Patty's Closet

Poster Child for Hyperactivity

"Punkess…Hey dope how's it going at bethel," began a letter from my younger brother R. "Punkess," not to be confused with hind end of a donkey, is one of R.'s favorite names to call me. It means "female punk." I would like to think that it's a term of endearment.

"Punkess" isn't the only name R. invented, actually. Despite the fact that a futon is a couch, R. went through a phase where he called everything a futon. Then from "futon" came "futonic" and "futonarium," and I was "futonic punkess." My first password for my Bethel computer account was "Mr. Futon."

R. liked the sound of his own voice. After watching My Fair Lady he went around saying "Gaaaahn, good heavens, girl, what kind of a sound is that?" so often that my cousin finally answered him with, "you made it. I guess you can name it." This, of course, was offering him way too much encouragement.

From an old Mighty Max cartoon somewhere, R. got the name "eggbert zygote." He liked to holler it at the Nintendo. I would come down from my room to choruses of "you rat" and "that's ratty." My favorite of all was "kumquat." I have at least one vivid memory of R. doing jumping jacks yelling "kumquat! kumquat!" in the living room. I proceeded to drape a blanket over a couple of chairs and call it an insane asylum, then commit myself because R. was driving me insane. Mom came in. She commented that of her two kids, one was sitting under some blankets reading and one was bouncing around yelling about tropical fruit, and the wrong one was in the asylum.

One afternoon R. dashed into the living room, stuck his face in back of the fan, proceeded to say "Luke, Luke, I am your father," for about twenty minutes. When he got tired of that, he gave a yell of "hey, kitty," scooped up the long-suffering tabby cat, yelled, "Supercat" holding her over his head and running around, then tossed her on the couch and dashed out the front door. "Hornets!" he yelled, blasting the sidewalk with his Super Soaker. Then he brought the squirt gun inside and pointed it at the Mario Kart cartridge. Mom told him in no uncertain terms to go back outside.

Dad told me once that R. has two switches: "high" and "off." It would be easy to relate more "high" stories—the time he spread soap suds all over the entire kitchen while I was doing dishes, the time an entertained Mom and I spent almost an hour listening to R. singing along with the Chipmunks on his headphones and make up his own words, the time he played an inappropriate two minutes from Dennis the Menace so often that he could have finished the whole movie in the time it took him to loop the fart.

I have learned through the years that "high" and "off" are two sides to the same coin. In a "high" moment, R. can recite every word of "Miss Susie" (an inappropriate jumprope rhyme we used to dare each other to sing for Grandma). In an "off" moment, R. can write gorgeous poetry. I copied one about the stars for my poetry folder here at Bethel, and a long poem that he wrote for our cousin H. still hangs on his wall.

In "high" moments, R. blasted Mark Lowry's "I used to hang my suspenders over the church balcony and use them as a bungee cord!" enough to make Mom and me wish Mark had never gone into stand-up comedy. In "off" moments R. says that one of his favorite songs is Michael W. Smith's Place in this World.

There is solo hyperactivity, and there is group hyperactivity. Recently, R. and his friend D. dropped their Playstation game to go look on the Internet for memory codes, and returned with weird expressions. R. and his friends french-kissed every object in Grandpa's study during Truth or Dare. And then of course there was the game of "What if" where the question was "what if I hugged you R." and the answer was "you'll have to catch me first."

R. knows how to have fun. The cats still run out of the room at lightning speed when he approaches them with a certain look in his eye. But he cares for his friends. The expressions that he directs at the television in the privacy of his own room, he never says out loud in company. When my friends were around last Interim, R. acted like an adult, and when we decided to be "girls" and have a teaparty, R. joined us all. He was an especially good sport when Mom got out the camera!

This is my brother. The young man who drained all the lemon juice when S. dared him to, yet spoke politely to J. a few seconds later. The young men who surprised me with a cd I wanted left on my bed, just because he knew I was having a hard time. He has a spirit which will never be quenched, and he has done some funny things. He is my brother. He has depth, he cares about people, and he loves Jesus.

Reflection

When it first occurred to me to write an essay about hyperactivity, I didn't realize that it might take things that were rather too personal about my brother and put them out there into "public."

It's ironic that I'd have written about ADHD so long ago, though, considering I was diagnosed with asperger's, aka high functioning autism, just last year. One thing about asperger's is that it makes it hard to intuit rules of politeness (aka R. might not want some of those stories out there in public). There are surprising correlations between autism and ADD. Put very simply, the difference between ADHD and normal-boy behavior is that regular hyper irrepressible kids can flip their own "off" switches, while that mechanism simply does not exist in an ADHD brain–it's not "won't" calm down, it's "can't," which leads to managing triggers instead—if you cannot calm down once you've started, then you avoid the situations that lead you to getting started unless you know it's okay to be hyper. With both ADD and autism, every bit of information gets through without filters. One of Mom's favorite stories to tell about R. was the time she advised him to count sheep, then returned fifteen minutes later to hear him say "stupid sheep are jumping five at a time." However, the mechanism for the ability to focus attention on one particular detail is insufficient in the ADD brain, and the mechanism for the ability to discern which detail is the most important is insufficient in the autistic brain. Once I know what to focus on, I don't have trouble doing it, but figuring out which details are important and which aren't continually leads me to miss important things.

As I look at these older essays, sometimes I'm amazed at the number of details I left out. I don't think my teacher particularly liked the essay. She complimented my details and suggested rearranging them so that the essay actually read like an essay with a point.

I had a point, it was just that I didn't yet have the courage to write it. As much as he couldn't help it, and as delightfully fun as he was to be around sometimes, R.'s issues were one of the major sources of angst in my childhood. And, I guess you could say, my early development as a Christian. Everything I learned about holding my temper, about forgiveness, about surrendering my right to be seen and heard and have a say in the things that were going on around me, I learned from living with him. Sometimes I'll tell a story about the way he got up in a deserted church and burped in the microphone, only to discover that the microphone was on and everyone in the potluck downstairs had heard him. It is funny now. At the time I was humiliated—and Dad told me I didn't have a right to be, since R. was his son and it didn't bother him.

I was hoping that I'd grow out of those issues as I got older. Childhood humiliations don't matter when you're thirty, after all. And to a great extent, I have. I remember mostly the good memories. I remember the Rich Mullins songbook R. bought for me completely out of the blue, then gave it to me inquiring whether the smile I was putting on was real. I went through things that could have ripped my family apart, and through it all R. stayed strong for and with Mom and Dad. He's a good person.

There was more to the story than I put in the essay, once again of course. During that "Interim" break from Bethel (the four days after January term), I had three of my Bethel classmates come over to my house—about four hours from the college. They only stayed one night. My dad lectured me later on accepting what I'd been given, since after all they came over to my house and thus they must like me. But I felt like a stranger the whole time. One of my friends had a story she wasn't yet sharing with us, and the other two were distant and preoccupied. I tried to introduce games a few times without success, and finally they all left a day and a half early. I gave the most cheerful smile I could to see them off, then made to head into my room. My mother intercepted me and tried to get me to talk to her. I said that I was still looking for a place where who I was, was okay. She said I had that place there, and I said, "when I'm alone," and then I shut the door. I didn't have words to say that my family's home was the place in the world where I felt most like a stranger of all.

Catholics speak of fasting as a way to manage one's own desires—rather than being a slave to one's own body, to subordinate one's own desires and learn to wait. That part is so easy for me now because I had all the practice, biting my tongue and holding my temper and fighting a child's desire to just get hyper in turn along with my brother. I'd like to think that discipline serves me now. It's certainly, just like all these other things, part of the place where I came from.