That Sinking Feeling. Episode 2. Shame.
Anonymous Mom
There are times — a lot of times — I distinctly do not like him. You know, if he were my husband, I would divorce him immediately. But he’s my kid. And you can’t divorce your kid.
Elizabeth Rynecki
This is That Sinking Feeling. It’s for people whose lives have been touched by ADHD. In this episode we’re talking about shame: that painful feeling of humiliation, and the ways we deal – and don’t — with the struggles that come from being neurodivergent.
We’re not here to shame anyone about their parenting styles, or the ways some are affected by their own ADHD. But we are here to talk with kids, parents, and families about the ways they’ve been made to feel embarrassed about their differences.
Lauren
I feel like judgment for her, and judgment for me. ‘Are you not teaching your child that that’s inappropriate?’
Owen
The whole ‘why am I different’ thing actually had me breaking down in the car on the ride home sometimes.
Ann Rivello
There’s a lot of sadness in grief when they’re not typical. Because you’re like, ‘why is that so hard for them?’
Elizabeth Rynecki
I’m Elizabeth Rynecki. I don’t have ADHD, but I am the mom of a kid with ADHD, and this podcast is about my son and the lessons I’ve learned about parenting him through the lens of my dad’s ship salvage career.
I know that’s weird, but I was thinking about making a documentary about all the ships my father helped rescue. And about the same time, my son’s ADHD worsened dramatically. As I read about my dad’s work, and I struggled to help my son, the two topics became intermingled. The images of the ruined ships and the stories of the salvage jobs began to feel like metaphors for life with my son, Owen.
This episode includes a gaggle of tourists, a special sandwich, and the ill-informed opinions of men on a beach.
A few years ago, when I seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown — the weight of raising a child struggling with a constellation of issues bearing down on me like a backpack full of kettlebells — my very loving husband gently encouraged me to consider the possibility of getting a therapist.
I’d actually seen a therapist a few months earlier, a woman listed by my health care provider as someone with availability for new patients.
I don’t remember her name, which is just as well. I didn’t like her. Her words of wisdom? Give myself butterfly hugs, wrap my arms around my shoulders and pat my back. She told me this would help me relax. I didn’t find it remotely comforting. Instead, it just made me feel like she didn’t understand the extent of my pain and my desperate need for help.
Eventually, I found a therapist I liked. A woman I’ll call Madeleine. It didn’t take Madeleine long to ask me a really tough question. She wanted to know if I felt shame about my son Owen and his ADHD diagnosis. At first, I answered a resounding, ‘no!’. And then as I sat with her question, the answer seemed so clear. And yet I didn’t want to share it. I was embarrassed because the truth was that I did feel shame. And then tears, because there’s something so extraordinarily monstrous about confessing to feeling shame, especially about someone you love so much,
Every parent we talked to had some version of experiencing this sort of shame.
Paula
When people don’t have kids, they’re also kind of like, ‘why can’t you control your kid?’ Well, I would like to, but I just that’s not really possible. So you just have this constant sort of like,
haze of shame. Every time we’d go to Trader Joe’s, she’d be in the cart, we’d get to the cashier, she would start screaming. I was like, oh my God, I can’t even take you to the store. The impact of sort of not having a kid who fits into the norm, is really challenging.
Allison Landa
In the beginning it was, ‘what did we do wrong?’ Did I have a bad birth, which I did? Did I not do some things, did I do too much, did I do this, did I do that. And then it was an issue of turning around and kind of blaming my husband: “You are on the spectrum, this came from you.”
Elizabeth Rynecki
I think it’s important here to say there’s a difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed.
Linda Lawton
For one thing, embarrassment is fleeting. It comes and it goes. Shame is about you. Embarrassment is something that happens to you. Shame is something that is a comment on your character.
Anonymous Dad
My kid would go over to his grandparents’s house and they would also give him a hard time. “Why aren’t you getting your shoes on? Why aren’t you sitting still at the table? Why aren’t you paying attention? We’re reading you this book.” And those first seeds of shame are going to start to build up. Because he doesn’t know why he can’t sit still, or why he can’t put on his shoes. All he knows is he’s being pulled in these other directions, and he has no control
over that.
Allison Landa
One time he did say to me, “I’m weird.” And it broke my heart. And I said, “What do you mean?” He just said, “I’m weird.” And I said, “Honey, everybody’s weird. Everyone, everyone feels that way and you can talk to me any time.” And he said, “Let’s, let’s watch trains.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s watch trains.”
Elizabeth Rynecki
I get why kids like watching trains. There’s the appeal of the rhythmic clacking noise, the roar of the engine, and the satisfying screeching of the steam whistle. And while I’m not a big train nerd, I am kind of a ship nerd ,because I grew up on the shores of San Francisco Bay, where my dad and I used to watch ships come in under the Golden Gate Bridge. And because my childhood was filled with dad stories about all the ships he rescued.
One of those ships was the Eldia. And if you were into ships, the thing to see on Cape Cod in the spring of 1984 was the Eldia: a three-story-tall blue and red Maltese freighter that washed ashore after a particularly nasty storm. My dad, the ship salvage engineer, got the call to coordinate her rescue. While he ran calculations and determined the best method to get her back into the ocean, thousands of tourists trekked across more than a mile of sand to see the gigantic boat on the beach.
Alex Rynecki
It was in a very, in a very open place not far from Boston. So a lot of people came down the Cape to look at it. It got a lot of press. We just kept working.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Some visitors to the job site whispered about the graveyard of the Atlantic, recalling the Cape’s more than 3000 shipwrecks. Others wondered how such a massive modern marvel lost her way from the ocean’s highways, and which idiot caused this mess? Because clearly someone was to blame.
While traffic was heavy and residents complained about the influx of off season visitors, the local newspaper published a tongue in cheek editorial suggesting that the Eldia was so good for local businesses that there should be no rush to remove it from the beach.
The town collected over $80,000 in parking fees, and local merchants made out quite well by selling commemorative mugs and t-shirts. Even the local deli got in on the action by hawking a ‘shipwreck sandwich’ of turkey with cranberry sauce.
The weather was rotten, but none of those who came to the beach seemed to care. “Eldia mania,” as the Cape Cod Times called the wreck, touched people in a way that rare events capture the collective imagination, and imaginations were definitely active when it came up to dreaming rescue efforts.
A WBZ Boston reporter even did a man-on- the-beach interview about exactly that.
Man on the Beach 1
I would try to get some tugboats, I guess, and tug it out.
Man on the Beach 2
Get another storm in here to make it go out.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I love the sense of awe about the situation, and the bizarre idea that one could conjure up a storm to rescue the ship. But there’s a part of me that sees an unspoken story of shame. There the Eldia is, completely exposed for the whole world to see just exactly how poorly things have gone wrong. And on top of that, almost everyone is more than happy to profit off her misfortune, gleefully picnic in her shadow, and to weigh in on the situation — a situation for which they have no experience or expertise.
I know the Eldia is an inanimate object incapable of shame. But it reminds me of the ways others feel entitled not only to judge my son’s ADHD and my parenting of his struggles, but worse, to shame me for my parenting choices.
Which honestly, is just kind of weird. Because shaming parents of kids with ADHD or shaming the kids themselves doesn’t do anything to change behavior. Shame just makes people feel worse about the things they already feel bad about.
Annalivia
I think maybe that’s the worst part of ADHD, right, for me right now. The shame of not being able to finish something or not being able to accomplish something to its fullest potential. It’s bad because you don’t ever truly feel satisfied when something is done. If you have the thing that makes you like a perfectionist, you wanted it to be done to a certain standard. And it’s not.
And then you have all this, all this shame around all this, you know, these dropped projects, this unfinished assignment, like these horrible — and like it really even in the moment, if you’re like, “Oh, well, I don’t really care about it that much,” or “It doesn’t seem like I cared about it that much because I didn’t put in that many hours into it,” No! The shame is still there. The shame is very much real.
Elizabeth Rynecki
The shame is as real as the ship on the beach. And just like the rubbernecking, tourists were quick to point out how they’d get the ship back into the ocean, a person struggling with ADHD is often told that if they just take a bit more personal responsibility, their problems would miraculously disappear. All an ADHDer needs to do is exercise six hours a day, take supplements, and read the seven essential self-help books that in six months will be seven new different self-help books.
Anonymous Mom
“Your kid just needs to be gluten free, that’ll solve all their problems,” or, you know, “We’ll run these essential calming oils,” or whatever ridiculous thing that people come up with.
Elizabeth Rynecki
The man on the beach thinks rescuing the Eldia is as easy as getting a tugboat to pull her back out to sea. But if it was that easy, the ship owners would not have needed my dad, several months of preparation, optimal high tides, and significant resources to set the Eldia free.
A month after she went aground, the salvage crew unloaded 140,000 gallons of petroleum and wastewater, stabilized the ship by pumping 2000 tons of seawater aboard, removed 30,000 yards of sand gathered at her bow and stern, welded I-beams to the hull, and installed steel blocks needed to rig a pulley system.
Under cover of night, during peak tides, the salvage team began their major tugging efforts. Local news outlets and several Boston TV stations illuminated the ship with powerful spotlights. The first two nights of polling yielded modest progress, and then on the third night, the crews set the Eldia free. Dad’s pretty humble about the job.
Alex Rynecki
It went pretty smoothly.
Elizabeth Rynecki
In many ways, salvaging the Eldia was much easier than navigating the parenting of a kid with ADHD. I mean, the Eldia floated free in less than three months. And here I am, a decade after my son was diagnosed with ADHD, still working to understand it. And I’m not sure I’ll ever fully know what it means to have ADHD. But like the people on the beach, I continued to encounter friends and acquaintances, even ones who mean well, who are quick to judge my parenting. They wonder why it’s taking so long for my son to get his stuff together. They wonder why my kid lives at home, and can only handle a few classes a year at community college, while their kid is double majoring in biology and French poetry, while juggling a busy social life, their volunteer work and part time job.
Allison Landa
You know, seeing him with the social difficulties breaks my heart. Knowing that he’s going to struggle with this his whole life kills me. Like it just — and knowing that we will, too. Knowing that this is — there’s not an end date, there’s not a ‘Well, it’s going to be okay on September 23rd!’ No! It’s going to be okay when we come to a place where it’s okay. And I haven’t come there yet.
Elizabeth Rynecki
So it can at times feel like something I’d rather not share with others. And if I’m honest with myself, that is a type of shame.
Shannon Watts
My parents, I think their, their instinct was to try to get me to be more like other kids by sort of shaming me or threatening me or grounding me.
Elizabeth Rynecki
But shame has never helped anyone. It feels awful and undermines self-esteem. And without a sense of self-worth, it’s difficult for a child to develop healthy coping tools. Owen doesn’t need to be endlessly berated about having a problem. He already knows that he does.
I didn’t get to see the Eldia on the beach because there is no such thing as take-your-daughter- to-ship-salvage-site-day. Besides, even if my mom and I had flown out to Boston and driven down to the beach, Dad wouldn’t have had time for us.
I now realize, to get the job done, what my dad had to do was to filter out the news reports, the crowds, and their cockamamie opinions. I wish I had that sort of self-confidence to ignore the judgments of others, which only served to load me up with shame. I’m slowly getting better at that.
Anonymous Mom
They show up with their brains, and their brains are their brains. I did not plan my child’s brains, and my friends did not plan the brains of their children either.
Allison Landa
It doesn’t define us, but it definitely shapes our lives. So we have to work with that.
Katherine Ellison
If you have a child with ADHD, normally they’re getting so much negative feedback from the world every day that first of all, your job is to find something to love and find something to praise. But also be eagle-eyed about whatever kind of strength they have or talent and fan that flame as much as you can. Give them any opportunity, do anything to help them develop that. Because they need — maybe it’s just one thing that they’ll be able to do, but they need support to do that one thing, and actually get some praise and acceptance for it.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Being a bystander with an uninformed opinion is easy, and it’s an almost inevitable outcome when anything goes awry in public. People who see my son act out or have a bad day will say what they want about my son, or his ADHD, or what he or I or someone else should be doing to fix it. The pain that all that judgment can cause may be unintentional, but it’s real. I do have to figure out how to help soften the blow of all the outside judgment. To help him successfully navigate the world on his own terms. And part of enabling that success is rejecting shame.
But that’s often easier said than done, especially when we’re constantly bombarded with advice, which is why our next episode is about advice.
This is Elizabeth Rynecki. Thank you for listening to that sinking feeling.
While I have read a ton about ADHD, this is a friendly reminder that I’m just a mom of a kid with ADHD. And if you’ve got questions about ADHD or any other neurological differences, please consult a professional. I hope there are no errors in the descriptions of the Eldia salvage job, but if there are things I haven’t got quite right, my apologies.
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 the series.
Owen
I’m Owen. I’m the son of Elizabeth Rynecki.
Alex Rynecki
My name is Alex Rynecki.
Steve
I’m Steve, 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 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.