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It's 11:14 on a Sunday night and I am sitting at my kitchen table typing into a Facebook group for parents of kids with ADHD. I am, as far as I can tell, the only grandmother in there. I need to tell somebody what just happened in my house and I don't have the right person to tell it to. My friends from church wouldn't understand. My sister would, but she'd cry on the phone and I don't have the room for that yet. So I am writing it here, to whichever woman is reading this at 11pm with the same weight on her chest that I had on mine three months ago. I am 64 years old, and I am raising my grandson. The reason my daughter isn't the one raising him is not a story I tell strangers. I will only say that I already failed once in this family, and the boy asleep down the hall is the second chance, and I do not have another one in me. He is eight. Nobody has diagnosed him with anything yet, but a few months ago the pediatrician used the word Ritalin and I cried in the parking lot before I even pulled out. That was the day I joined the Facebook group. I lurked for weeks, read every post, I wanted to know what other parents had tried before I made any decisions. Then came the weekend that drove me to the keyboard. Friday afternoon he refused to get off the couch to do his homework. By Saturday morning he was screaming at me to shut up. We went to the grocery store and he pinched the soft part of my arm in the cereal aisle hard enough to leave a mark. On the way out to the truck he threw a rock at the back panel. Sunday night I was scrubbing dried cereal off the counter at almost midnight thinking that I have a doctor's appointment on Tuesday and I cannot have him sent home from school again. I cannot. That's when I went to Facebook. The other women in the group are 32, 34, 41. I read their posts and I felt every one of my 64 years. I typed the question. "has anyone actually found anything that works" I sat there with my hand on the mouse and I did not push post. I was thinking — I am 64 years old. I have already raised a child. What does it say about me that I am sitting here at midnight asking a room full of women young enough to be my daughters for help with a boy I am supposed to know how to raise. Then I thought about Monday morning and what it was going to take to get him out the door for school and I hit post. A woman replied in nine minutes. She said: try these saffron gummies. I know they sound weird, but my son finally finished his homework on his own three weeks in. She dropped a link in the comment. I almost didn't order. I have spent more money on supplements over the last 18 months than I want to put in writing. Magnesium. Fish oil. Those patch things. The chewable B vitamins from the pediatrician's office that did absolutely nothing. Somebody in that group had called it the supplement graveyard once and I laughed out loud at my own kitchen counter because that is exactly what it is. But the prescription was sitting in my purse. So I thought — if forty dollars of saffron gummies doesn't work, at least I tried something else before I sign that paper. Saffron. The cooking spice. I know. I ordered the bottle Sunday night. Then I called Marlene. Marlene is in my Tuesday quilting group. She is 71. She was a pediatric nurse for 35 years before she retired. She is the woman I call when I do not understand something a doctor said. She picked up on the second ring and I told her what the pediatrician had said and what I had just ordered, and I expected her to tell me to fill the prescription and stop messing around. She didn't. She said — sit down, Pat. I want to tell you something nobody told you, because it has only really been in the journals the last few years. She said my grandson's brain is not broken. It is running four chemicals at once and they are all out of sync with each other. Not just dopamine — that is what the doctors were taught in the 80s and that is what most of the supplement aisle is still built around. There are four. Dopamine, serotonin, GABA, and norepinephrine. Ritalin, she said, grabs one of those four and shoves it around with a sledgehammer. And the trade you make for that is sometimes the personality of the kid you were trying to help. I had already watched one person in my family lose herself. I was not going to do that to him. Then she said the part I want you to read twice. She said — every supplement you have bought in the last months was built for the old model. One pathway, one ingredient. Magnesium hits one. Fish oil hits one. The B vitamins barely hit anything. You weren't failing those bottles, Pat. Those bottles were never built to fix what is actually going on with him in the first place. The supplement aisle is still selling the version of this disorder we taught nurses in 1988. Then she told me about saffron. Not the grocery store stuff. An extract, called affron, that is actually backed up by clinical research. What makes saffron interesting, she said, is that it is the only natural ingredient she has come across that nudges all four pathways at once. Quietly. Not like a stimulant. Something they have used in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years that nobody marketed because there is no patent on a flower. The brand the woman in the group sent me uses affron. Most of the cheap stuff on Amazon doesn't have enough of the active part to do anything, Marlene said. That's why most people think saffron doesn't work. They were buying knock-offs of the real thing. I sat at my kitchen table for another hour after that call. Then I finally ordered. The package came on Wednesday. I started giving him one with his breakfast on Thursday morning. He liked the taste. He thought I was being weird about a gummy. I did not tell him anything. I just put it on the counter next to his cereal bowl every morning and waited. I want to be honest with you about that waiting. I did not expect it to work. I have been doing this long enough to know that the bottle on the counter is almost always just another bottle on the counter. I told myself I would give it a month. Then I would walk into the pediatrician's office and sign the paper. Week one — nothing obvious. I made coffee in the morning, made dinner at night, and waited for something I wasn't sure was coming. Week two — mornings were less of a fight. He still complained, but I wasn't calling his name three and four times before he sat up. Week three — I was on the couch one evening with the news on, and he came in from his room and sat down next to me. He didn't say anything. He didn't ask for anything. He just sat there, close enough that his shoulder was touching my arm, and watched the television with me for maybe twenty minutes before he got up and went to bed. I want you to understand. He has not voluntarily sat next to me in two years. He has been a body in motion in this house — pacing, bouncing, slamming, gone. The night he came in and sat down next to me on that couch I did not move a muscle, because I was afraid if I breathed wrong he would leave. After he went to bed I sat there with the television still on and cried quietly for about ten minutes. Around week four I went back online to read reviews for these gummies, because I wanted to be sure I was not imagining what I was seeing. I am 64. I have raised one child already. I know what wishful thinking looks like in a tired woman. I scrolled until I found this one. I want to give it to you exactly the way I read it that night, because this is the moment my shoulders dropped for the first time in three years. It was on Trustpilot. From a woman named Cyndi. "his 2nd grade teacher pulled me aside one day and said this week my grandson was completing work at his desk without being badgered by her" Another grandmother. Raising another grandson. The same exact moment. Word for word the same scene I would not let myself imagine yet. I read it three times. I sat there at this same kitchen table and I cried for ten minutes — not the bad kind of crying. The other kind. I was not crazy. I was not the only one. There are other grandmothers in their sixties putting one little gummy in front of their grandsons in the morning and watching the kid they knew was in there start to come back. Six weeks in I was in the pickup line at his school. The teacher caught my eye through the window of the truck and walked over. I have been bracing myself in that pickup line for three years. I gripped the steering wheel. She leaned in and said — I just wanted to tell you, he finished all his work at his desk this week. I didn't have to ask him once. I nodded and said thank you and drove home. I made it into the garage before I cried. That night he laughed at one of my old jokes. The dumb one his grandfather used to do with the forks. I have been doing that silly joke for years and getting nothing back. He laughed. I sent a package to my sister last week. She’s not raising her grandson like me, but the child is struggling at school like mine was. I told her — I am not going to oversell this. Give them to your daughter. Try them. That is all I'll say. A few things you should know before you decide. Most ADHD supplements out there are still built on the old one-pathway model. The brand the woman in my Facebook group sent me — the one Marlene kept underlining for me on the phone — uses affron, the standardized saffron extract from the studies. That is the one that matters. Make sure you are getting the version with affron in it, because everything else on Amazon is a different product wearing the same name. They also have a 60-day money back guarantee. If it doesn't do anything for your child, you send it back. I would not have ordered if they didn't. Here is the link: https://trysaphire.com/products/saphire-saffron-gummies