Your funny isn't my funny

I'm one of THOSE Facebook users. I'm the one who, if I don't post at least once a day, you likely need to call the authorities to do a wellness check on me. I'm always on it - I love keeping up with childhood friends, sharing inside jokes with college friends, looking at pictures, and posting my own pics. I've learned to stay away from conversations where I'm just going to piss someone off, and ignore the personal, political, and religious posts that I may disagree with. For me, life's too short to get all bent out of shape over Facebook posts.

But today, I saw this, courtesy of a friend of a friend of a friend who shared it on someone else's page and it ended up in my newsfeed:

I know better. I should have just hidden it or ignored it or shook my head at the inaccuracy of it. But nope - I allowed this one little share of a share of a share from someone I don't even know ruin my morning.

It was from one of those comedy-type pages, but I don't see what's funny about it. I don't know - maybe when I got dressed this morning, I forgot to put on my sense of humor. Maybe that's where this is coming from.

Or maybe I've just had enough of hearing, "Oh, you're overreacting. My kid gets hyperactive all the time!" or "Just because he doesn't pay attention doesn't mean he's ADHD!" or "ADHD isn't a real condition." or my personal favorite these days, "You're just medicating him because you're too lazy to parent your kid."

That last comment was an actual comment on the picture, in response to another parent who posted what I was feeling - that this meme minimizes what parents of ADHD kids go through and illustrates some of the stereotypes we live with. I would like to hunt down Mitch Thomas* and drop off an unmedicated Sam at his home for a week, and then have him tell me how lazy I am and how my son's condition is imagined and overblown. (*Not his real name. Or is it? If your name is Mitch Thomas, you're totally freaking out right now, aren't you?)

Please understand - I do not go around diagnosing my friends' kids as ADHD. Many, in fact most, times they are just kids being kids. I'm not a medical professional, and I don't like to project my situation onto others. I do believe that a lot of times, ADHD is a label that gets slapped on a child, through no fault of the child's or their parents. ADHD isn't just a kid who's really active, or a kid who daydreams, or a kid who doesn't pay attention. Those are factors in our child, but those alone do not indicate his ADHD. There's a difference between a kid who gets easily sidetracked, and a kid who gets out of his chair and starts doing somersaults and then grabs markers and writes all over books and then throws the markers in the trash and then digs through the trash and then wanders outside and then...(Side note: If reading that last sentence exhausted you, that's a glimpse into our lives. Sam is a walking, talking run-on sentence.)

I've seen a ton of memes that poke fun at ADHD that I actually think are funny, and have even posted some to my on own Facebook page. Isn't there some rule of comedy that says in order for something to be funny, it has to be true? But this stuck in my craw. I WISH this is what my son's ADHD looked like because at least he'd be quietly sitting on his ass as he daydreamed, instead of being sent home for bouncing off the walls.

In an effort to determine if I was getting all bent out of shape over nothing, I asked Matt how he felt about this post. Matt is not as hot-tempered as I am, and not super-expressive, but he pinpointed exactly what I was feeling. This minimizes our struggles, and make no mistake - it has been a supreme struggle. My marriage had became weakened and contentious partially because we didn't know how to work together to handle our son's ADHD. My older son has felt neglected because we've spent so much time, evergy, and money on his brother. Our ADHD son has walked around for several years feeling like a failure because he thinks he's not as good as all the other kids who listen. Most moms and dads calendar their weeks and months around playdates, sports, and school activities. Not us - we do it around doctors, therapists, and marriage counseling sessions. We're becoming a stronger family unit for it, but the hell we went through to get there - I wouldn't wish that on Mitch Thomas or any of his ignoramus buddies.

I hate not being able to see the humor in a situation. I hate feeling like a hypocrite because I can laugh at some jokes about ADHD, but not this. I hate not being able to live and let live. I hate complaining about this because I know it could be a lot, lot, LOT worse. But just because something could be worse, doesn't mean that what we went through (and still go through) isn't still plenty shitty.