unhappy story can change just a few people’s minds about what we are doing to our children in our schools, it is worth the pain of having had to tell it.
For the next generations.
Note:
The few studies that exist looking at ADHD-diagnosed children and later addiction are inconclusive; some suggest that children treated with stimulants have a lower rate of addiction to other substances, while others suggest that use of stimulants in childhood can lead to later addiction. In Dopesick, her recent book charting the opioid crisis, Beth Macy writes “Almost to a person, the addicted twentysomethings I met had taken attention-deficit medication as children, prescribed pills that as they entered adolescence morphed from study aid to party aid.” Macy quotes Dr. Anna Lembke, an addiction medicine specialist at Stanford University School of Medicine: “… if we really believe that addiction is a result of changes in the brain due to chronic heavy drug exposure, how can we believe that stimulant exposure isn’t going to change these kids’ brains in a way that makes them more vulnerable to harder drugs?”2
Between 2000 and 2010, diagnosis of children with ADHD rose 25% in the United States. If there is even a small chance of a relationship between early stimulant use in children and later addiction we should be concentrating massive amounts of resources into researching that connection.
1 Though this diagnosis is now referred to as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), I use ADD in this essay because that was the term used when Gray was diagnosed in the late eighties, early nineties.
2 Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, Beth Macy. Little Brown and Company, 2018. pp. 134-135.
Fireflies
When Gray was in junior high we lived in Iowa where he stayed with me in the summers, and with his dad, in Dallas, for the school year. I would feel sad when the fireflies came in August because I knew it was almost time for him to return to his father’s. We had a ritual of going out to watch fireflies the evening before he had to leave.
One August evening in those years we took our last walk of the summer to the park near our house. Gray ran around the open field in the park’s center, buoyed by an energy my body had long forgotten, sweat shining on his forehead like a kind of body-light in the setting sun. He ran to the merry-go-round and pushed it in faster and faster circles.
“Hey mom, look at this!” he yelled, hanging on to the side railings in a casual kind of way, to show that he could handle the danger, no problem.
He ran from the rails to the slide, then up and down the slide, then back to the merry-go-round in a dizzying performance of young male energy. Two girls watched silently from the edge of the playground. It was beautiful, this display of energy; it was everything I thought of when I thought of youth, yet I couldn’t help but remember his elementary school teachers complaining endlessly of this very vigor.
Every now and then he’d look over to make sure I was watching, and I’d smile. I didn’t want him to know how torn I was at his leaving, didn’t want him to feel the dark thing already growing in my throat like some new infection.
I blinked back my grief, then suddenly it was really dusk and the whole field, every inch of it, came alive with the glowing bodies of thousands of fireflies, blinking their own spirit, searching for something kindred. Their light felt like a blessing, a consolation, a reminder of how beautiful the earth was, and Gray: look at me, look at me, remember, remember this, they seemed to blink. Their flashing lights were a reminder that what makes life beautiful is precisely the fact that it doesn’t last.
The world looked upside down, as if the stars had descended to cover the earth for a time, to touch us with their smallest lights. May none of these be broken, I asked, may they stay whole until their short lives stop, may someone be there, sober and full of human light, watching over their sweet, boundless energy.
Yarn
I love to work with yarn that’s hand-spun, hand dyed or painted by someone who loves wool, and cares for the animals who give it up to us—there’s such loveliness in the unevenness of it, the unexpected variations in color as a strand slips through your fingers, its coarse silkiness, even though sometimes the spinner misses a twist, creates a weakness that will reveal itself in the finished product, the yarn thinning to almost nothing as you stitch a scarf or sweater, say. Sometimes you must cut the yarn, begin again with a healthier part of the strand. Other times, you miss the weakness and stitch it right into the garment, a flaw that doesn’t show up until you put stress on it, and the whole row undoes itself.
Still, I prefer these yarns. They’re nothing like synthetics, so reliable and predictable, each strand perfectly colored and twisted, easy to work with, machine washable to boot.
No, give me a bit of turbulence, the beauty of imperfection, this rough texture that hints at intimacy with sheep or llama or alpaca, give me the very real possibility that at any moment it could all unravel.
It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe
… the human hand…has its own form of intelligence and memory.
—Elizabeth Zimmerman
Some of my earliest memories involve watching my mother crochet in our small living room nights when my father was away working his second job or out somewhere carousing. Oh, the bright and colorful afghans she made for her five children! Although I don’t remember her smiling while she crocheted, she seemed more serene than at other times, centered, surrounded by balls of yarn, an afghan slowly taking shape in her lap. Sometimes she worked with granny squares, stacking up hundreds of multi-colored squares next to her on the sofa, then, months later, stitching them together in a lively design, making a whole of pieces in ways I’m sure she wished she could do with the broken bits of her life with my father.
Even as a child I perceived the swirl of chaos around my father, who often came home late from work, smelling funny and slurring his speech. I sensed my mother’s crocheting was a way of creating a bit of calm in the frequent storms my father choreographed, storms that included strange women calling our house late at night, strange women’s jewelry found in his car, increasing DUIs, car accidents and hospitalizations until, finally, just short of his 60th birthday, his liver in an advanced state of cirrhosis, he slipped into a vegetative state and died a few months later. In those years, I kept a journal and wrote poems in secret, which became my way of reflecting on my father’s life, since my mother rarely talked about it unless forced. Instead of talking, instead of writing, she crocheted.
My mother has shared with me that crocheting all those years was, for her, a form of meditation. Instead of doing almost nothing, as in traditional meditation, with one’s hands, hers were always moving, always in contact with the yarn she was looping and yarning over and pulling through in a rhythm I now understand, as a crocheter myself, underlies any thoughts scuttling about in your brain. Whatever else you might be thinking about while crocheting, you usually must be counting—one single crochet front loop only; one back loop only, skip one stitch; three single crochets in the next stitch, repeat until you have 150 stitches. Counting underlies all your thoughts in crochet, giving them a substance and song they might otherwise not have had.
If you’re mourning some loss, as my mother often would have been—not only did she lose her husband over the years to other women and drink, but both her younger sister, and her troubled son, my brother, died young of drug overdoses—the yarn slowly but surely binds you to that
