by Lucynda Rowen

Created on: September 23, 2008

I knew there was something wrong with my step son. My new husband insisted the problem was mine and that I needed to learn to be more patient but I knew he was wrong. It was not normal to have to drag a 5 year old boy kicking and screaming across the house 5 times to make him hang up his clothes or to listen to him scream at the top of his lungs 45 minutes each night because he didn't want to go to bed. Nor was it normal to have to chase him around a neighbor's house for 20 minutes because he didn't want to go home.

I married a man with two young children, ages three and five. There mother had custody and she had threatened suicide if her ex husband tried to take them away so I wasn't concerned about getting stuck with them either. I had a career and no interest in children but I was happy with the every other weekend arrangement. At least until the weekend she never came to pick them up. Suddenly I was a mom with a three and a five year old.
I finally talked my new husband into letting me take him to a pediatrician to have him checked for ADHD a year after they moved in when he accidentally kicked his 3 year old sister in the mouth and broke one of her front teeth. He was playing at the time, not fighting.
He was diagnosed and put on medication. Life improved for everyone. When he turned eight I noticed he wasn't growing. Not an inch in two years. I spoke to his doctor about lowering his dosage and they insisted everything was fine. Time passed and he started looking like an Ethiopian kid. He weighed 45 pounds and yet his doctor insisted there was nothing wrong. I experimented on weekends by taking him off of the medication and he did seem calmer so using my own judgment I took him off of it completely.
It seemed to be working. He was still kind of hyper but not out of control and he grew 2 inches in the first 6 months. Now the problem became his teachers. Once they found out he wasn't taking medication they refused to allow him in class and called me at work insisting I come and give him a pill. I hired a lawyer to go down to the school and threaten them with prosecution.
Time passed and my step son grew and went to school. His grades were barely passing. I learned that he made straight A's on all of the work he turned in. The problem was he wasn't doing half of what he was assigned.
Once day just for fun I had him take an IQ test on the internet and was floored when he scored a 147. I made an appointment with a doctor in Little Rock and had him professionally tested. He scored 146 this time.
I took the test results to the public school he attended and insisted they put him in advanced classes. They refused.
I then made a decision I will never regret. I took him out of school. He was 13 years old at this point in time.
We worked through the summer and he went through all of the curriculum in the first year. Now he works on his own. He has started a business online and earns as much as he would working a part time job. He is 16 years old now. After 3 years of watching him absorb information like a sponge it still blows me away.
I don't regret my decision to put him on medication years ago because he was a hyper active child, but I can't help but wonder if what we saw as attention deficit disorder was actually just his little brain working and absorbing information at a speed we just weren't used to seeing.

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