ANY PERSONAL STORY about living with Attention Deficit & Hyperactivity Disorder – ADHD – necessarily begins in the genes.
This is because ADHD (or, for those without the H, simply ADD) is genetically linked. It is a condition of the brain and nervous system that is passed from parent to child, like blue eyes or funny earlobes or distaste for cilantro.
We covered this above, but it needs to be underscored as we proceed into the detailed description of an ADHD life: ADHD identifies a set of behaviors that are unplanned, unanticipated, not necessarily intended or desired, and – especially in a small child – uncontrolled! An ADHD child is born into an atypical existence, with differences that set them apart from other children, usually to parents who are utterly unprepared for those differences.
And born into it I was, on July 6, 1961, at Kentucky Baptist Hospital.1 My folks expected me to have blond hair and blue eyes, because those traits ran in the family; they expected me to be bright and talented, because they themselves certainly were.
But they didn’t expect me to be:
Impulsive;
Hyperactive;
Chronically disorganized;
Hypercreative;
Lost to distraction;
Unable to complete any task.
But that's what they got! As a young child, I would wander between the television, a comic book, my GI Joe action figures, my rock collection, and the sandbox in the backyard within the space of 10 minutes. I would build plastic model planes and spaceships, snapping the pieces together without gluing them so I could take them apart and put them back together again. I would shut myself off in my room and listen to the same song on my record player over and over and over. And over. And over.
I would go to the nearby baseball park with my bat and ball and mitt, pretending I was meeting my friends, and I would play, all alone, with imaginary teammates for an imaginary crowd:
“...and we’re down to it, bottom of the ninth, the Reds are down by one with Bench on second... Pete Rose steps to the plate! Rose is two for two today, knocking in Gerónimo back in the fifth... swing and a miss! He’s had a stellar season so far, batting .381 – and he fouls it off to left! Seaver with the wind-up... and Rose blasts one past Fregosi at short! Bench is rounding third as Mays chases it down! Bench is coming in! Mays sends it all the way in to Grote at the plate... safe!, and Mays knocks the ball out of Grote’s glove with his slide, Rose is rounding third as Grote fires it over to Garrett and Rose is going for it! He’s going to try to score! Garrett sending it back to Grote - Rose is a freight train! He won’t be stopped! Grote for the tag and Rose slides, Grote’s in the air and back on his ass! Rose has done it! The Reds win it! The Reds win it!!!”
Damn, I was good!
The reality, of course, is I’m eight years old, standing there on a baseball field all by myself, at home plate, tossing the ball up in the air and then grabbing the bottom of the bat in time to swing, just like the coach does when we’re having infield practice. I struck myself out many thousands of times that way.
Even in grade school, I could sense that I was different. I was far more comfortable doing activities alone than with others. I fidgeted during work time, calm and focused only when reading (reading was by far my favorite school activity). Though I longed for connection, I realized in my heart of hearts that I just wasn’t very good at baseball or basketball – or, for that matter, Red Rover Red Rover.
Dodgeball interested me, I must admit, because it was so unstructured – anything could happen, and the focus required was more to do with immediacy than rules.
And I did long for connection. Other kids seemed to fall into teams and groups and shared laughs so easily, and it was a real struggle for me: I never knew what to say or how to act. It was only in very creative endeavors, like putting on skits and short plays, that I felt like I had something to offer.
My early existence, then, was a matter of suffering through activities for which I was ill-suited, finding ways to cover for my disorganization, faking it with the authority figures around me, scanning relentlessly for activities that offered refuge, seeking cover wherever I could find it.
That, Gentle Reader, is how the ADHD child survives – and it’s how the ADD adult lives every day, as I would one day learn.
Moreover, it is clear in hindsight that I came by this honestly – it was clearly inherited, built into my DNA.
There was no trace of ADD on my mother’s side of the family. To the last, my maternal forebears, suburban Ohioans with industrial roots, were orderly, tidy people, organized to high heaven and industrious to a fault. My father’s family was another matter altogether: Northern Kentucky farm folk, more at home in tobacco fields and milk cow barns. And there was ADD as far as the eye could see.
The ADD adult seeks a profession far afield of 9 to 5, as their physical and cognitive rhythms don’t sync with the white-collar workday at all. They need to be able to go all in when they are at their best and have a place to retreat to when their focus is off and they can’t produce.
My father’s father owned a 92-acre farm, and bolstered the family income as a soil conservation agent, post-Roosevelt. From the many family stories that survive, it is clear that he was as ADD as he could be. And he had chosen an existence that allowed him to live with it comfortably.
Working his farm, he could pick and choose tasks and chores (of which there was an endless supply) as befitted his mental and physical state at any particular time. As a USDA soil conservation agent, making the rounds through his county, he could schedule himself largely as he pleased, and flexibility of clock and calendar were no big deal.
And there are family tales that he was touched, from time to time, by the dark side of ADD – existential confusion and occasional dread, and the need to hide away. He would sometimes rise from the dinner table, which he usually presided over with paternal fervor, and simply vanish into the evening mist of the farm.
While I’m not privy to many tales of my dad’s generation’s early years, at least two of my grandfather’s four children also displayed markers of ADD in adulthood, my dad being one of them.
There were times when I was a teenager that I wondered why my father had chosen to be a pastor, rather than a doctor or lawyer, for he clearly had both the brains and the people skills to have done either of those jobs and many more. But he chose the ministry – why was that?
There’s the usual spiel about “having a calling,” but the truth of my father is that his true pastoral qualities – his tendency to be the ultimate good neighbor, his congenial nature, his desire to help anyone in need – have little to do with Sunday sermons. The truth that I see is that the ministerial lifestyle is tailor-made for ADD adults.
A pastor, you see, actually spends relatively little time in the church itself. While they have an office and a secretary and a quiet refuge for sermon-writing and counseling of parishioners, they also have a wide range of duties that take them out of the office: pastoral calls, hospital visits, lunches with church elders, and so on. And, as I learned in my early years, it is common for the pastor’s workday to extend far beyond 5pm. I saw very little of my father when I was a young boy.
It is a simple matter for an ADD adult, in a ministerial role, to tune their tasks, chores, and professional activities to the odd rhythms of their brains.
The ministry is also a great place for the ADD adult to indulge their creative impulses: they must write sermons, come up with concepts for church events, innovating to stir up interest and expand the flock. My dad thrived in that role.
My father’s younger brother led a similar life. He, too, took up ministry, but his actual profession was airplane pilot. He loved to fly, was very good at it, and made it his family’s bread and butter. In this, he one-upped his older brother, for as a minister and a pilot he had not one but two ADD-friendly jobs, both of which permitted him the flexibility and freedom that the rhythms of the ADD brain require to thrive. The pilot, after all, takes up in flying a series of tasks that require staggered degrees of attention: intense focus, followed by an immersive calm, followed by intense focus, with occasional forays into the completely unexpected. The pilot’s process is a perfect mapping of our prehistoric ancestor’s cognitive infrastructure onto modern undertakings.
And my uncle was, like my dad, given to strong creative impulses. They were both musicians, raised in a musical household, and loved to play – my father, the piano, and my uncle, the bass. This, too, is a strong ADD marker.
And here’s a telling feature: they both married women who were exactly the opposite. My mother and my aunt were highly-structured, organization-prone people with a knack for sensible planning and effective life management (which spilled generously over into their parenting) - smart women with clear ideas about getting things done, and getting them done well. And within such environs, their husbands could make no consistent purchase: their brains were built very differently, leading to frequent exasperation on the part of their wives.
I would repeat this pattern. But that story comes later.
The point is, I’m an ADD Guy because I’m the son of an ADD Guy who’s the son of an ADD Guy. And my sons are ADD Guys. As is my grandson.
And I’m not the only ADD child of my father. And my uncle has one. And at least one of my other cousins inherited the unexpressed gene from his mother...
Ain’t nothin’ but a family thang...
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