today I taught my son to play chess

Henry is five and a half. Six months ago, on his birthday, he was diagnosed with ADHD. It seems funny to say it that way, as though somehow on the day he turned five he became a Wild Thing and we sought help and voila! Problem solved! Which is not how it happened at all. Six months ago, we sat on the beautiful velvet sofa in the psychologist's office and listened as she talked through several months of observation and testing, and what seemed like hundreds of pages of questionnaires that my husband and I and Henry's preschool teachers had painstakingly filled out. Nothing she said was new to us; we were familiar with every behavior she described. What we had been missing, until that moment, was the external confirmation that something was not right. And now we had it.

The diagnosis was, for the most part, a relief. I had always known that Henry wasn't like other children; he was more energetic and high-strung than his peers. As a baby, he would sit in the bouncy seat and kick his legs until the entire seat rocked and his butt touched the floor. He took his first unassisted steps on a Sunday, Father's Day; five days later, he was running from one end of our house to the other. He refused to hold hands and would run out into parking lots or race away in shopping malls. When he turned two, he knew fourteen words; six weeks later, when our second son was born, he was talking non-stop, in complete, complicated sentences. After he started to talk, he began memorizing books and would recite them, whole texts, things like Henry Hikes to Fitchburg and Katie and the Sunflowers. That same summer, he developed an intense fascination with our lawn mowing equipment (mowers, leaf blowers, weed eaters). Henry would stalk the man who mowed for us around our house, narrating his every move. He would beg us to drive him through the neighborhood 'to look for guys mowing.' He would insist that his playdates play 'lawn guy' with him. This lasted until he was four.

I read about autism and Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. I told my husband, 'He can't have sugar. No more juice! No more cookies!' I had lists of places I couldn't take him: any place with an escalator, for example, or a local bookstore with ladders attached to the shelves. I knew, I just knew that it wasn't supposed to be like this. But when I would mention it to my mother-in-law or my parents or my friends, they would all say, kindly and gently, 'He's fine!' or 'Boys are like that!' or 'Relax!' Even my husband was skeptical of some of my theories about Henry. 'Lots of kids are odd,' he would say. 'I'm sure he's fine.' And I would think, my god, they're right, I'm a terrible mother.

So when the psychologist said, 'Henry is a classic ADHD case,' I was relieved. For the first time in five years, I didn't feel like a terrible parent. Henry really wasn't like other kids, and the things that work for other kids--strategies for discipline and play and sleep and food--were not going to work for him. So we started over with new strategies for everything. We started intensive behavior therapy, which required that I be with Henry ALL THE TIME to help him negotiate the world. I spent the summer saying, 'Look at my face when you talk to me! Walk in the house! Take five deep breaths!'). By Labor Day, I was exhausted and was beginng to feel, again, like a terrible mother.

In the weeks after Henry was diagnosed, I read and read about how some highly gifted children, particularly boys, particularly at Henry's age, are misdiagnosed with ADHD. And in some small part of my heart, I hoped that this might be what we were facing. These children are hyper and distractable simply because they are so smart. If we can challenge him, I thought, then that will take care of it! We took him out of his Montessori preschool and put him in a smaller, more structured school. I bought hundreds of dollars worth of art supplies--paper, crayons, paint, markers, Playdough--and had Craft Time every day. We started reading more challenging books to him--the Magic Treehouse series, and Harry Potter. We encouraged him to make up stories, and we would type them for him. Wade would illustrate them. But he still couldn't sit still, couldn't have a coherent conversation, couldn't focus long enough to learn to spell his last name. He still had catastrophic meltdowns over what seemed like nothing. And then the director of his school called and said, 'We have to do something about Henry.' And once again, I felt like a terrible mother, because I had done too little or too much of the wrong thing.

Four weeks ago, we put Henry on medication. And in the last four weeks, he has begun to have complete conversations. He has started to draw detailed pictures of Quiddich matches. And today we played chess for two hours. Right now, in this moment, I don't feel like a terrible parent; I feel like the parent of a very smart little boy who spent fifteen minutes this afternoon memorizing the pattern for placing the chess pieces on the board, repeating it over and over, placing and replacing the pieces until he had it right (Rook, Knight, Bishop, Queen, King, Bishop, Knight, Rook). And no, I don't think this is a 'normal' Thursday in most homes, but it is closer to normal than we have ever been. And I think that's all we can hope for just now.