Quiet

The other day a very dear friend asked me if I was ok. I’d been very quiet (read: nonexistent) online and as we live in each other’s computers, she was understandably concerned. I haven’t slapped up a blog post in over a week, have been absent from Twitter for several weeks, and Facebook witticisms have been noticeably absent since Sunday. I hadn’t even noticed until she asked how I was doing. I just did what an introverted gifted woman whose main over-excitability is emotional would do.

I went Quiet.

There’s a difference between quiet and Quiet. Lowercase is an adjective. Uppercase is a reaction to the world that I’m coming to realize means I’m over my limit, I can’t take much more, I need to pull back away from people, I need to be quiet because things are so over-the-top that I can’t joke about them and I’m sick to death of my own mental whining. When it happens in my own house things go really off the rails, but thankfully that hasn’t happened in a few years.

These are the times that I wish…sigh…I was normal. That emotional intensity wasn’t always perched on my shoulder. I would dearly love to take things in stride and not be continually thrown off-kilter by life’s curveballs. Some days it’s like being on a bender on a cruise ship doing the tango down a whirlpool. Not a solid footing to be found. Damned wiring. Makes it triply fun that my husband is a lot like this also, as well as our oldest son. I fully expect one day to find the younger son and the long-suffering dog slowly backing out the door to search for a little less crazy.

I’m tired. I’m tired of the crazy, and I’m even more tired of my unconscious reaction to it. Yes, yoga and meditation would help, but it’s kinda hard to do those when the dog thinks it’s playtime when you’re on the floor and the only quiet place in the house is the bathroom. The one with no lock on the door.

So I’m returning to my Quiet, for just a little while longer.

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When Jen isn’t Quiet, she writes over at Laughing at Chaos. She also has a book coming out in July, courtesy of Gifted Homeschoolers Forum Press, and she’s gonna hafta get over the whole Quiet thing before that puppy goes live.

OH, those emotional intensities

Over-excitabilities. Intensities. Wound too tightly. Whatever you call them, they’re not fun. They’re not fun to parent, they’re not fun to be married to, they’re not fun to have yourself. Put ‘em all together and you have all kinds of emotional distress. Distress such as:

Do you ever wonder if and when you’re going to snap? Not just a twig-underfoot-snap, but a huge old-growth-tree-hit-by-lightning-snap. That feeling just keeps getting stronger and stronger, and I owe it to my family (and yes, to myself) to back away from the ledge and get a grip. No one will benefit from Mom losing her mind and running down the street naked with a platypus singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” Except maybe the random person with a camera who then gains his 15 minutes of fame when his amusingly edited video goes viral. Dude, just Photoshop out the jiggle, that’s all I ask.

This summer, just an hour up the road from me, SENG will host their annual conference. I registered last month, but this afternoon finally got around to checking out what breakout sessions are available. And I fell in love and wanted to hug the whole danged organization and buy it a root beer float and rainbows and glitter and yeah, I’m excited about the offerings.

Of all things with giftedness, the social and emotional aspect is the part that hits us hardest here in the House of Chaos. Four people (three of them Type A firstborns), all with over-excitabilities of various strengths, bouncing off each other in a frenetic dance of intensities. It can be kinda rough, is what I’m saying. So to be able to attend a conference that not only acknowledges that gifted people are wired a wee bit differently but has sessions on how to cope with that wiring…well, it’s a relief. Maybe someone there will have “The Answer.” Or at the very least crib notes.

I will need those crib notes; we realized today that we’re looking down the barrel to the teenaged years. That realization did not sit well with us. So we’ll be working even harder to teach (and model) appropriate stress management. Of course, to teach and model such appropriate behavior, one must actually (ahem) learn it oneself. Which is one reason why I’ll be at the SENG conference this summer.

Pinky promise, I won’t snap between now and then, though the thought of a quiet padded room is delightful right now. I just don’t trust the guy with the video to Photoshop out the jiggle.

For now

I made a comment to a therapist nearly a decade ago that I needed a clone to get done all that I needed to get done. As I recall, she was a bit horrified concerned and that became The Topic of Discussion for quite awhile. At the time, I had an extremely active and precocious toddler, a large flute studio, a list of To-Dos that would bleed from one side of the paper to the other, and I was barely holding it together. I knew nothing of giftedness or overexcitabilities or how intensities can easily overwhelm a person.

Looking back at that now, I laugh, for dem were da easy days.

Since I couldn’t ditch the toddler or the flute studio, the therapist strongly encouraged me to rip up, or at least pare down, the To-Do List From Hell and I did. For awhile it worked, and it was a relief not seeing all the things I wanted and needed to do in black and white in front of me.

These days my list is actually more manageable. No idea how that happened, probably because the items on it are actually doable, like getting this post written. Instead, I have a mental tally of things that need to get done…but now I have a mantra to counteract the crazy, when I feel myself start to spin down the rabbit hole.

FOR NOW.

OMG the dishwasher is still broken and it’s probably going to stay that way until we gut-rehab the kitchen and waaahhhh!!! that’s at least five years away and the rest of the appliances are jealous of the dishwasher’s extended vacation and will soon join it FOR NOW.

Homeschooling is killing me. Yes, it’s the best thing for our son, but I know we’re going to do this until the end of time and he’s going to be dumb as a bag of rocks because he shuts down if I try to teach him anything because he’s convinced that he knows it already even when he doesn’t and I really need to find a job because ramen noodles don’t come in a gluten free variety FOR NOW.

We are living in a house of horrors. I am convinced that it was built over some sort of ancient burial ground because every single thing is falling apart all at once and we have to live with it and can’t afford to fix everything and renovations are years upon years off and it’s a matter of time before that one kitchen cabinet falls off the wall and maims the dog and I really can’t handle another unexpected repair with a contractor saying he’d never seen that before FOR NOW.

It’s really a freeing phrase. It’s my antidote to mentally spinning out of control, and it was the mentally spinning out of control that landed me in the therapist’s office in the first place. It doesn’t mean I can’t deal with situations as they arise, it just keeps the “and this and that and the other thing” from sending me straight into the very dark places that keep me awake at night.

Now the challenge is to teach this phrase to my husband and sons. I’m not the only one around here who tends to spin down the rabbit hole.

Stress and the gifted adult

I did an entirely unscientific survey the other day on my Facebook page, asking my friends to describe me in one word. In minutes, I got back: intense, exhausting, hilarious, passionate, determined, embracer, funny (3), intelligent, beautiful (kinda shocked by that one), inspirational, witty, human, gifted, busy, quirky, ardent, helpful, struggling, self-deprecating, frazzled, overwhelmed, high-strung, and sexy (thank you, dear husband!).

Huh. That’s funny. The first word I think of to describe myself is stressed.

Gifted adults and stress::peanut butter and jelly::peas and carrots::me and Jen-nay (name that movie). For as long as I can remember, I have been one huge mind-knot. It’s like mental Chinese handcuffs; you know, those woven things you stick your fingers into, and the harder you try to escape, the tighter they get. I once had a flute teacher recommend that I get hammered and then hit the practice room, the thought being that maybe being a little looser I’d be able to play better. She may have been on to something there, but I didn’t drink back then and rarely play my flute now. The world will never know…

But I know I’m not alone in this. I know there are other gifted adults who get into mind knots, who have an extremely difficult time controlling their stress, who have been teased about being addicted to stomach acid. It’s a horrible feeling. For someone who is just a tiny bit of a control freak, being controlled by stress is dreadful. Having that scream lodged in the back of the throat, crouched and ready to pounce without warning…sigh… I’ve tried yoga, acupuncture, therapy, lifted weights, dabbled in meditation, had “me” time, journaled, and generally expressed my feelings. The more I worked to manage my stress, the worse it got.

So I’ve made an executive decision. This is my wiring. This is the result of my biggest overexcitabilities, emotional and imaginational, hooking up; they popped out a little bundle of stress. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. Then it hit me…if I worked with this wiring instead of against it, maybe the mind knot would loosen. Like homeschooling my 2e son; working with his intensities rather than against them gets us a lot further a lot faster. All those books I own on intensities and overexcitabilities and the like will now be read with me in mind as well. If I can harness these intensities for good rather than evil, I suspect I’ll feel a lot better. At the very least I’d like that scream to vamoose.

In the meantime, I really need to investigate some of those descriptive words. I don’t see myself in most of those words; only two. Wanna guess which ones? And if you were to ask your friends this question, what words would you see?
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You can find Jen at Laughing at Chaos and on her Facebook page by the same name.

Dear Gifted Me – Jen

Welcome to another installment of DEAR GIFTED ME, featuring our very own, Jen Merrill. Take it away, Jen:

Dear 7 year old Jen: I see you have a book in your hand. Again. Good. Keep reading. All those kids who can’t believe how much you read, and that you started reading so young? Eh, to heck with them. Stick with the friends who read as much as you do, and absolutely take that creative writing class. Someday you’ll wish you had taken more writing classes, so take that one and remember how much fun it was.

Dear 10 year old Jen: Second year of a pull-out class, huh? Last year was an in-depth study of advertising, this year it’s law. Not quite the full-time gifted class you’ll wish you had had when you’re older, but certainly better than sitting in language arts wishing everyone else would just just shut up and learn it already so you could move on. Sadly, you’ll have to continue to cultivate that patience in school, everywhere but in math.

Dear 13 year old Jen: You should’t have listened to that idiotic high school counselor. You love science, yet you let him talk you out of honors science classes because of your weakness in mathematics. Then again, because you had more flexibility with class scheduling without the honors, you were able to take a science elective with a teacher who so loved teaching that he was the reason you chose his class. And you learned more in that class than you thought possible.

Dear 15 year old Jen: You’re trying so hard to fit in, not be any different than any other 15 year old girl. But. You want to show the world that you are different! You’re not like any other 15 year old girl! You love learning about other cultures, you love deep discussions, you play Dr. Beat the Metronome with your band geek friends! And yet you only show that side of you to those closest to you. That’s something you’ll struggle with for the next 20+ years, and wish you had let your freak flag fly earlier. You would have been a lot happier a lot sooner.

Dear 17 year old Jen: I know you were hesitant about that college choice, that you felt you should have tried harder to go to a larger and more prestigious music school, but it was absolutely the place for you. You were able to succeed there in a way you wouldn’t have been able to anywhere else. Living in the honors dorm with others with deep and quirky thinking was delicious. Oh, and you met your husband at that university, so probably a good thing that’s where you went.

Dear adult Jen: You, my dear, are gifted. You can ignore it, you can refuse to say the words, you can call it something else, but that’s how it is. If you truly believe gifted = wiring, that gifted ≠ uber-high achievement, then you’re as wired as they come. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, you know. So it’s time to take the advice you gave your 15 year old self: let that freak flag fly. Celebrate the oddities you love. Quit hiding your light under a dirty bucket. Be the you on the inside to everyone on the outside. You’ll be a lot happier for it now.

Focus

Focus.

What comes to mind when you hear that word? A camera, moving from blurry to crystal clear? Getting a note perfectly in tune with warmth and clarity? Directing a sunbeam through a magnifying glass to see a little puff of smoke come off a dry leaf? Pure concentration?

It’s so easy to determine when something is out of focus. No little puff of smoke, an image that makes your eyes cross, a note that to this day has me jerking my head and pursing my lips, as though I could tune that flute from across the room.

But do we recognize focus? Or do we always think it could be better? What about with our gifted kids? Do we see the focus they have, on the things that matter most to them? Or only recognize the lack of it, when it’s something that bores or intimidates them?

This is something that has been on my mind lately. I have little focus these days, resembling nothing more than a whacked-out squirrel in an acorn field. Ooh! Acorns! Should I start here? Or here? Or over here??? My son, on the other hand, has ADHD and can focus just fine…if it’s quantum physics or Legos. No joke. Homeschooling is all kinds of interesting when the kid only wants to watch Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking and his brains fall out when I want him to write a paragraph or something.

Focus. Do you have it? Do your gifted kids? And how do we encourage them to focus on the less-interesting stuff without their brains falling out?

Just something to focus on this weekend.

Having my doubts

I chuckle with sarcastic humor when I say that twice-exceptional means exceptionally gifted and an exceptional pain in the butt. It is not fun for anyone, least of all the person who has to work around it every day. Tom wrote about that the other day, and I printed off his incredible post to share with my own 2e son. It was something I felt he needed to see, that maybe he could then start to believe in himself a little more.

It is far too easy to only concentrate on the challenges the second E presents; they’re a lot louder and tend to show up more clearly in everyday life. While a lot of issues have been resolved since bringing A home to homeschool (including overwhelming anxiety to the point of illness), there are many still there. Executive function skills need to be goosed. Short-term memory needs an upgrade. ADHD behavior could improve. All need to be addressed, if not for his educational advancement, then for self-preservation; I’m going to wring his neck if I have to keep repeating instructions. I kid! Mostly…

In the midst of all this, I have doubts. Big, ugly, sneering doubts that maybe he isn’t gifted after all. Maybe he just has a whole bunch of learning disabilities and a stubborn streak with a heavy dose of laziness. I don’t see the sparks of intelligence and curiosity and thirst for learning I did a few years ago, before school prodded most of that out of him. I just don’t know anymore.

And then he rattles off 14 digits of Pi to a stranger. He memorizes two digits a day, but slogs through division with remainders with grimaces and groans and whines. Oh, I know all about “sometimes the hard is easy and the easy is hard with these kids.” Doesn’t make it any easier to teach and parent him.

While I know that gifted = wiring, it’s hard to remember that when you’re living with The Most Complex Kid on the Planet©. I’m trying to see past the challenges to the gifted and am failing miserably. Gifted or not, he’s still my son and I’ll do anything for him.

I just wish my doubts would shut up so I could figure out how to best help him.

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Jen writes at Laughing at Chaos, where sometimes she does actually remember to laugh at it all.

Gifted, creative, or ADHD?

The last few weeks have brought several articles on ADHD and its impact on kids. SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) had a news release on how it plans to alert pediatricians on the similarities of ADHD and gifted traits (and for this I am grateful). The New York Times released a controversial opinion piece on how ADHD drugs don’t work long term, and the Times’ Motherlode blog replied with a thoughtful post. Finally, the Wall Street Journal’s article on Ritalin and creativity suggested that creativity is greatly dampened by ADHD medications.

Well. Great. More noise about ADHD and how it is over-diagnosed and over-prescribed and not a danged thing on what to do about it. Drives me batsnot crazy. See, our 2e son has ADHD.

Or does he?

Could it simply be that he is gifted and his wiring just keeps his body moving non-stop? That school bored him to the point that he tuned out? (Um, yeah, it did…but that’s a post for a different day). That our parenting in his early years affected his brain development and thus his behavior?

Possibly, absolutely, and are you freaking kidding me?

A has always been on the move. Always. In utero he did laps until he played soccer with my kidneys. I stopped wearing shoes with laces when he was two, because I couldn’t get them on fast enough when he’d bolt from Music Together classes. When he was three I asked his pediatrician if he thought A was ADHDish. The answer was yes, but too young to make an official determination. At four we embarked on a yearlong quest to find any other reason for his hyperactivity and difficulty paying attention. Occupational therapy, vision therapy, diet changes, sleep studies, and a tonsillectomy for sleep apnea followed. All this time the curiosity intensified, and he was deemed to be twice-exceptional. At five we finally caved and put him on medication.

And saw this:

This picture means more to me than most. This was the first time my son voluntarily sat down and quietly drew out an idea he had in his head. December 2006. I still have the intricate picture he was working on.

The last five years he’s been doh-see-dohing with various medications, trying to find that delicate balance of efficacy and acceptable side effects. The biggie is loss of appetite. For me that would be awesomesauce; for my 25th percentile son it’s a very fine line. On meds he can focus enough to read, work on inventions, do school with me, has a higher frustration tolerance, and is basically easier to live with. We see the giftedness. Off meds he pings around the house and talking to him is like shouting through a waterfall. And I’m not just talking evenings; he went 18 months off meds a few years ago after some scary side effects joined forces with weight loss. He went back on last spring when it was either that or I was going to wring his neck. That’s where the other E comes out to play.

So are we medicating him simply for our benefit, to make parenting him easier? Are the medications inhibiting his creativity, his ability to express himself? Is his gifted wiring just such that he has to move nonstop and get lost in his own mind, unwilling or unable to listen to others?

Or are these articles simply noise? None of them seem to be written by a parent of an ADHD kid. Sure, it’s easy for an adult to say having ADHD as a kid made him more creative, but I bet his parent was at wits’ end most days. My job is to get this kid to adulthood in one piece, ready challenge life on his terms. If meds help get him there when everything else has failed, does that mean I have failed him? Of course not. I already beat myself up that he’s so thin because of the side effects, I don’t need that joining in.

So here’s what I want to say to all the ADHD OpEd writers (with the exception of SENG, which I think is doing the absolute right thing in raising awareness of ADHD/gifted similarities): Be quiet. Stop. Enough. You do not speak of nor represent all those who have to cope with ADHD. For some the diagnosis and medications were a last resort, and even then the second guessing doesn’t stop. I am not damaging my child by keeping him on ADHD medications, nor am I dulling his creativity. I am providing what he needs, when he needs it, to get him to where he needs to be.

The rest is just noise.

But what about parents?

They have the IEP, the ALP, the 504. They have afterschooling, summer camps, tutors. They have occupational therapy, vision therapy, therapy therapy. They have robotics class, debate team, competitive dance. They have classes and events and mentors.

In a perfect world, gifted kids have these supports. In a perfect world. I’m fully aware that not every gifted or twice-exceptional child has these opportunities, but they exist. They may be expensive, they may be difficult to find, they may be a pain in the neck to schedule and attend, but they exist.

But what about their parents? What’s out there for them?

<crickets>

Yes, there are SENG parenting groups, but they’re few and far between, and are only for a short period of time. Anything else?

<crickets…truck passing down the road…rustling in the bushes that may or may not be a skunk but your dog will surely let you know with great glee-turned-horror>

I’m even going to get a bit more specific. What is out there for parents that isn’t advocacy or ways to help your kid, but specifically for parents?

Not.Much. And it’s frustrating as hell. Here are these incredible kids, we have the honor and frustration of raising them, and the support that is so desperately needed just isn’t there. Our kids aren’t in parenting magazines or most parenting books. Our kids and our parenting needs are here and there on the internet, but are often shouted down by other, more mainstream publications. Last week a Babycenter writer posted a rather insensitive ditty about her perception of gifted kids and their parents. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I fired off a passionate response. And my little piece of the interwebz exploded. The frustration, the pain, the deep need for connection from the parents (mostly moms) who commented left me in tears for days. My own emotional over-excitabilities went into overdrive, my heart breaking for all the parents out there (including me) who were struggling trying to raise these incredible kids, with little organized support but plenty of condescending scorn from society.

I would love nothing more than to see support groups for parents of gifted and twice-exceptional kids. Not to figure out ways to advocate for state funding or 101 ways to convince the school to reverse its cranial-rectal inversion, but parenting. What to do when your kid has a five alarm meltdown over something so trivial your own brain twists itself into a question mark. How to keep your marriage strong when neither partner has the emotional strength to converse after an insanely difficult day. Ways to change the subject when well-meaning family members opine about your child with great fervor. I’d love to see family get-togethers where everyone there is in the same leaky boat and askance looks and snide comments don’t exist. Wine tastings. Lots and lots of wine tastings. Little talk of advocacy or school situations, but lots of I got your back and I know you got mine. If there’s already something like this out there, I haven’t heard about it, and please share if you have.

These amazing kids came into our lives, throwing us into Advanced Parenting (prerequisite: gestation), and our village  doesn’t know what to do with us. We need our own neighborhood in the village, where the hearts and souls and brains of gifted kids and their parents can roam free.

Who’s with me?

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Jen writes over at Laughing at Chaos.