The Good Old Days…. ?
I was talking to my best friend Catherin the other day. She’s German and lives in France. We were discussing kids. Each time I told her another tidbit about my son, Peter, she had an aha! moment about her daughter.
“Ah! Oh! Wow! That’s JUST like Leonie!”
Then when I got to the part of the story where he is diagnosed with ADHD–and how we’re having trouble getting his teachers to understand that he’s not being a lazy slacker, but that he’s got issues with his frontal lobes, thank you very much–she was utterly perplexed.
“What’s ADHD?” she asked.
I almost fell out of my foaming bathtub and chipped my perfect red nail varnish. What? There’s a mother on this earth who hasn’t heard about the ADD/ADHD epidemic? How is that even possible these days?
I started wondering about the advantages and burdens of these kind of diagnoses. On the one hand, knowledge is power, right? Now that we know he’s not just being a lazy slacker, we can stop chaining him to the desk and whipping him when he forgets his pencil for the ten millionth time.
BUT… in the old days, his behavior would have been dealt with too, just without involving a doctor, a neuro psychologist, a nutritionist, a therapist, a pharamacist and a mom racking up miles in the car and endless time on the phone and in bland offices with beige wallpaper and tinkling (supposedly soothing) water fountains.
We talked to a group of 70 working moms yesterday and when we asked if they thought the old days were easier for moms, almost all of them raised their hands. Hm. Am I happy to know the issues my children are struggling with in their everyday lives and trying to help them deal? Of course! Moms are fixers, but we can’t always make everything right.
So… is ignorance bliss, then? In some way, I do envy my friend Catherin. ADD? Huh?