VI - A Scattered Mind
“You were always so sensitive as a small child. I’d scold you and off you’d run to your room.'' my mom says. It’s Sunday afternoon. My mother and I are at the kitchen table eating Faspa, comprised of cold cuts, zwiebach and pickles, typically pickled the summer before.
I used to think it was an affectionate thing to say but lately I find myself bristling when she repeats the phrase. “You were always so sensitive.”
And I still am. A harsh word, a distracted listener or even a criticism and I’m down for the count, heart races, face flushes. It’s embarrassing!
***
While living in lockdown during Covid in a 740 square foot main floor of my house in Toronto, my 33-year old daughter self-diagnosed. Besides being socially anxious, a diagnosis she got when she was 16 after learning George Bush Junior was going to invade Iraq, she was sure she had ADHD.
She sat slumped on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling for symptoms.
“People with ADHD don’t have any sense of time, Mom.”
“No one has a sense of time these days S.” I say.
“People with ADHD struggle with their short term memory.”
“Oh, so does everyone, you’re just getting older.” I smile at her, trying to lessen the impact of the impulsive statement.
“People with ADHD are super sensitive.” I stop. Was she on to something?
That summer she was diagnosed with ADHD. Because of our similar ways of being I couldn’t stop wondering about myself. Was it hereditary? Two of my nephews had been diagnosed, now her. Were my Mennonite genetics responsible for all this?
Six months later I too received a diagnosis of ADHD.
With a recommendation from my nephew’s wife I picked up the book Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate. I dove into it and with surprising focus I quickly read it cover to cover. What I thought was trauma was now a brain thing? An underdeveloped right frontal cortex leads to impulsivity, hyper arousal, lack of focus, oh and rejection sensitivity dysphoria, RSD.
In Scattered Minds Mate explains brain development. ¾ of the brain gets developed outside of the womb and the first two years of life are extremely important in continuing the development of the infant’s life. And guess what? It depends, not just on genetics but also attunement. In the first two years of life the child needs the full attention of the care giver, it can be any adult, male or female, but it needs that focused attention or the right prefrontal cortex is not able to do its job.
We moved the day I was born. My mother in her memoir writes about how the day before she went into the hospital, she and my father were dragging mattresses and heavy furniture from the upstairs bedrooms in their house on Home St. in Steinbach, a bastion for refugee Mennonites from WWII.
Besides doing the heavy lifting she was also devastated. In her memoir she writes, “The thought of leaving our home that we loved, our church and friends seemed unbearable to me… I was seven months pregnant…” She was a refugee who had left Ukraine, the former Soviet Union, when she was eight and the family had been on the move until she turned fourteen. Eventually they were sponsored by another Mennonite family and settled down in Steinbach. Here she began to feel a sense of safety as she learned English.
Eventually after a courtship, where my mother insisted my father be baptized, they married. Nine years later she was pregnant again expecting her third child.
My father, however, was restless. He wanted to move to Winnipeg to make a better living or so the story goes but I can’t help but think he also wanted to get out of his hometown.
They were at odds to say the least.
At the table, I sit looking through the old pictures of when I was tiny, looking for evidence. Did I not get what I needed?
There is only one photo of me as an infant. In the picture, the infant is wearing a frilly dress, bundled tightly in a used blanket. The mother’s hair is neatly coifed. She is wearing a Sunday dress. Everything about her says she is well put together and that the infant is well taken care of. “I plucked the soother from your mouth, and before you had a chance to cry, because you were crying so often, Dad quickly took the pic.” She says as she takes a bite of her zwiebach.
I stare at the pic and see a woman overwhelmed with sadness, who has been abandoned, and who is unable to attune to her daughter. The sensitivity is beginning to make sense.
Mom and I, 1965
