BENGALURU: I have always known that my mother was patient and stable but I did not realise how much my life depended on it until I found out nearly six years ago that she had brought up a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).
She says I had my thumb in my mouth when the nurse first brought me to her. Her sister, a child psychiatrist, had told her that it meant that I had ADHD. The habit stuck till I was 11.
I wonder if she felt regret or frustration typical of parents of such children. All I know now, a little over two decades later, is that as my symptoms were not too severe, she decided to raise me without medication, fearing the side effects.
Long after I learned to talk, I would sit on the swing at my playschool and sing self-composed songs of gibberish while the other children were learning to write the alphabet. I was never forced to join them on my mother’s request, and she and my grandmother taught me at home.
Once school began, my mother requested the teachers to be patient with me and promised them that I would soon pick up what was taught even if the immediate evaluation indicated otherwise. Smiling as she reminisces, she declares that the teachers would be flummoxed for she was telling them exactly what they constantly told anxious parents.
When it came to homework, my mother thought of ways to draw my attention to the task at hand. She would let me have a bite of a favourite snack after every five problems or make me write in different coloured sketch-pens — colours never cease to fascinate me — to learn answers by heart. Some evenings would be spent in the park consisting alternately of 15 minutes’ study on the bench and a quarter hour of play.
When I was in fifth standard, my mother seemed to sense my struggle against the syllabus. So, both my sister and I switched to a semi-residential non-conventional school, Centre For Learning.
I decided to join college after Class 10 and proceeded to study for BA in Journalism, English and Psychology after PUC. So, when my mother told me I had been diagnosed with a disorder I studied about as a part of my syllabus, I was flabbergasted.
But after the initial shock, it seemed a relief to understand that my slowness in performing tasks, my inability to multitask as efficiently as others and so many other behaviours that caused me to be labelled a ‘perfectionist’ or ‘weird’ had some basis. The questions that had remained unanswered about why I found many simple, everyday jobs harder than I ought seemed to have a plausible explanation.
Yet, all these came at a time when I had proved to my mother and to myself that ADHD did not hold me back. Over time, I have understood that if I was a ‘special child’ of sorts, I’m glad to have had a special mother.