The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome by Shonda Schilling, Curt Schilling Page B
Authors: Shonda Schilling, Curt Schilling
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the hand and an overly simplified generalization. None of it felt right.
And then there were the times when it wasn’t just friends and family who were questioning my instincts but my own husband. This was usually because Curt wasn’t around enough to know what I was talking about—he hadn’t witnessed certain behaviors in Grant firsthand. Other times, he seemed to think I was latching on to an excuse for not having control. Every night when he wasn’t home, I’d give him the playbyplay on how Grant had acted, and often he’d find a way to retrain the lens onto something else that didn’t involve Grant. Curt still wasn’t that close with Grant, and each night I reached out in the hope that I could draw them together. Yet something in my communication with Curt was being lost in translation; I didn’t know what I could do to make him see what I was going through.
Curt was also skeptical about the way behavioral illnesses like ADHD were becoming excuses for modern children being disrespectful to their parents. Though Curt himself had been accurately diagnosed with ADHD many years before, and took Adderall to deal with it, he still felt that ADHD was diagnosed too frequently in kids. I, too, had been wary of this suddenly common diagnosis, and I was against medicating kids so casually for it.
But then, in early 2007, as I was starting to think more about Grant’s behavior, I began to notice things about Gehrig as well. He was struggling much more in middle school than he had earlier, which is certainly not abnormal, but for someone so bright, it made no sense. His grades didn’t reflect how intelligent he was. It seemed that over the past couple of years a cycle would repeat itself—he’d find himself far behind and depressed about catching up, and I couldn’t get him to focus or spend nearly enough time on homework. He had a tutor come work with him twice a week, and I was able to check his homework online, but still he would spend more time trying to get out of doing his homework than actually doing it.
At the time, Curt was getting ready to leave for spring training, so I couldn’t rely on him to help me stay on top of Gehrig and his schoolwork. Gehrig and I would go through the same cycle over and over again: I wouldexhaust myself chasing him into the dining room, where he was supposed to be working. But as soon as I’d leave the room, he’d wander into another room to do something, anything, besides his homework. He’d go watch television in the den, follow one of the dogs outside to play with it, go into the computer room to email his friends, or worse, to agitate his siblings.
When report cards came out, Gehrig was shocked and sad. After many years as an average student, his grades now reflected that he was below average. He broke into tears right in front of us, but knowing how hard it had been to get him to focus on work, Curt and I were angry with him. We fell back on the approach we always used back then: punishment. We tried to figure out what we could take away from him for a while to show that we were serious and to persuade him to do better. But it’s hard to take something away from a kid who doesn’t treasure anything enough to be worried about losing it—unlike his sister, who would view being docked a sleepover as capital punishment. Gehrig also didn’t have as many friends as he used to. Although he was well liked at school, he didn’t put much effort into socializing after school and on the weekends.
After watching Gehrig struggle with this for a while, I was tired of the fights and concerned about how much he dreaded homework every night. I went online and realized he fit every single symptom on the list for ADHD. Not a few—every one. (What did we do before the Internet?) I printed out one of the lists I found and brought it to Curt in his home office.
“Look at this,” I said, handing the paper to him. Curt glanced over the list of symptoms: not being able to sit still,
And then there were the times when it wasn’t just friends and family who were questioning my instincts but my own husband. This was usually because Curt wasn’t around enough to know what I was talking about—he hadn’t witnessed certain behaviors in Grant firsthand. Other times, he seemed to think I was latching on to an excuse for not having control. Every night when he wasn’t home, I’d give him the playbyplay on how Grant had acted, and often he’d find a way to retrain the lens onto something else that didn’t involve Grant. Curt still wasn’t that close with Grant, and each night I reached out in the hope that I could draw them together. Yet something in my communication with Curt was being lost in translation; I didn’t know what I could do to make him see what I was going through.
Curt was also skeptical about the way behavioral illnesses like ADHD were becoming excuses for modern children being disrespectful to their parents. Though Curt himself had been accurately diagnosed with ADHD many years before, and took Adderall to deal with it, he still felt that ADHD was diagnosed too frequently in kids. I, too, had been wary of this suddenly common diagnosis, and I was against medicating kids so casually for it.
But then, in early 2007, as I was starting to think more about Grant’s behavior, I began to notice things about Gehrig as well. He was struggling much more in middle school than he had earlier, which is certainly not abnormal, but for someone so bright, it made no sense. His grades didn’t reflect how intelligent he was. It seemed that over the past couple of years a cycle would repeat itself—he’d find himself far behind and depressed about catching up, and I couldn’t get him to focus or spend nearly enough time on homework. He had a tutor come work with him twice a week, and I was able to check his homework online, but still he would spend more time trying to get out of doing his homework than actually doing it.
At the time, Curt was getting ready to leave for spring training, so I couldn’t rely on him to help me stay on top of Gehrig and his schoolwork. Gehrig and I would go through the same cycle over and over again: I wouldexhaust myself chasing him into the dining room, where he was supposed to be working. But as soon as I’d leave the room, he’d wander into another room to do something, anything, besides his homework. He’d go watch television in the den, follow one of the dogs outside to play with it, go into the computer room to email his friends, or worse, to agitate his siblings.
When report cards came out, Gehrig was shocked and sad. After many years as an average student, his grades now reflected that he was below average. He broke into tears right in front of us, but knowing how hard it had been to get him to focus on work, Curt and I were angry with him. We fell back on the approach we always used back then: punishment. We tried to figure out what we could take away from him for a while to show that we were serious and to persuade him to do better. But it’s hard to take something away from a kid who doesn’t treasure anything enough to be worried about losing it—unlike his sister, who would view being docked a sleepover as capital punishment. Gehrig also didn’t have as many friends as he used to. Although he was well liked at school, he didn’t put much effort into socializing after school and on the weekends.
After watching Gehrig struggle with this for a while, I was tired of the fights and concerned about how much he dreaded homework every night. I went online and realized he fit every single symptom on the list for ADHD. Not a few—every one. (What did we do before the Internet?) I printed out one of the lists I found and brought it to Curt in his home office.
“Look at this,” I said, handing the paper to him. Curt glanced over the list of symptoms: not being able to sit still,
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