Squeedle!!!

How I discovered my son’s distraction reflex is part of a hunter’s nature. Or a golden retriever’s.

A few summers ago we were on a road trip down south. The highway stretched out before us, cruise-control was on, and my husband and I were three-deep into our game of “top five Bruce Springsteen songs.” Suddenly there was a shout from the back seat, where we thought our tween son had dozed off with his nose in a Foxtrot collection.

Not Behind the Wheel…Yet!

You can’t get into the fast lane if you don’t have a license — and we're still waiting for our ADHD teen to show us he has the drive to get one.

Today my son Enzo turned sixteen. To a kid like him who can’t think of much else than cars, we figured this day would be a big one! Since he was ten, he's always dreamed of the scene from Transformers, where Sam Witwicki’s dad drives him to a used car shop and gives him a budget of double what he'd saved on his own.

Where the Cool Kids Are

Attending our first support group for teens brought a delightful surprise: kids with attention deficit are the fun ones. A look at the lighter side of these creative, self-aware blabbermouths.

Although Enzo’s symptoms were pretty obvious to me, it took a long time to get his diagnosis, and I had no idea what it would mean if we did. All I knew was we needed help. And as soon as the doctors could see what I saw, the doors really did open up into a world of support: classes every Friday on different topics surrounding ADHD:Understanding ADHD, Parenting Skills, Navigating School Support; family therapy; and best of all, a Tuesday group for both parents and teens.

The World's Most Precious Resource

A wonderful thing happened last year. I got a contract to write a book: a payment up front, a year to write it, an editor, a marketing team — the works. I write with my mother, a community psychologist and positive parenting guru — so I hit the ground running when I started my mothering career fifteen years ago.

The Interest-Based Nervous System

"Almost every one of my patients and their families want to drop the term Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder," writes William Dodson, M.D., "because it describes the opposite of what they experience every moment of their lives. It is hard to call something a disorder when it imparts many positives. ADHD is not a damaged or defective nervous system. It is a nervous system that works well using its own set of rules."

"Mana" from Heaven

Okay, this first post is a little gross, apologies.

I had a heated argument with a game hunter on Kauai last weekend about whether or not the ancient Hawaiian kings were honored in death by being roasted or boiled.

In the 1500 years the Hawaiian people lived on the unspoiled islands, there had probably been time to try all practices, I suggested. He said he'd visited and even discovered undisturbed caves where kings had been entombed. It was all about their bones, which they believed to contain their mana.

Mana is power of the essential variety. It's kind of like how Native Americans of all tribes refer to a person's gifts as their personal medicine.  Wikipedia says this about mana: "in anthropological discourse, mana as a generalized concept ... has commonly been interpreted as "the stuff of which magic is formed," as well as the substance of which souls are made."

The substance of which souls are made. The spark of the divine. 

Do you suppose mana might be the Hawaiian word for awesomeness? It's something you can feel in your bones.

What If There Really Were Two Paths?

Just while I'm thinking about how to kick this blog off, someone sends me this:

The world needs you to stop being boring. Right?