Neuroconvergence: Where a Mother's Heart Meets her Son's Mind

Author: Dr. Colleen Lang

With my hand on his warm cheek, the only fleshy part of him that remains from his babyhood, I embrace his face, his lovely face, damp with tears that still remain in his long lashes. Though his head rests
on his pillow, what I can see and feel of it while my thumb strokes that cheek, speaks so little of what goes on within.

My older son is sound asleep, light snoring like an accusation against the differences between them. My older son rests; his brain is comfortable and accustomed to it being time for sleep, well-conditioned to turn off with the bedroom lights, after the book is closed and the kisses are marked on his forehead. His brain will wake up in the morning and will help him follow the rules of our home and of school; his brain will focus on when and on what the world outside of him wants it to, and will work until the work of the day is
done.

Lucas’s brain, though, has him awake, late at night and jarred against the impatience I can’t hide, the worry he feels about not sleeping and about how he knows I feel about it, now feeding its energy, energy that searches constantly for something to stimulate. His brain has scanned all of its images, memories and worries, and tonight has landed and remains stuck on the singular and overwhelming worry that he will never find something he can do better than his brother...that try as he might, his brother will always be better at all things than him. Including sleeping. It is a worry that keeps Lucas from sleeping like his brother can in the first place.

I speak slowly, with a tone that tries to soothe. But the elastic of his brain keeps snapping back to this thought with everything I say to try to pull it away. I am wresting the switch of his reading lamp from his hand, which he otherwise wants to click on and off while he cries...on and off, again and again. The blinking light causes a sharpness of irritation in me that competes with the burning I feel in my heart, fed by the fire of that cheek.

There isn’t enough dopamine in the front of Lucas’s brain to fuel the processes that would otherwise inhibit or quiet the screeching noise of all that it seeks. Its electricity runs without a circuit breaker.
He sees everything, hears everything, smells everything, all at once. His nervous system the uncovered outlet, picking up all of it, quick to react, what comes in so overwhelming sometimes, it creates spark and then small wafts of smoke. During the day, he is boundless. His lithe and athletic 9-year old body either needing to be shirtless while he runs laps across his bedroom, or tightly curled into itself in small spaces he finds containment in – suitcases, hampers, empty Amazon boxes. He moves from question to question without hearing the answers he does not have the patience for, from soccer game to basketball game to wanting to know “what’s next;” he interrupts with urgency and then forgets his point, seeks the pleasure of candy and YouTube and somersaults he jumps on our couch with an energy that cannot be safely turned off, the wires too hot to the touch. His brain leaves him at day’s end, with me forcing the light off and demanding that it halt for the sake of sleep, lying in the dark while it still reels instead, confused. Unable to safely, slowly turn it off.

Yet what is most compelling to his brain holds him hostage, his lived experience a streaming series of itches to scratch, fun (for him) when the itch he scratches is for pleasure, and painful when it is worry, for how its magnetism hijacks and takes him under, haunts and enervates that same small body until it becomes more rigid and disjointed, sickening his stomach, darkening the otherwise brightly colored neural networks that move him. ADHD, the inability to see the forest through the trees, for how all of the trees, both beautiful and scary, may tempt his focus. To pull away from his own worry is more frightening than the supposed ease of just marrying himself to it. And where worry hits the bedtime pillow, he can never be expected to jump into the mental nothingness that is the sweetness of sleep. His impulses, whether to burp, shout, kick or worry, are the trees of the forest he gets so lost in, that the forest no longer exists.

And of course, the feverish search by a brain for stimulation is really about its need to avoid boredom above all else. To be still, to wait, to listen or to move slowly: here is where fear lies. He can’t help but take shortcuts around and over and above, jumping like a rabbit in motion, through the obstacles that are effort, time, and energy, too often leaving him without the learning, the sinking in, and the knowing of necessary information: the words on a page, the conceptual underpinnings of multiplication, the directions for how to
use a hand mixer before he actually turns it on. He is then left to make mistakes, to not know, and then to doubt himself and feel different, to pretend that he can and pretend not to know that he can't.

As I come into the house each night after work, my husband still jolts at how I am pulled by my own neuro-biologic force to see and fold a crumpled blanket, straighten piles of mail, clear the kitchen counter
of the knives and dishes he is dirtying and still trying to use as he cooks. I do not think to say hello first. My own overwhelmed mind needs clearance. I cannot move through the forest when its brush feels too thick. I run to problems, all problems, that need to be solved right now. My distraction from the big picture is the clutter of my home, of tasks and of emotional pains that become the trees I need to clear before the forest itself is unrecognizable anyway.

Lucas’s mind is the polar end of a magnet against the problems. I know now, then, that we exist on the same polarity.

Here is where he and I meet. He, my son, with something that causes me discomfort, and him, with a brain that can’t lock into my concern, for how it discomfits him, the size and scope of it without any lines or
definition, it becomes too much of a morass to be able to face. His brain shivers like a seizure between the pull of pleasure and in opposition of discomfort; held within the margins of limbo by impulse or avoidance, he is pained by his own awareness of what he “should” do, and by his desire to do ‘right’ in ways that he often can’t. At minimum, I may be behind him, picking up the candy wrappers and dirty
socks he drops wherever he is standing, chasing and imploring him to “just listen one of the first 8 times” I tell him to “put on his goddamn shoes already,” to fit into the unforgiving margins of my own plans; and at worst, at emotional odds with how his vulnerability and needs can’t be neatly and quickly problem-solved and sorted, so that all makes sense to me again and can be more easily predicted. I can’t move him fast enough through his distractions to get out of the house on time and I can’t make school easier for him. I can’t solve the problem for him of what the world expects of him and what he can actually deliver.

Yet I know his heart, and I know it to be more powerful than his brain.

A supposed attentional deficit, he is the one of us who pays attention, because what might be distracted is also ever noticing. He sees unfamiliar plants in the front garden as I pull at him toward the school bus. He is lost in the satisfaction of the electric pencil sharpener when I just want his writing homework done. His body is taken with new dance moves at the dinner table, when I want him to stay rigidly seated, as I police the glasses around his flailing arms. And he finds humor in my anxiety, extracting and perfectly copying the
sideways shifting of my jaw, the way my eyes open to my brows. He can intuit how I feel from a million miles away.

I graduated college in Phi Beta Kappa, got a PhD in psychology, and now run a business. He sees, hears, thinks, experiences. My rigidity creates blinders and while my razor sharp intentionality gets things done, it is without his kind of silliness, the comfort of the tight hugs he needs, the exhilaration of riding fast on a bike without holding onto the handlebar.  While I run irritably through the conveyor belt that is my ‘to-do’ list or the crowds on the streets to my office, clock my sessions and get my notes done, ensure every object in the house is in its designated place before going to bed… he is perched there in his own bed, sometimes, on his own curiosity, absorbed by how expansive the circles of his thinking can get. If we let him, he will have ideas no one has ever had nor ever will. He will observe what so many of us ignore, feel things our minds are fashioned to shut out, perchance upon ideas and motivations that may actually change us. If we let it.

Yet, tonight in his bed, he is crying because the world we live in, and the world that I, his heartfelt champion, too often wrongly herald, teaches one way, reinforces only one of our approaches. But my little boy, with his heart afire trying desperately to learn to walk alongside his brain, persists in who he is, even as he cries about it. May I just let him. I can’t mold him; I can’t round out the corners and squared edges of him to make him fit into the hole of the outside world. I risk losing too much of him, trying. Nor, though, can I expand and push out the world’s hole to make room for him. That would be a futile wrestle, too, and perhaps we would both miss the safety of its constriction. But here in this small bed of his, late at night,
where I frustrate, with the lightning bolt of his emotional intensity running interference with my plans, I can make more room. I can do what I so often ask of him, and override the habits of my own brain, and instead let him be. And in the room I make, I can find real life in the joy and love of working with him and not against him, where his brain is not a problem, but a brighter light, a light that without a circuit breaker, I need to be more gentle with, sure, but can also let run longer through the night.