Destination: ADHD Coaching

I started my car and set my GPS to visit across Brooklyn. It's a very good October night and I am driving to generally meet my new instruction client, an eleven year old boy withAttention disorder treatment Hermosa Beach. His mother contacted me because he's having trouble at school.When the GPS's unknown female voice tells me turn right or left I do and I follow all of her recommendations on auto pilot. Finally she tells me I have reached my destination and I park my car. Then I know I'm in-front of PS 216 --- my primary school alma mater.I begin to feel anxious and my chest tightens at the picture of the school. Memories start to flood my mind but I do not want to revisit the bleak landscape of my childhood also for a moment. I resist returning to a period that was filled up with suffering, disgrace, and destructive loneliness.School was pain. I didn't 'get' things exactly the same way the other kids did. I visited primary school in the 1950's before anyone heard of ADHD. You were only BAD.I flinch when I think about those days, if you were inattentive, disorganized and impulsive as I was. I prevent dwelling before. When my kids were little they had a habit of running full steam ahead while looking right back over their shoulders. 'Look where you are planning, not where you've been,' I'd scream at them. That became my motto, my technique for dealing with life. Yet as I stare to the silent schoolyard where I played as a kid I'm carried back once again to a brilliant, cold winter's day in 1959. I hear the shouts and laughter of kiddies playing in the backyard, girls are jumping rope and kids are pursuing each other.I peer across time and strain to determine my 10 year old home and suddenly there I'm. I identify myself from a photograph of me in fifth grade --- fifth grade, a thin girl with eyeglasses held together with a safety pin and a button missing from her coat. One of my friends took it with a Kodak Brownie Camera and gave it to me.I am playing around the garden, thrilled for the liberation from the row of wooden desks, the crushing boredom and my teacher, Mrs. Nash, whom I never didn't disappoint.She had a warm smile and kind words for the other kids however not for me. She was the teacher who explained to not perform with the other young ones, just since I sang off key move my lips. If the whole sixth grade took a spelling check to decide who should represent the institution in the city large spelling bee I received the highest grade but Mrs. Nash said she couldn't advise me to contend. 'You are a girl who does perhaps not try hard enough, you are just too lazy and bad to get a spelling bee.' she said.But for now, I seem so happy, merely a scrawny baby playing around pretending to become a horse. I will be reprimanded again for neglected research, my dirty laptop, and for looking out the window when break has ended. I run free in the yard, with my unbuttoned layer, stringy hair, anklet clothes dropping on to my scuffed shoes and knobby joints with the scabs dropping off. It's freezing cold but I have no hat or scarf or gloves. I must have dropped them or maybe I never had them.I reach through the fence and wave to my phantom self but she can not see or hear me. Her mind is elsewhere. I drive through time and the metal wall to run along side her. I just take her freezing turn in mine. I send her my hopes. 'Life will not continually be so difficult. You'll love and be loved, be powerful. Embrace who you're and enjoy yourself.'I turn away and I am in 2011. I reach into my purse and take-out a structure to dry my eyes. I breathe deeply to find my heart. I steady myself, setting my feet vigilantly, as I cross the street and keep yesteryear behind. I pause a minute outside my customers door.Now I am ready to coach, willing to touch base my hand to another child --- a child I've yet to generally meet but feel I understand. I hope I will help and am wanting to meet him. I will look and ask him to inform me most of the good things I should know about him and I'll hear as hard as I could. I have reached my destination.