My job is to keep you safe! My son has heard me say this over and over to the point of being an unspoken mantra in both of our minds.

From early on, I’ve had to continually outsmart his impulsivity, which has been exhausting and aged me. During my stay-at-home dad days (his 1-4 years), I’ve curtailed his leaping down the cement stairwell in our apartment building, leashed him to keep him from flying over the 10 ft. sea wall (letting him hang there one time), kept him on the inside of the sidewalk so he wouldn’t dart between cars and into the street, and have out run his crazy sprint toward a family of “friendly” raccoons.

One would assume he would learn to stop stressing me out, but instead it’s been overlooked by another whim of curiosity. Now I do understand the value in supporting curiosity and learning, but few others understand that another body is needed to tag team and keep up with a kid like him.

This is one of those situations where reality is stranger than fiction, which has put all of us into a socially awkward position. He doesn’t have too many friends his age, and his biggest complaint is that they don’t understand him.

By two he could count forwards and backwards to 20 (in English, Spanish, and German) and would correct the day care workers when their square was a rhombus because it wasn’t straight. By three, he knew all the fish at the aquarium (ie., Who in the h*** recalls an Arapaima in their pre-preschool years), was kicked out of daycare for being too much, and kicked out of the “special” school for correcting the kinder teacher – and being right according to the director. No, I’m not being boastful, but sharing pent-up grief – It’s ADHD2!

So what does ADHD, being smart, and safety have to do with each other? It’s that I’m always thinking as to how to outwit the dangers of his curiosities – that sometimes appear as outright stupidities if it weren’t for his age. Now he’s 8 and he hasn’t stopped. I’m still standing a step back, playing the Safety position, as in the following case at Wally World last weekend.

Boy Wonder had two coins, a quarter and a dollar, for the candy machine, which we promised he could have after our shopping. We had just stepped into the department store to admire the remaining incandescent light bulbs, and our son kept on picking every single variety and jabbering as to why we should get it. Suddenly he screamed: I swallowed my dollar!

He doubled over, the quarter hit the floor, and he began to choke and not breathe. I leaped over; did the Heimlich until he puked; no sign of the dollar and so he began to scream hysterically about getting the dollar out of him. At that moment, I felt relief knowing that he could breathe well enough to be upset. As the store manager put it, “I heard him choking. Then, I heard the dollar dislodge and he began to scream. I realized that I would not have known what to do if it were my child.” Certainly, this was very frightening and every bit of thanks went through my mind.

I was grateful that I spent $1000 on a two week advanced first aid course, that I was there at the right time to help my son appropriately, that the paramedics arrived and calmly confirmed that the real threat of suffocation had passed, that my son knows how much I love him. My partner was grateful that I was there this time because I had been absent the prior few weekends due to work. My son cried and apologized for having carried around the coins in his mouth while at the store, and vowed to never do anything like that again – Thank you, son, but I know better. Sure enough, another day, another drama.

I came home yesterday and he apologized for his blistered finger. When asked about it, he explained that he believed a gas fire (like the fireplace pilot light) was not as hot as a real fire, so he thought it would not have been as hot. (Sigh) I’m sure my insane childhood ideas at that age had a similar logic at the time, but he still lost some privileges. When he tried to butter me up, I told him to talk to his finger about it. He smiled at my response, which I believe contained a real understanding that my job, to keep him safe, is unyielding because I love him.