That Sinking Feeling. Episode 4. Drop the Rope.
Elizabeth Rynecki
In March of 1973, the Igara, a cargo ship carrying more than 100,000 tons of iron ore, hit an uncharted reef in the South China Sea. The ship had been headed to Japan, but seeing that the hull’s damage was severe, the captain charted a new course for the Singapore Docks, where he hoped the ship could be repaired. It was a noble but ultimately doomed effort. As water gushed into the ship’s forward holds, her bow began nosing downward, eventually digging deep into the ocean floor while the stern rose skyward. The crew sent out distress messages and lowered themselves into lifeboats.
At first light, salvage experts assessed the situation. The weather was good, but with the onset of monsoon season, everyone worried that even a modest storm might sink the Igara. There weren’t any easy salvage solutions. My dad, an engineer with expertise in unusual ship salvage jobs, got the call to come up with a clever solution that would save the imperiled ship.
Alex Rynecki
They called me and I showed up, and I vividly remember, they were asking me, “What is the American method of doing this?” And I kept thinking to myself, ‘beats me.’ You know, I didn’t know. There is no American method.
When I got there initially, I caught a helicopter from Singapore to the Igara, landed on board and started looking around, and I was stunned by the whole thing. I just couldn’t figure out what to do.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I’m Elizabeth Rynecki. I don’t have ADHD, but my younger son Owen does. And in this podcast, That Sinking Feeling, I share my dad’s ship salvage stories and explore the insights they’ve given me about my son’s ADHD. This episode is about difficult choices and learning to cope.
My dad’s first thought about the Igara was to unload the cargo, make the ship watertight, and then refloat it. But sometimes good ideas — even great ideas — just aren’t workable.
Alex Rynecki
I came to the conclusion that there was no practical way of refloating the ship. There were theoretical ways of doing it, but none of them that I considered viable. So you have to come up with something else. What could the something else be?
Well, the big value of the ship was in the machinery, the engine room, the house and the
stern of the ship, where everything was located. I thought if we could cut the ship in half, the forward section would sink and the stern section would float.
Elizabeth Rynecki
In other words, Dad would sacrifice the bow to save the much more valuable stern.
This is obviously a podcast, and so you can’t see me gesturing. But my hand is pointed down towards the ground and my elbow is up in the air. My fingertips are the front part of the ship, stuck in the mud, unable to move. My elbow represents the back portion of the ship. If you want to rescue my elbow, you either need to find some way to free my hand from the mud, or you need to cut off my hand in order to let my forearm and elbow go free.
Obviously the latter solution is incredibly unappealing, but for a ship, well, it’s not that difficult a choice to make. Especially if it was the best chance for saving the valuable part of the ship, where the engine and other machinery live.
Alex Rynecki
Sometimes you have to let parts go to save the rest.
Elizabeth Rynecki
My son is not a sunken ship. Not even a partially sunken ship. But three quarters of the way through his junior year, when it seemed like Owen was doomed to flunk out of high school, I put on my best Dad thinking cap. And while I had all sorts of brilliant theoretical solutions to help Owen, I tried to think of more practical approaches.
At first, we lightened Owen’s course load and enrolled him part-time in a private program offering one-on-one tutorial style classes. That sort of worked, but it was kind of like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
It changed things up, but it wasn’t enough. Which is how Owen transferred to a very small private school with just six weeks left of his junior year, a place touting its well-thought-out ability to help kids with ADHD. A place that I thought might magically offer him a supportive and understanding environment. A place whose innovative teaching methods I hoped would help him round that proverbial corner. But as Owen will tell you, you take yourself with you wherever you go. And somehow that seems doubly true with ADHD.
Owen
Everything I do is essentially affected by my ADHD. My brain is just always moving, always thinking. So I’ll be playing a game that should be fun for me. And I’ll just be in my own head the entire time thinking about troubles I caused, or things I’ve done in the past, or things I have to do in the future.
Elizabeth Rynecki
At first, transferring to the new school was helpful. But then we ended up back at square one.
He didn’t like his teachers. He struggled to see assignments as meaningful, and couldn’t moderate his opinions or express himself appropriately. He despised the assigned novel for English class. That had a lot to do with his all or nothing style, which is very typical for ADHD brains. And for Owen, if he didn’t like a book, there was no middle ground.
Owen
It was Mexican Gothic. I thought that book was an insult to the Gothic horror genre. My distaste with Mexican Gothic was expressed in some not-great ways. I wrote some long tirades during essays about how it was a mockery of the genre. I left long, nasty notes about my frustrations with the book and how the characters were being idiots. And it was just a lot of stuff that I am totally embarrassed by but I’ve done more than once.
Elizabeth Rynecki
He eventually got kicked out of English class. It wasn’t the first time he found himself clashing with teachers over assigned books.
Owen
And that started a long trend of me just not wanting to deal with reading books in English classes. Well, eventually that got me kicked out of English class, because I was being such a stick in the mud that they just were like, ‘okay, we’re not dealing with you.’
Elizabeth Rynecki
His being vocal about vehemently despising the book, and the school’s struggle to deal with him really not liking the book, was bad in and of itself. Getting kicked out of class felt horribly emblematic of his emotional immaturity. I was embarrassed that he couldn’t hold it together and keep his inappropriate opinions to himself. But worse than getting kicked out, was my realization that his emotional reactions were ADHD symptoms.
I want to pause here and say it took me a really long time to understand that his over-the-top reactions to some situations were absolutely tied to his ADHD. And it was this part of his ADHD that has always been the hardest for me to explain to other people, because people seem to be understanding of the fidgeting, the pacing, the struggle to pay attention. But the volatile reactions to something like a book? That seems awfully melodramatic. And worst of all, it’s not something that’s an internal struggle, but is one that other people must personally endure. And it turns out that that is often just too big of an ask.
Anonymous Dad
Honestly, my approach in the last few years is essentially just to give up and expect nothing.
My wife, she just can’t do it. They’re innocent mistakes. So it’s just these like, these synapses or whatever it is, gaps in how her brain takes one set of information requests and turns it into action. And the things that I need help with just don’t happen.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I definitely understand the feeling of giving up, especially because outsiders made me feel like I’d made bad parenting choices.
Katherine Ellison
My dad was saying, you know, “You have to be tougher on him, you know? And, “He’s getting away with all sorts of stuff.” I felt like the worst parent in the world. Like, what’s wrong with me that I can’t train him?
Paula
I felt guilty. I wasn’t – I shouldn’t feel guilty. This is my daughter and that’s how she is. But my mother in law would be kind of very sort of condescending about it. It was really hard to navigate that.
Elizabeth Rynecki
To the outside world, the solutions to ADHD struggles are easy: make expectations clear, demand compliance, and follow through with consequences if tasks aren’t completed. But that never seemed to work with Owen, and it’s embarrassing to admit. But on the days where I felt hopeless about everything, I’d cry and fight with my husband about how our son was lazy and ungrateful. I feared Owen had run out of runway, while Steve argued he just needed a longer runway.
But I’m not a bad parent and my son is not being purposefully difficult. His neurological differences are real.
Ann Rivello
What we know about ADHD brains is they don’t rest like other brains do. And they’ve shown in brain scans that with like typical brains, they rest a lot more. But ADHD brains, it’s, you know, you would know, because if you talk to someone, they’re just like always spinning. But it’s starting to go hyperdrive, pulling themselves apart. And anyone who knows people with ADHD, you see it in real time happen. I call it crumpling. Where they’re amazing, they’re doing all these amazing things, and then something will happen or someone will say something, and then all of a sudden they start getting really, really dark on themselves
Noah
I think it’s hard for people who don’t have it themselves to understand.
Allison Landa
My family has always been very much, “Well, he doesn’t seem like he has it. He doesn’t seem like he has ADHD.”
Katherine Ellison
People get very judgmental.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Maybe they’re judgmental because they think they do a better job. Or maybe if they can find fault with someone else’s parenting, they won’t need to judge themselves. Experts say to forgive yourself, to learn all you can about ADHD, to be an effective case manager and advocate in your kid’s educational journey, to remind all the people in your child’s life of the ways they can and should support your kid.
And then there was the very specific advice I got from my therapists: “It’s okay to hold on to him, but to let go of some of the expectations.” On some days I liked that idea. On other days it just sounded stupid, because what I wanted was a guarantee that it would work. But there are no sure things in life.
My dad had a few parallel concerns about the Agora, the ship whose nose was stuck on the ocean floor and whose butt was up in the air.
Alex Rynecki
I thought the only viable solution was to cut the ship, but if you cut it, would the stern section capsize? Or would it be stable? And I spent a lot of time working on that part of the problem.
And it had to be cut instantaneously, because you couldn’t piecemeal it. You couldn’t take a torch and start cutting somewhere. So it had to be done just in an instant. And the only way to do that would be with explosives. And I had a lot of experience with explosives.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I don’t have any experience with explosives, and although my experience with Owen and his ADHD was up close and personal, I didn’t have enough perspective or knowledge to know if letting go would work. But I started to make peace with the idea of letting go. Not letting go of everything, but I was willing to toss things overboard to lighten Owen’s load. And once I decided that the important thing was getting Owen to graduate high school, everything else became expendable. Having Owen take care of his own laundry? Forget it. Asking him to wash the dinner dishes on the weekends? Never mind. Requesting that he take the garbage cans to the curb? I’d do it myself.
But I couldn’t seem to let go completely. Because letting go is hard. Especially because when you let go, things don’t change all of a sudden. They take time. And I wanted to see immediate results. Which is why I turned to a new psychiatrist. I hoped he might give us more insight about our son’s diagnosis, and maybe a prescription that might miraculously cure Owen of his ADHD struggles.
The psychiatrist’s conclusions were mixed. On the positive side of things, he helped us to get on a non-stimulant medication that helped to cut the edge of his over the top emotional reactions. But he also left us with the dumbest, most asinine opinion we’d ever received.
Steve
The most worthless piece of advice that we got was that Owen had an Oedipal complex, and wanted to, you know, we don’t even need to get into the details of the Oedipal complex. The good news was he listened to Owen. But the bad news was his training was from a school of psychology that was based entirely on a guy 100 years ago sitting in an armchair pontificating about how the world worked.
Elizabeth Rynecki
It was laughably absurd, but perhaps not all that unusual. Because the more people we spoke with, the more we found that lots of parents had this feeling that the experts just don’t get it.
Anonymous Mom
The first behaviorist we ever saw was pretty useless. She actually suggested putting a lock on the outside of his door, and when he was really out of line, to actually lock him in his room.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Some advice — like the kind that tells you to lock your kid in his room — can be damaging. Damaging to the parent-kid relationship, a kid’s sense of self-worth, and to the parents left wondering whether the experts actually know what they’re talking about. But not all advice is bad, and sometimes the best advice isn’t prescriptive, it is instead a reminder to keep your eyes on the prize. To focus on being supportive of your kid in their most difficult moments.
Rachel Blatt
We did a positive parenting class. And one of the things my husband and I used to talk about was like, when you’re kind of in a tense situation, this back and forth with your kid, drop the rope. Just let go. Like if your kid doesn’t want to take a shower? Okay, don’t. Just drop it. Because if it’s becoming too intense, you’re making that situation worse.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I love that advice. But there’s a lot of advice out in the world. A lot of it’s contradictory. The neurodivergent social media town square is chock full of ideas. Do an Instagram search for ADHD, and you’ll find everything from self-described coaches producing videos about the neurodivergent dating life to professional therapists offering 12 tips on how to establish structure and stick with it.
Shannon Watts
I think it’s interesting when I look on Instagram. My feed is filled with people who are saying they’re neurodivergent in some way. Like, it seems like this next generation is talking about it a lot.
Annalivia
There’s a lot of useless stuff out there I think when it comes to ADHD — when it comes to
like, resources and advice, especially now that there’s a culture of ADHD influencers, and people who want to speak on it without necessarily having the proper tools.
Elizabeth Rynecki
One of the tools that parents are encouraged to use to solicit positive behavior in kids with ADHD is a sticker chart.
Rachel Blatt
So sticker charts are like you’re giving the kids something to work towards. Something positive, like when you get the ten stickers, you get an ice cream cone. But you have to keep track of all the times that they do that.
Elizabeth Rynecki
But behavior charts don’t work for kids with ADHD because the rewards are too abstract. It just doesn’t give them the same motivations it gives a more neurotypical kid.
Anonymous Mom
The sticker chart, the setting, the firm limits, it’s all – it’s always a sticker chart. With his ADHD, that’s interesting to him for about three seconds.
Paula
Trying to maintain and keep her on target and then remember to deal with the chore chart, never worked for us.
Rachel Blatt
I couldn’t stick with it. F*** the sticker charts. F*** sticker charts.
Steve
All of the strategies that we have looked at, we’ve told – we talked to many people, we’ve looked on the internet, read books, the whole nine yards, pretty much anything you can think of we’ve thought about, in terms of how to approach Owen. All of the strategies that you’re told about, they’ll require someone to have an open mind. Owen doesn’t want to make lists. He doesn’t want to use an organizer.
Owen
On the topic of calendars and to-do lists, they’re terrible and shouldn’t exist.
Linda Lawton
People think that a to-do list is a plan, and it’s absolutely not. It’s like a nag. I call it a whip.
Elizabeth Rynecki
No one ever gave my dad a to-do list for salvaging ships. He was brought into jobs to invent the to-do list.
Alex Rynecki
I never worked on small things and there’s a good reason for that. First of all, if a salvage job is simple and small, nobody needs you. You know, why do they need you? for what? I worked for the biggest salvage companies in the world. And if they have simple things, they would never call me. Why should they? For what? So the only things that I got were things that were really difficult. And that became a challenge.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I don’t remember the Igara because I was just three years old. But I know that it turned out to be one of my dad’s most memorable jobs. In part, that’s because of the complexity of the project and because it was a risky undertaking.
Alex Rynecki
I believe we put about 640 explosive shaped charges, and they were all custom fabricated. And the great fear I had was when the system was fired to explode, that something would be disturbed and the whole system wouldn’t fire. And if that happened, then the stern section would have sunk.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Dad worried about whether or not the solution he dreamed up for The Igara would work. I worried whether the changes I was making at home were helping Owen. I decided I needed to change up a few more things. I started with the way I responded to his angry, middle-of-the-school-day, paragraph-long texts. Instead of telling him to stop with the attitude, to get back to work, to grow up, I sent smile emojis and told him I loved him. I’m not alone in this approach, but it takes its toll on parents.
Anonymous Mom
It’s very, very traumatic to be screamed at like that every day. I really like what this woman who I’ve just learned about says. She says, just look at it as a disability. The yelling at me is not personal because once he has blown off that steam, he’s much better.
Katherine Ellison
Somebody who needs love the most might show it in the most unlovable ways. Just think that that is the essence of it. And that’s when you’re parenting a child like that, you have to keep reminding yourself that they’re not out to get you.
Elizabeth Rynecki
When Owen was in his deepest and most challenging spaces, was when I needed to support him the most. I had to be the adult.
A month after Dad arrived at the Igara, the salvage team began their preparatory work while divers cut pipes and bulkheads to create a clear line where they wanted to cut her, roughly in half. Pumps expelled water from the ship, and then a special five-man team began assembling and installing explosive charges. Starting on the ship’s deck, the team strung one explosive device for each section of steel, circling the ship in nearly 1800 feet of shaped charges.
The ship went aground in March. The scheduled blast began at the crack of dawn one June morning. With nine salvage ships and barges on site, orders came to turn off all radios, transmitters, receivers and radar. When the main generator and machinery aboard the Igara shut down, the explosives crew connected the firing lines. When all the electric detonators fired, a fountain of seawater burst into the air. More than a few observers gasped as the stern appeared to sink. But then, as if a miracle, it popped up out of the sea while the bow quietly settled down onto the sea floor below.
I’ve never blown up anything, and I’ve definitely never cut a ship in half. But with Owen, I learned to let go of the less important stuff in order to get him to focus on school. And he did.
By the end of the school year, we had a zoom meeting with his advisor to count up his credits. Owen arrived at that meeting holding Orb, a 2.5ft long stuffed whale I’d given him. The gift was particularly meaningful to both me and Owen. Years earlier, I had noted he was too old for stuffed animals, but stuffies made Owen happy and I wanted to honor his love of them. Plus Orb was made of exceptionally soft blue gray fur, dark, soulful eyes, rather magnificent fins, and a swooshy tail. More importantly, he was big enough to hug a weighted object with just the right texture for soothing Owen’s anxiety and calming his angst.
At the meeting, Owen dug his fingernails into the palm of his hand and then let go a bit to give Orb a big squeeze, holding back his impulse to jump up and run from the room. The results of our collective experiment are not just good, they’re excellent. His statistics class, done. Economics class finished, and with an A on the final paper, which is about Ponzi schemes. Best of all, enough extracurricular credits to graduate.
Owen used to say his dream was to be able to stay in his room and have everyone leave him alone. That’s probably still a lot of his dream, but a mother can dream of more for her son.
Which was why, just a few weeks after graduation, I began to harp on Steve to work with Owen on registering for community college classes. And why I insisted that Owen try two medications the summer after he graduated from high school. But that’s all in the next episode. Thanks for listening to That Sinking Feeling.
A few last tidbits about the Igara.
At the time of her sinking, the Igara was the largest ever single marine insurance loss in maritime history. The bow of the Igara is now a popular recreational diving spot. I’ve greatly condensed the story of the Igara salvage job in this podcast. If I’ve made any mistakes in the retelling of the tale, my apologies. The ever so friendly reminder at the end: I do not have any degrees or certifications for dealing with mental health conditions generally, or ADHD specifically. If you have questions or concerns about someone you love, please seek out professional advice. An especially big thank you to all the people who took the time to share their stories with us, and whose voices you’ll hear throughout this series:
Owen
I’m Owen. I’m the son of Elizabeth Rynecki.
Alex Rynecki
My name is Alex Rynecki.
Steve
I’m Steve, I’m Owen’s father and Elizabeth’s husband.
Annalivia
I’m Annalivia.
Ann Rivello
My name is Ann Rivello. I am a therapist and mom.
Noah
My name’s Noah. And my daughter has ADHD.
Anonymous Mom
I’m a mom in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have two sons with ADHD.
Allison Landa
My name is Allison Landa.
Katherine Ellison
I’m Katherine Ellison. I’m a journalist and the author of Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention.
Paula
So I’m Paula from the East Bay.
Lauren
My name is Lauren.
Rachel Blatt
My name is Rachel Blatt. I have two boys. They both have ADHD. And I also have ADHD.
Corey
My name is Corey. I hope I am some form of new A.D.D.
James
My name is James. I’m a medical doctor and a psychiatrist.
Anonymous Dad
I am a parent and a musician, and I have a wife with ADHD and a six year old with ADHD.
Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos
My name is Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos, and I’m the co-director of Classroom Matters, and I have ADHD.
Linda Lawton
My name is Linda Lawton, and I’m an educational therapist.
Shannon Watts
I’m Shannon Watts. I have ADHD, and I’m the founder of Moms Demand Action.
Tony Kaplan
That Sinking Feeling is produced by me –Tony Kaplan – Elizabeth Rynecki, and Jacob Bloomfield Misrach. Audio engineering provided by IMRSV Sound.