By Lisa Middents
Growing up as a white, middle class Protestant girl of German and English-descent, it seemed as though I must be in the mainstream. But I knew I wasn’t. I always felt different, but I couldn’t put a finger on exactly how or why.
In first grade at Broadway School in Mystic, CT, I had an intense encounter with a girl by the sinks in the bathroom. I was the new girl who’d entered first grade midyear after Christmas vacation. As a seasoned “navy brat” at age 6 (father had been a career submariner since I was a baby), I took this in stride. It was early 1969. Woodstock and the first moon landing would happen late that summer.
The ceiling in the girl’s bathroom was so high it was in shadows and all the pipes lining the upper parts of the walls were painted a glossy gray. The sad smell of young school-child urine lightly masked with cleaning fluid filled my nose. The girl locked eyes with me, inches from my face, her eyes opened wide while she posed the question drawing out each word, “Leeeeesa, are you Jewish?” I wasn’t even sure what she meant but her words made a thump in my gut that felt strangely familiar. I responded with a slow, “I . . . think I . . . am.”
It was ridiculous because I had no reason to believe I was Jewish. In my small Southeastern Connecticut town, Mystic, we didn’t even know anyone who was. Both my parents were children of Protestant ministers and we went every Sunday to the Methodist Church. The word “Jewish” smacked of difference and that’s what I was latching onto. I knew I wasn’t like everyone else.
THE ONLY GIRL TO EARN A SPANKING IN THE THIRD GRADE
In third grade, we moved to Charleston, South Carolina and my mother put my brother and me in a private Baptist school. There was a complex system of behavior control that involved getting yellow slips for missing a homework assignment and pink slips for talking out of turn in class. When you earned enough slips, you had to go to school on Saturday. After that dire punishment, if you continued to rack up the pink and yellow slips, the ultimate consequence was that the teacher brought you into the back room and spanked you with a ruler.
Not a cruel woman, my teacher did not relish doling out this punishment. She whispered sorrowfully to me as she lightly whacked my back with a tiny ruler in a subtle Southern drawl, “Lisa you are the only girl I’ve ever had to spank.” We were in a dim, closet-sized room adjoining the main classroom where we spent the entire school day at our desks in rows. It had a pleasant schoolish smell of pencil erasers and chalk dust.
Contrary to the contrition she hoped to inspire, my teacher’s words filled me with a glow of accomplishment. I felt deeply honored that I’d earned such a unique distinction. My teacher recognized me for the very strange girl I knew that I was.
FROM JEAN PAUL SARTRE TO DENTAL PLAQUE
I date my coming of age to senior year in Stonington High School. I was in the class of 1980. We’d moved back to Mystic from Charleston, SC when I was in 5th grade and I got the rare privilege, for a navy brat, of graduating with kids I’d known since they had baby teeth.
Senior year, I finally found my niche among the oddball bookworms and stopped trying to make it as a cool kid. Even though I took honors classes senior year, delving into things like the French Existentialists, I headed off to dental hygiene school after graduation, much to the dismay of my teacher mentors who couldn’t imagine why I’d decide to pursue a trade.
I told myself that I wanted to make sure I could always pay the bills while I studied whatever I liked later on. But the real reason was that I was not emotionally prepared to enter the competitive race of applying to colleges and finding one’s rank in the world according to the prestige of the places that accepted you.
1980 was not yet a time when college tuition was the same as a home mortgage. Elite schools did not yet have so many applicants that they only accepted the godlike 1%. I was hypersensitive to the disdainful tones of the top kids in my honors class when they got to mentioning their “safety school” UCONN (University of Connecticut), last in their glittering lists of hallowed ivy-clad private colleges where they applied.
It was all about SAT scores back then and mine were certainly not up to par for acceptance at a prestigious school. So, my solution was to do the weird thing for an honors student and study to acquire a trade.
PSEUDO LESBIAN AND WANNABE JEWISH GIRL
I graduated from dental hygiene school at Northeastern University in Boston in 1982 and went back to college a year and a half later to earn my bachelor’s degree in history. I was a student at UMASS-Boston for five years while working part time as a hygienist. I was on the slow boat and finally completed my bachelor’s in 1989, a full five years after most of the college-bound kids the high school class of 1980.
I spent my twenties and early thirties in Boston yearning after a clan where I’d find kinship. I finally had to give up hope that I might have a future as a Jewish girl after my Jewish boyfriend of several years finally told me that he did not see us together long-term. I spent several years hoping to be mistaken for a lesbian and had to let that go when I found a boyfriend.
It wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own and was well into middle age that I finally discovered the basis for the consistent feeling that I was an outsider. It was attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder or ADHD. At age 17, my daughter got diagnosed with the condition and I came to recognize in myself in much of what I read about ADHD.
BOARDING SCHOOL SCAM
First, a little backstory. In ninth grade, my daughter opted to leave public school and be a day student at a local boarding school because she wanted more of a challenge. After a few weeks of classes, in shock over the workload, she asked for ADHD medication. “My friend says she takes it to help her study.” I rolled my eyes and thought to myself, oh boy I’m not falling for this trick and joining the legions of parents who secure uppers for their children so they can do 5 hours of homework every night and then wake up the next morning before dawn to speak intelligently in an 8 a.m. class.
I mean really, we’re talking homework that included reading single-spaced 19th century novels so thick they could double as a weapon in a pinch. Yes, maybe this was a normal expectation for teenagers in the pre-digital age and of course a highly worthy goal. However, the vast majority of my daughter’s contemporaries spent at most one hour per night at the books before they tossed them under the covers to devote themselves passionately to their true calling—taking Snapchat photos of their tonsils. Of course she thought something was medically wrong with her because it was hard to focus!
“No honey, we’re going to give it some time and see how it goes. You’re just not used to getting so much homework after being in public school for 8 years.” She struggled another couple of years and would cry out in frustration, “I can’t focus!” while sitting on her bed surrounded by balled up gum wrappers, random hair scrunchies and notebooks and paperback books, her laptop with multiple tabs open, one of which was always Netflix. In the middle of Junior year finally, she overcame her shame over possibly being seen walking into the school health center for a visit with the staff psychiatrist who diagnosed her with ADHD.
SO THAT’S WHO I AM!
I started to read books about ADHD and was mightily surprised to recognize myself in many of the case studies. Girls are often undiagnosed because, unlike boys, they don’t manifest the condition through hyperactivity; they just daydream a lot. I was always called a “space cadet” in school. Furthermore, kids with ADHD can still get good grades without accommodations and are often highly creative and able to “think outside the box,” it just costs them a lot emotionally to manage a condition they don’t even know they have.
Even though I was proud of being different, I did struggle with many feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. I spent my 20’s, 30’s and 40’s trying to understand those conditions from a psychological perspective. Were they because of the way I was parented? But in fact, I had a great time in childhood. I also realized after I had my own children, that my parents did an amazing job just holding it all together and making sure my physical needs were always taken care of and I never had to worry about my basic bodily security. Was this constant underlying feeling of “not being enough” because of a biological condition in my brain chemistry and formation?
Reading about ADHD was like finding the magic key that solved the riddle of myself. Why was juggling the multiple demands of motherhood, holding down a job and maintaining a house so very hard for me? It wasn’t easy for anyone I knew, but I was particularly frazzled and filled with a sense of failure and inadequacy. Why did it seem so extraordinarily difficult for me to keep it all together? How could the other mothers I knew do it? Not all had perfectly clean houses and a fail-safe system to get their kids to bed by 8 pm. But why were the ones who had messy houses and unruly schedules so able to sigh and accept good naturedly that’s the way there were. Why couldn’t I be more unapologetically myself?
UNAPOLOGETICALLY MYSELF
I had the great good fortune of finding a gifted therapist who learned along with me the role undiagnosed ADHD can play to make intelligent and creative people feel chronically bad about themselves. Knowing about my ADHD condition has been beyond a great gift. Of course, it is sometimes hard on my ego to realize that my life-long feelings of difference were not from the arguably more romantic causes of Jewish DNA or of being a lesbian. However, knowing what’s really going on with my brain has led me to develop ways to manage my ADHD through diet, exercise, meditation and excellent talk therapy. I am now a lot more forgiving of myself for my limitations.
It may take me a little longer and a more circuitous route to get the job done— but I often go above and beyond expectations in academic, work and volunteer projects and develop creative solutions that others who finish more quickly never could.
I’ve gone from feeling different in some vague way and sometimes ashamed— to knowing I am different and accepting the gifts along with the challenges of the condition. What a relief!