Although AA was important for me in the early days of my own recovery, and though I still cherish the friends and community I found there, I couldn’t complete all the steps (see “The Third Step” for one take on why), so I took what seemed useful and left the rest. One of the things I did take from AA, however, was the message of Step 12: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” Having personally experienced the ways in which writing could encourage healing and assist with recovery, in 2007 I co-founded, with Sarah Shotland, Words Without Walls, a program that sends MFA students and faculty into jails, prisons, and rehabilitation facilities to teach creative writing. I teach myself as part of the program in Sojourner House, an in-house rehab center for women who are mothers. “The Ink That Binds: Creative Writing and Addiction,” the final essay in the collection, was inspired by teaching in this facility.
My son once said to me that he didn’t think he could be creative (and by that he meant write music) without being high. This made me sad because I know a great number of writers (including myself) who are in recovery and still able to be creative. Facilitating a group that supported each other in creative fellowship, a group that could then go on to share with others, seemed a good way to “pass it on.”
This collection tells two stories, one of a fall, and one of healing, and is yet another way, I hope, of passing it on.
I
Do No Harm
That’s our discipline style. A paddle is part of a principal’s toolbox. If we remove that tool, we may open a can of worms that cannot be closed.
—Ron Price, Dallas Independent School District trustee
The week before my son started kindergarten, I trimmed the long hair tail I’d let him grow. He hadn’t wanted me to trim it because, he said, if it got long enough, he’d become a lady, which seemed sort of cool to him at the time. It was 1989, and we were living in Dallas, Texas. A photograph taken on his first day of school shows him wearing a new Batman sweatshirt, stonewashed jeans, and new sneakers. He’s standing in front of his new school, Lakewood Elementary, holding a purple lunch box and smiling brightly. His blonde hair, tail-less, is neatly combed to the side. It’s one of the saddest photographs I own. He’s happy, naïve, full of promise, and his future seems as unmarred as the cloudless August morning. I was excited that first day too. All the hustle and bustle, all the children in their new clothes, all the hopeful faces of the parents mirroring my own. The new cars and well-dressed moms and dads dropping off their well-dressed kids impressed me. For the last three years, I’d been divorced from Gray’s father, putting myself through graduate school, and Gray and I had been living just above the poverty line. Now I had a part-time teaching job and two roommates to help with the rent. For the first time since we’d left his father, Gray and I were living in a “good” neighborhood.
He came home from school that first week quiet; I couldn’t get him to talk much about how things were going. On Friday morning, though, when I woke him, he rubbed his eyes and said, “Today is tomorrow, Mommy.”
“What do you mean, sweetie? Today is today. It’s Friday, a school day.”
“No, it’s Saturday. I don’t have to go to school today,” he said, pulling the covers over his head.
After some cajoling and threatening, I got him out of bed and to school on time, but since I’m an educator myself, I was disappointed that he seemed already disenchanted with school. That night, he had a series of nightmares, one about a two-foot long scorpion, another about a kidnapper who could take his head off and put it back on, and the last involving his teacher, who appeared as a witch with a magic diamond that made kids look ugly. He slept with me that night.
Monday afternoon, one week into the term, I discovered a note from the principal in Gray’s book bag. At the top was the Dallas Independent School District letterhead. Below, the principal had handwritten:
Parents of Gray Gideon:
Please see me as soon as possible about several problems that Gray is having at school. His teacher is having problems with him, and I have had to correct Gray many times during and after lunch.
Larry Williams, Principal
After dropping Gray off the next morning, I met with the principal in his office. He was a short, plump man, balding and ruddy-cheeked, who spoke with a heavy Texas accent. He looked me square in the face.
“I’ll get right to the point, Mrs. Gideon. Your son has Attention Deficit Disorder. He needs to be put on Ritalin.”
To say I was stunned at the abruptness of his pronouncement would be an understatement.
“It’s St. Germain, not Gideon,” I said. “And you know this after one week with my son?”
He gave me a patronizing look and proceeded to explain. He noted not only Gray’s fidgetiness and inability to sit still, but that he had trouble getting started on projects and trouble finishing them. He seemed to be “out in space” somewhere when the teacher gave orders or assignments. He couldn’t remember much of anything, his teacher Mrs. Merkin had said. Whenever he had to go somewhere, whether it was to the bathroom or outside for recess, he ran. Sometimes, the principal said, he even ran in the classroom from one side to the other. These, he said, were symptoms of ADD1 children—restlessness, hyper-activity, inability to concentrate for long periods of time, and so on. He told me he had written his dissertation on ADD, which was why he could recognize it so quickly. ADD children, if not treated, he said, tended to fall behind and become under-achievers. Some of them, he said, never finished school and had trouble making friends all of their lives.
“Mrs. Merkin has had to send Gray in here to talk with me every day because he won’t sit still and can’t pay attention. He’s distracting the other students and interfering with their ability to learn.”
“Every day?”
“Every day. And this can’t go on.”
“But this is just kindergarten. It’s the first time he’s had to sit still. Why can’t the teacher handle this herself?”
“Kindergarten is an important time for children, Mrs. Gideon. It prepares them for the challenges ahead. The teacher can’t take so much time on one child. It’s better to nip this in the bud now.”
I left his office furious. Of course I knew about ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder); I’d read articles in the newspapers and magazines about how it was being over-diagnosed in young children, mostly boys, and how Ritalin was a stimulant often used treat it. ADD was associated with hyperactivity, but its major symptoms were inattention and impulsivity. Tears sprung, unbidden. I didn’t want to drug Gray. The thought of it made me ill, but I wondered what would happen if we fought the principal’s recommendation. I felt thrust into a harsh world I didn’t understand, and for the first time in my life, I had no clue what the right path might be. It seemed to me that, once taken, the path of drugs would be one from which it would be hard to turn back.
Psychostimulants were first administered to children in 1937, although the first FDA-approved use of Ritalin (methylphenidate) for children was in 1961. Methylphenidate, classified in the same category as cocaine and methamphetamine, is a stimulant some doctors argue is addicting. For years, it has been abused on the streets, sometimes crushed and snorted, other times injected. Like cocaine, it’s a powerful, mind-altering drug. During the 1990’s, the use of Ritalin or other stimulants to control children’s behavior increased more than seven hundred