It's been a tough day. We are trialling a change of medications. This is possibly the most stressful parental experience I know. There's nothing like starting the day with the knowledge that in a few hours you will be willingly exposing your child to the small chance of aortal rupture/sudden suicide risk/life as a chemically dependent zombie to add a little piquancy to your daily routine.
There was no way I was going to be able to send my son to school until we'd checked that the new medication didn't, well, kill him. (It didn't: he's still here, and I am duly grateful, although if he keeps me awake much longer listening to that blinking storytape I may start to rethink the huge care I took not to accidentally overdose him this morning). But after the obligatory sleepless night, it was equally hard to focus on "doing HE" properly. He was, as you would expect without the Ritalin, slightly spaced and hyper: especially as he wasn't in THAT much pain and under normal circumstances, today would have been a good day, the kind when he could go into class.
We agreed he'd spend half an hour on Mathletics, the computer maths game that normally he loves. Today, after twenty minutes, he was champing at the bit "Have I done enough, can I stop?" I was about to deliver one of my "you will do exactly what I say and be grateful boy" lectures, when I hesitated: I was sorting out library books and had a picture book in my hand, a few Andy Warhol prints designed for children to look at. "You can look at this for a few minutes instead," I said, and tossed it on the bed where he lay.
I felt bad that I wasn't making him KEEP HIS NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE - how will he ever keep a job if he doesn't learn to work hard when bored? (This is not a very good theory, actually. I spent most of my school life bored out of my mind. Far from teaching me self-discipline and persistence it has just given me an absolute horror of boredom, with a consequent inability to spend time doing boring stuff, including, housework paperwork or paid work I am not interested in). But anyway, I wasn't MAKING HIM LEARN. Never mind, I thought, I'm too tired to think about it. Ten minutes later, he came and told me that he’d finished reading it. I told him that the paintings were by the same bloke as we’d seen the day before in Burger King (we do very posh field trips around here). He didn’t seem that interested. “What did you think of them? I asked, casually. “He is AMAZING!” he said, and wandered off as if there was nothing more to say on the subject, since Andy Warhol was, so clearly, fabulous.
I still feel very guilty about medicating at all, let alone messing around with different drugs. I’m doing it because we are desperate, we need to try everything we can to reduce anxiety and hopefully hence reduce the pain. Since the Andy Warhol is amazing comment, however, I stopped feeling guilty about letting him skip Maths. If he’s decided Andy Warhol is amazing, perhaps not everything about today is terrible. Sometimes the most effective learning points come in the gaps between what you expected, wanted and planned to do, and what is actually possible in the real live activity of a living child. Same with meds. You can’t predict what they will do, you just have to take a gulp and see what happens, hope that you don’t do any damage and that something may shift as a result. And you have to go with the flow, and see what’s possible. Then respond to what actually happens, rather than what you hoped or planned.
We wait to see what that “actually” is.
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