My Daughter is What!?!

“What?” I ask. Staring at my pediatrician, searching my brain’s catalog in hopes of finding an archived file consisting of the words she uttered in the sentence that preceded my question. I have been here before.  I vaguely remember being in this moment, in this space, in this fuzzy state of mind trying to make heads or tails of the information bequeathed to me by a medical professional.

“Chronically inflexible…easily frustrated…highly explosive.”  Here we go. Again. “I’ve noticed in the last year during our visits that your daughter is less adaptable than other children her age. She is unable to behave in a logical and rational manner when she is frustrated. The situation with her pink blanket (Oh No, she did not go there with Pink Blankie.) overwhelmingly frustrated her. She was unresponsive to our efforts to reason with her; and in fact, the situation became worse.  I am concerned that she is lacking the necessary coping skills to function well in everyday life.  The pink blanket being left at home should have been a relatively trivial event.”  Should, she stressed, but it wasn’t, it never is, nothing is ever “trivial” or easy with my daughter.

We go through a series of Q & A so that she could better evaluate my daughter. Yes, she was difficult to soothe as a baby.  Yes, she has frequent meltdowns.  Yes, she has difficulty shifting readily from one activity to another. Yes, she obsessively plans or recites plans and persistently checks for authorization on something we have agreed upon repeatedly- until it happens.  No, she does not have any language processing problems- she is smart as a whip.  Yes, she struggles with sharing- what’s hers is hers.  Yes, she is exceptionally vibrant. Yes, she is acutely perceptive.  

It’s conclusive. She identifies my daughter as fitting this psychiatric profile for behavioral volatility-“An Explosive Child”. So, not ADHD/ODD like my eldest, and not ADD like my middle, but highly explosive with a limited capacity for flexibility, extremely low frustration tolerance threshold, rigid thinking, and poor response to frustration to the point of incoherence. Yes, this is my sweet spitfire, my spirited little soul. 

I neither shy away from the assessment, nor condemn my pediatrician to the deepest, darkest place on earth; rather, I sigh, inhale, exhale, and breathe. I’ve got this. Armed with my humor and wit, (my saving grace) I quickly ask my pediatrician what kind of trade in I could get for all three, I am willing to negotiate a heck of a deal.  Negotiation is after all a strong suit of mine, having now three kids with special needs. She laughs. “Well, Heather,” she says “I do believe you will navigate your way through this with your daughter. These are not exactly foreign waters for you.” No, no, they’re not.

We leave the doctor’s office- my daughter and I, and I swoop her up, give her a tight squeeze, and whisper in her ear, “You have the most beautiful wings, all you have to do is FLY… Together, my baby girl, we will soar through this amazing life.” 

(By Heather Reagan-Isbill as published in San Joaquin Parents & Kids Magazine)