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Derek’s Way
“Maybe I should take him to a psychiatrist, “ I
thought, “ I’m obviously not qualified to raise him.”
Mechanically I cleared away the bowls of half eaten
cereal. Tears quickly formed in my eyes, if only the
solution were that simple. With one common gesture I
had wiped away all traces of mess. “Mess,“ that’s the
perfect word to describe what I was in. What this
whole house was in. How could one small child create
such discord between five people?
This morning had been awful. Who was I kidding? Every
morning was awful. I’d paste that phony smile on my
face, grinding my teeth in preparation of the dance we
were all dreading, but doomed to dance anyways.
The battles over wearing socks in February, which
bowls he could or could not eat cereal from and the
regular morning wrestling match over the toothbrush
never ended. Eight year olds should not still be
acting like toddlers in the throws of the “terrible
twos”. Sure he had ADD, but so did my husband and I.
We understood. Why was Derek so out of control?
When we were growing up, no one talked about ADD.
There was no diagnosis. No medications or behavior
therapy for impulse control. We were simply told we
were bad, troublemakers, or just plain stupid. Armed
with recognition, we knew within 24 hours of Derek’s
birth, that we had a “live one”. Convinced that we
would never repeat the mistakes our parents had made,
we unsuspectingly brought our little darling home and
immediately started fouling things up. Eight years
later, I knew our mistake. I just had no idea how to
fix it. While we had possessed an excellent
understanding of what not to do, we had no working
model for what we should be doing. Derek needed
something else.
As I entered the living room, my gaze fell on the
stack of books beside my chair. It had been my
practice for the last several months to spend this
time of day reading. Anxiously, I raced through
parenting books as though the devil himself were at my
heels. Parenting experts. They were all there. John
Townsend with his boundaries, Gary Smalley with his
love languages and Dr. Dobson claiming to tame the
challenging Child. To date, Derek was not only still
Challenging, but he was actually growing worse by the
day if that was possible.
continue...
Author: Beth Lane
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