Laura Jenkins Facebook ad: “Read this if your child has ADHD”

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I made 14 apology bags for the strangers around us on an 11 hour flight. My son found one somewhere over the Pacific. ⠀ He was 9. He read the card out loud, in a normal voice, in row 31, and then he asked me a question I still can't answer. ⠀ I have to start with the bags, because the bags are the whole thing. ⠀ Dollar Tree on Route 17, the Tuesday before we flew. Cellophane party bags, the kind with the twist ties, from the birthday aisle. Foam earplugs from the hardware shelf. The little 2-packs of Tylenol by the register. Fun size Snickers. And a pack of thank you cards with a gold border, because they were the only ones that didn't have balloons on them. ⠀ I sat at the kitchen table after the kids were in bed and wrote 14 cards by hand. I have a copy of what I wrote because I drafted it on the back of a school newsletter first, and I have never been able to throw that newsletter away. ⠀ "The boy in 31B is my son. He has ADHD. He is trying harder than you will be able to see from where you're sitting. If anything he does makes your flight harder, I am sorry, and thank you for your patience." ⠀ Then I tied each card to a bag with curling ribbon and did the thing with the scissors to make the ribbon curl. ⠀ Fourteen. The 2 rows in front of us, the 2 behind, and across the aisle. I counted the seat map on the airline website to get the number right. ⠀ I thought it was a kind thing. I got the idea off a forum, and everyone in the replies said it was clever, and I thought, I can do clever. ⠀ My brother Danny was getting married at Schofield Barracks. He's Army, he's been in Hawaii 4 years, and he is the only person in my family who has never once suggested my son needs a firmer hand. ⠀ Newark to Honolulu, nonstop, 11 hours and 10 minutes. My husband couldn't get the time off, so it was me, Cal, and my daughter Maeve, who was 12. ⠀ We had flown once before. Orlando, when Cal was 6, 2 and a half hours, and I still can't say the word Orlando in front of my mother without her doing a face. ⠀ So this time I prepared the way you prepare for weather. ⠀ I want to give you the whole list, because if you're reading this at midnight you need to know I am not a woman who didn't try. ⠀ Two pairs of noise cancelling headphones, one on his head and one in the bag in case the first pair died. The Switch, charged, with a power bank and a second power bank. Thirty-one episodes of the show he was into downloaded to the iPad, plus 3 movies he hadn't seen. A DK sticker book about sharks that I gift wrapped so he would have something to open at hour 5. A fidget cube. Playdough in a ziplock. Washable markers, not crayons, because I'd read that too. ⠀ Snacks with no sugar. A drink with a lid. The window seat, so he was trapped between the wall and me, which is not a phrase I'm proud of. ⠀ And the prep. Three weeks of it. We walked through the airport on YouTube. The security line, the bins, the part where the shark book goes through the x-ray without him. How the seatbelt sign works. Why you can't kick the seat. He could recite all of it. He asked me twice to go over the seatbelt part, because he wanted to know what happens if he needs the bathroom when the sign is on, and I said we'd figure it out, and he said, "but what's the rule," because he needed a rule. ⠀ The morning we left, in the car to Newark at 4:40 in the morning, he looked out the window and asked if he could just stay home with Dad. ⠀ Quietly. Not a fight. A question. ⠀ And I said we don't make decisions like that in an airport parking lot. ⠀ I said it nicely. I was already turning into the lot. I have thought about those words most days since, because he never asked again, and they don't ask again. ⠀ Six hours in, he was fine. ⠀ Six hours. Nine episodes, the sharks, the pretzels, and I had let myself think it. ⠀ What happened is small and I know it is small. ⠀ The kid in front of us reclined. Then the seatbelt sign went on and stayed on for 40 minutes. Then the headphones died, and the second pair was in the overhead bin, and I couldn't get up, because the sign. Then the drink with the lid went over anyway, into his lap, cold, and he was wet, and he couldn't move, and the noise of the engine came in where the headphones had been. ⠀ I watched it stack up. I want you to understand that I watched every single one land on him and I could not take any of them off. ⠀ He kicked the seat. The man in front turned around. Cal screamed, one long one, the kind that makes a whole cabin do the same movement. He hit the tray table with both hands until the pretzels jumped. He tried to get past me into the aisle and I held his arm and he screamed at me to let go of him, and 180 people heard my son scream at me to let go. ⠀ A flight attendant crouched in the aisle. The man in 30C stood up and asked, loudly, to be moved, and said something about his blood pressure, and was moved. ⠀ And then Cal stopped. ⠀ On his own. Before anyone got to him. And he looked up the aisle at all of the faces that were turned around, and I watched my son read that plane. ⠀ He got about 4 seconds of it. Then he pulled the blanket over his head and stayed under it for a long time. ⠀ Maeve was across the aisle. She had turned her whole body to the window and had her hood up. She didn't look at us for the rest of the flight. At the hotel that night she asked, very carefully, if she could not sit next to us at the wedding. ⠀ Hour 8. I went to the bathroom. I was gone 4 minutes. ⠀ When I came back he was sitting up with the blanket off and one of the extra bags in his lap, and the card was untied, and he had read it. ⠀ I'd put the spares in my tote bag, under the seat, right by his feet. ⠀ He read it to me. Out loud, in a normal voice, the way you read a menu. "He is trying harder than you will be able to see from where you're sitting." ⠀ Then he said, "You gave these out before I did anything." ⠀ Then he said, "So you knew." ⠀ I didn't have an answer for that in row 31 and I don't have one now. ⠀ My mother met us at arrivals with a lei and the first thing she said, after the hug, after the flight I'd told her about in the cab, was, "Well. You should have told me it was this bad." ⠀ I had. Every Sunday. For 3 years. ⠀ Nobody in my life believed me when I talked about what he was like. So I had built a plane full of witnesses, and it turned out the witness I'd actually built it for was him. ⠀ Here is what we had already done by that flight. ⠀ Occupational therapy, 14 months, Tuesdays at 4. A behavior chart, laminated. A parenting course, 8 weeks, at a church in Paramus, where I sat with other mothers and learned about natural consequences. Fish oil, the lemon one, for a year. Magnesium spray on his feet. A social story about airplanes with his own picture in it. Melatonin for the flight, which he took and which did nothing. ⠀ The pediatrician had 11 minutes. She was kind. She said the words emotional regulation, said a lot of boys grow into themselves, and put us on a list for a developmental clinic with a wait she described as "unfortunately about 9 months." ⠀ Just keep doing what you're doing, she said. To a woman with a laminated chart. ⠀ You never failed at this. I'm saying it now instead of at the end, because it took another year for anyone to say it to me. ⠀ Here is what nobody put in front of me, and you can do it with your own body in 10 seconds. ⠀ Get someone to stand behind you and clap, hard, without telling you when. ⠀ You jumped. Everybody jumps. ⠀ Now do it again and don't jump. ⠀ You can't. Not by trying, not by wanting to, not for money, because by the time you're available to have an opinion about it, the thing has already happened. ⠀ Researchers have measured the window on the kind of reaction I'm talking about, in children, and it's under a fifth of a second. Faster than the word stop. ⠀ Follow it one step. ⠀ If it fires before he can choose it, then my son is the first person who has to watch it happen. Not the second. The first. It goes through his own hands and his own voice and he is standing right there. ⠀ And then he looks up the aisle and 180 people are turned around. ⠀ So he does what anyone would do with something they can't explain. He explains it. And a 9 year old has exactly one explanation available, and I had written it on 14 cards with a gold border and handed it out before he did anything. ⠀ He got it from evidence, first hand, and I had supplied an exhibit. ⠀ And there's a second piece, and it's the one that belongs to that plane. ⠀ I kept saying the drink was small. The recline was small. The sign was small. They weren't 4 small things. They were 1 thing, stacked. ⠀ Cortisol is the stress chemical. It goes up when something is hard, and it is supposed to come back down when the hard thing is over. In a kid running overloaded it doesn't come down. The bins at security are still in his blood at hour 6. The engine noise is still in there. The 40 minutes of the sign. Nothing drains. So when the drink goes over, it isn't landing on a kid who's had a small setback. It's landing on a kid who is already full to the line. ⠀ And then the reaction fires in a fifth of a second, and I'm holding his arm in row 31. ⠀ Go back down my list with me. ⠀ The headphones took one input off the pile. The window seat took the aisle away. Every single thing I packed was aimed at keeping things off him. Nothing I packed could take anything out. ⠀ And the chart and the course and the OT were aimed at how much he wanted to stop. He always wanted to stop. ⠀ Not one thing on either list touched what didn't come down. ⠀ I want to tell you about the woman in 31C, because she is the only reason there's a second half to this. ⠀ Her name is Lorraine. She was flying home to Kailua. I had given her a bag at boarding and she'd taken it with a little laugh. ⠀ At hour 9, when Cal was finally asleep against the window, she leaned over and put the bag back on my tray table with the card still tied on it. ⠀ "I don't need this," she said. "My oldest is 19. Talk to me when you can." ⠀ I started and couldn't. She waited. Then she said, "What have you tried," and I did the list in a whisper, and at the end she said, "What about saffron." ⠀ The spice. The thing in paella. I said something rude, and I want that on record, because I am about as far from a person who buys wellness products as you can get. ⠀ And she said, "Have you already tried it?" ⠀ And I had. Fourteen dollars off Amazon, before Orlando, because somebody in a Facebook group mentioned it. Three weeks. Nothing at all. It went in the cupboard with the fish oil and I filed the whole idea under things that don't work. ⠀ She said, "Pull up the order." ⠀ I had the airline wifi. I found it. There was a photo of the back of the bottle in the listing. ⠀ Saffron extract. Proprietary blend. ⠀ That was the entire label. No milligrams. No standardization. A word on the front and nothing on the back you could check. ⠀ "That's a jar of nothing," she said. "You didn't try saffron. You tried that." ⠀ I had spent 3 years carrying a failure that never happened. ⠀ Here's what I didn't know, and I read most of it on hotel wifi at 1 in the morning the night before my brother's wedding. ⠀ Researchers didn't start on saffron because it's exotic. They started because of what it appears to do with the same chemical messengers the standard medications act on. ⠀ Dopamine is what lets a person start a thing and stay with it. Serotonin holds mood level, so a small setback stays a small setback. Cal's brain makes both. That was never the problem, not for one day of his life. They get released into the gap between 2 nerve cells, do the job, and then get pulled back in and recycled. But if that happens too fast, the signal is gone before it has finished landing. Safranal, one of the compounds in saffron, slows that down. It isn't making more of anything. It's leaving what he already produced there long enough to arrive. ⠀ A small setback stays a small setback. I read that sentence 4 times, in a hotel bed, thinking about a drink with a lid. ⠀ Then there's phosphatidylserine, and it's the one the whole aisle has mislabeled. ⠀ It sits on the cortisol side. Every product on that shelf sells it for focus and memory. There's a trial from March of this year, 56 children, 6 to 13, 3 months, head to head against a standard non-stimulant medication. It did not move focus. ⠀ What it moved was the inward side. The medication moved what people can see. The phospholipid moved what they can't. ⠀ That's my son under a blanket. And the aisle is selling that ingredient for his spelling. ⠀ Maritime pine bark sits on the norepinephrine side, the alert chemical that spikes and is supposed to fall away again. Magnesium L-threonate is GABA, the brake pedal of the nervous system, and most forms of magnesium never get where they need to go. That one does. ⠀ Four pathways, four ingredients, every one of them supporting chemistry he already makes instead of overriding it. ⠀ A stimulant forces one pathway open, hard, which is exactly why it works so fast and exactly why it costs what it costs. ⠀ And then I found the study that had me ordering a bottle to our house in New Jersey before I turned the light off. ⠀ A researcher named Baziar put saffron head to head against the standard stimulant medication. In children. Double blind, so neither the parents nor the doctors knew who was getting which. Six weeks. ⠀ Both groups moved about the same amount. ⠀ Not in mice. In children, against the real thing. ⠀ Nobody puts a spice up against the actual medication unless what they've already seen makes the question worth asking. There is nothing else on that shelf with a study like that behind it. ⠀ And now the part that decides whether any of it matters, which is the part my 14 dollar bottle failed. ⠀ The trials used a standardized extract in the region of 30 milligrams a day. ⠀ The one we ended up with is 30 milligrams, standardized to 6 percent safranal, and both numbers are printed on the label. ⠀ If a brand won't tell you the number, that's your answer. I own a jar of nothing that taught me that. ⠀ It's a liquid, which matters, because Cal has never reliably swallowed a pill. It goes in juice at breakfast, which is the point. The brake needs to be on at 7 in the morning, before the bins and the line and the gate, not at hour 6 when everything has already stacked. ⠀ Link is down below. I'll come back to it. ⠀ It was waiting on the porch when we got home. Week 1, nothing. ⠀ Week 2, nothing. If anybody had promised me a different kid by Friday I'd have quit on the Monday and told everyone it was a scam. ⠀ Week 3, my mother called on Sunday and I realized halfway through that I didn't have an incident to report. I used one from the week before so she wouldn't think I was hiding something. ⠀ Week 6 is the one. ⠀ We drove to my in-laws in Vermont. Four hours and 20 minutes in the car. Somewhere past the Connecticut line I realized I hadn't turned around once. I checked the mirror and he was looking out the window, and I had to pull into a rest stop in Hartford and sit for a minute. ⠀ Four hours, and nothing had stacked. ⠀ He's not fixed. In February he lost it in a Costco over a sample cart and I won't pretend that away. A version of this post where my kid is fine now is one nobody should believe. ⠀ What changed is the count. It used to be most days. It isn't. What actually changed is how much of it he has to stand there and watch. ⠀ Because here's the only honest way to say what this did, and it's smaller than what you were hoping for. ⠀ Nothing in a bottle un-reads a card. I can't take the exhibit back. ⠀ But a verdict is built out of evidence, and evidence has to get made first, and that's a rate. It's not a character. It's a rate. ⠀ You can't win the case. You can run out of new exhibits. ⠀ Danny and his wife had a baby in May. We flew back for the christening in July. Same route, same 11 hours. ⠀ Maeve did the booking with me, on the couch, and when the seat map came up she pointed and said, "Put me next to Cal." ⠀ Not next to me. Next to Cal. I didn't trust my voice so I just clicked it. ⠀ I wanted this for me too, and someone should say that out loud so it may as well be me. I wanted to sit on a plane for 11 hours and not be braced. ⠀ But it wasn't the trade I thought I was making. He is not easier because there is less of him. There's more of him. He talked to the man next to him for 40 minutes about sharks somewhere over Nevada, and at hour 9 he was so annoying about the snack cart that Maeve put her headphones on and turned to the window, but the normal way, the way a 13 year old does about a little brother. ⠀ That's my kid. That was always my kid. I just wasn't getting many hours with him. ⠀ Nobody sold this to me. A woman in 31C handed my own bag back and made me read a label on airline wifi. I've thought a lot about how close I came to giving her the bag and nothing else. ⠀ So somebody told me. Now I'm telling you. ⠀ He's 9. The pile is small. ⠀ That's the only urgency here, and it has nothing to do with anyone's shopping cart. Every week a kid collects more evidence about himself, it gets harder to argue with, until it stops being a thing that happens to him and becomes the thing he says he is. ⠀ Link is down below. ⠀ P.S. It did nothing for 2 weeks. Decide now that you're giving it 6, because 14 days is where I would have quit and I would have been wrong. ⠀ P.S. If there's already a bottle in your cupboard you've written off, go turn it over first. Look for a milligram number and a standardization percentage. If they're not there, nothing was ever tested, and you've been carrying a failure that was never yours. ⠀ P.S. It's a liquid, it goes in juice, and it's not for under 6s. It does not replace anything and it's not a reason to stop or delay anything. We changed nothing else, we kept every appointment, and we're still on the clinic list today. ⠀ P.S. He asked me once, at 4:40 in the morning, if he could stay home, and I told him we don't decide things in a parking lot, and he never asked again. If there's one thing in this post I'd hand over, it's that. They don't ask twice. Whatever the thing is in your house, the first time is the only time you get. ⠀ P.S. I made the bags again in July. Fourteen, out of habit, same Dollar Tree, same gold border cards. They came home in the tote bag with every ribbon still tied. ⠀ One is in the hall closet, on the shelf with the passports. I kept the card on it. I don't need to read it. I just need to know that the last time I wrote it, nobody did.

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