is to get at the truth of the matter, to the best of his or her ability--to follow the facts wherever they might lead, even if the final conclusion pisses off an important source. Inside the Beltway, though, fairness to one's sources is usually the applicable rule--either that, or reporters are aware of the kind of shellacking they will take from certain quarters if they fail to give the nay-sayers equal time, even on a topic where there is significant scientific consensus, like global warming. What happens then is usually a mechanical kind of reporting--i.e., "I give one side three paragraphs and the other side three" sort of thing. I used to do this myself: I'd literally count the paragraphs in a story to see how many were one side of an issue, how many were the other. And sometimes, on your basic "should we raise the property tax or not" kind of story, when things are pretty yes-or-no, that kind of approach works okay. But now that I've left my newsroom days behind, I see that the only stories I ever wrote that I'm proud of today pushed past that. Those stories were fair to the facts. They were also really hard to write, because they offended people.

What would happen, I wondered, if a reporter simply refused to cover a press conference in which some Presidential candidate announced his or her support of a flag-burning ban? Or if a reporter wrote a story about the eye-rolling, a story which said, "Hey, readers, this is one of the oldest political stunts in the book and a howling non-issue generally used to deflect attention from something more important"? Anybody who approached the issue in this way would be looked upon by many of his or her colleagues as having displayed (gasp!) a "liberal bias."  Under what passes for old-rule journalism today, it would be a faux pas equivalent to ripping one off at the country club. Yet, in reality, it would be a return to an even more old-fashioned concept: that journalism's first obligation is to the truth.

But these are interesting times we live in (remember the old Chinese curse?) and one of these days, somebody is going to do it. Maybe flag burning won't be the topic--I haven't heard anybody mention that lately anyway--but something else. One of these days a reporter will be courageous enough to write a story saying that Presidential "debates" are not really debates but a bunch of candidates presenting packaged sound bites, and that until candidates actually get to slug it out with each other they are theatrical spectacles not worth covering. Or maybe he or she will attend a White House press conference and press the Preside

A Prayer for My Daughter, with Apologies to Yeats

Is hell-fire religion encoded in your genes?

I am wondering about this, because I was raised in a Bible-thumping, sinners-are-going-to-hell kind of religion. It's something I left without a backward glance when I was old enough to vacate the parental home, but by then it was too late. Take it from an authority: if you want to raise a really anxious, guilt-ridden girl-child with major self-esteem issues, the kind of kid who is primed for illnesses like depression the way easy-light charcoal is primed for the match, Fundamentalism is the way to go. Maybe the Taliban could do a better job in this department, but I'm not so sure.

Consequently, I have been scrupulously careful about not teaching my kids that a) they are sinners or b) that God is sitting up in the sky running a tab on their every infraction or c) that they will go to hell if they don't Measure Up. I have, in fact, not even pushed my kids to go to Sunday School or church, being opposed on principle to intellectual force-feeding of any kind. My husband and I have gone out of our way to explain that the world is full of people who have all kinds of beliefs--atheists and Buddhists and Muslims and Baptists and so forth. So explain to me why my 10-year-old announced to me last night, "Mom, I've figured it out."

"Figured what out?"

"I've figured out why I feel so anxious and sad. It's because God is mad at me. I've done something wrong, but I don't know what it is."

Travel back with me in time, to College Park, Georgia circa 1965, and this would be me, saying the exact same thing. Except that I had people telling me this kind of thing three times a week, and my daughter does not and never has. So what gives here? Does bad religion leak out of your pores or something? Do you impart it to your kids with your DNA, along with a tendency to chew your nails?

Aside from assuring my daughter that God is not mad at her, and that perhaps her general anxiety has more to do with starting middle school than with some horrible sin she has committed (and, by the way, do any ex-Fundies out there remember the Unforgiveable Sin? It was "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit," whatever that is, and I was always petrified that I'd done it without knowing it)--aside from this, I have no idea of how to disabuse her of this notion, or whether I should even try. Perhaps she'll figure out for herself that fear is not a healthy basis for any kind of spiritual life. Perhaps she will, as William Butler Yeats said, discover that

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

("A Prayer for My Daughter," June 1919)

Come to think of it, this is something I'm still learning. Maybe we can learn together.