Most of my memories of childhood Christmas mornings have blended together into a pleasant haze of torn wrapping paper revealing box after box of just what I always wanted and one holding a dopy sweater from Great Aunt Jean. But Christmas 1955 stands out. Santa gave me a “Family Doctor” play set. I was six, and despite early behavior alarms from Montessori teachers, Santa apparently still held out hopes for a stable professional future for me. No one, including Santa, knew from ADHD in 1955. I was, according to my early teachers, a cheerful individual but also “distracted,” “unruly,” and a “trouble-maker.” As a matter of fact all my teachers, until I dropped out of college, said approximately the same thing.
But Santa believed in my medical career. And he was right; I loved the play set and the whole doctor idea. I literally shook with excitement opening the plastic doctor bag. This was the most amazing present ever. I would do things, great things, and everyone would call me “Doctor.” I could see myself smiling wisely and patting heads. But once I put the stethoscope around my neck, opened up all the individual tongue depressor and little Kleenex packs, ate all the sugar pills, and blew air into both sides of my nose at the same time with the two plastic syringes, I was bored with medicine. I’d put my cap pistol in my doctor bag and decided to turn to a life of crime as a train robber, when my best friend Doreen came over with her dolls, Maria and Marsha, and saved the day by turning all my scattered doctor junk into a story. “First,” she said, “We have to save Maria’s life.” Then, pointing at the yellow plastic doctor specs with her paper fan, she said, “Hurry up, put on the doctor glasses.”
I pushed the glasses onto my nose and got to work. Under Doreen’s direction, my boredom flew out the window. Maria needed a shot and a heart operation, but before we could do that we had to fix Marsha’s broken leg, which we did but she kept running out of the doctor’s office and breaking it again so Doreen had to use my cap pistol to hold Marsha captive at gunpoint, for her own good, as we tried everything we could to keep Maria alive, which was no longer necessary when we discovered that Marsha and Maria were long-lost sisters. It was touch and go at the start, but with Doreen and I working together that Christmas day flew by, filled with life and death drama, touching reunions and miracle cures.
This last November I went to Delaware to help my 89 year-old mother make Thanksgiving dinner for my dementia-saddled dad, on a day trip to their house from the nursing home where he lives. My wife Margaret and sixteen year-old ADHD daughter Coco stayed home for Thanksgiving in Georgia with Margaret’s mother who lives with us now. Margaret teaches middle school with her sister Liz, who was diagnosed with ALS last year and is retiring to fight the dark, unrelenting disease full-time, and she and Margaret planned to get together a few times over the holiday. Coco is completing school projects and studying like a dervish for upcoming tests, determined to prove to her teachers and everyone else, especially herself, that she can get straight A’s – except for math – but she wants a B there and I’m worried that she’s going to burn herself out.
So, I’m up in Delaware, and on Thanksgiving day I’m so worried about my dad getting up out of his wheelchair and falling while he and my mom watch an “Above the Chesapeake” video that I keep running out into the living room to check, and burn the half the dinner.
That night, after I got Dad back to his nursing home, and mom went to bed, I called home and told Margaret what happened. “First,” she says, “Did your mom or dad really care about the overcooked ham and yams?” I told her not really, there were plenty of mashed potatoes and the middle of the ham was still okay. And I had to admit under further questioning that nobody fell, and both my parents were happy, grateful, and tucked in their beds, safe. “So you did a good thing and it turned out well, yes?” Margaret said, “So stop your bitching.” I gave up, laughed and asked about home. “Everybody is good here too,” she said, “As long you get home at the end of the week. We need you too.” We traded “I love you,” back and forth and then, feeling much calmer I went to sleep.
The night before I left Delaware, I watched “Love Actually” on TV with my mother and the movie’s opening voice-over once again bowled me over with its straight-forward honesty, “It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends.”
And maybe one of the great things that I wanted to do when I was six is simply to pull my head out of my own constant seductively swirling, confused worries, complaints and obsessions long enough to appreciate the power of the love among all of us and our family and friends and show it, over and over.
That, I think, is the ADHD Christmas cure.