I am slightly OCD and ADD and am prone to depression with naturally high levels of anxiety. My daughter is slightly ADD and has mild Dyslexia. It makes for an interesting combination, especially during a pandemic when parents were playing a huge role in remote learning. This led to the battle of the acronyms.
Just having a child was a strain on my perfection complex. I was obsessive with cleaning and straightening and trying to make my infant then toddler be mess-free all the time. It was just the two of us those first few years, and she was an incredibly neat baby (minus all the spit up from her colic and sensitive tummy!). But, children are not perfect. Parenting is not a perfect science. It all gets messy at times.
With having a shorter attention span, and liking everything in perfect order, patience was definitely a virtue I had to work on. Having a kid with a short attention span, trying to keep her on task or get her to finish any chore without being completed distracted and it taking hours still is a battle now into the teen years!
In 2020 when the world shut down and kids switched to remote learning, that was the toughest battle of the acronyms yet for us. Math and language arts are her hardest subjects, just because it takes so much brain power to switch words, letters, and numbers around, the comprehension stage is such a struggle for her to get to and takes all the joy out of those two subjects.
She first was diagnosed in her first year of preschool, so by fifth grade, I almost forgot about her dyslexia. She had adapted and coped so well, and never complained about her struggles, that I actually temporarily forgot she even had a learning disability. Math and language arts were my favorite subjects growing up, and the ones I excelled in most, so my brain just couldn’t compute why my child JUST. DIDN’T. GET. IT!!!
Every day off doing math together led to me losing my temper, her in tears, and my husband having to gently step in to finish her work with her. When it finally hit me after weeks that she has dyslexia, I felt like the worst mother in the world! I cried. I apologized to her. I tried to be less strict with following “new” math that made no sense to either of us and just taught her how it made sense in my brain from growing up. I called and emailed her teachers, and they only cared that she showed her work and was DOING work in general during that time of craziness.
I have tried to remain cognizant of her internal battles and not let it become a battle between the two of us these past few years. Now in middle school, she works her tail off and gets all As and some Bs. She hates to ask for accommodations and advocate for herself, though. I’m worried I may have put too much pressure early on and given her a complex, like my dad did to me all growing up well into my senior year of high school.
I just try to be mindful of how her brain works, be more compassionate all the time, and try to be her biggest champion and advocate.
Are there any battle of the acronyms in your family, and what are the ways you try and make it less of a battle? Share with us in the comments!
