That Sinking Feeling. Episode 1. Fiery Wreck.
Ann Rivello
My son, he’s in middle school. He said, “Let me tell you what’s happening, what’s taking my attention away. PE is going on out there. You have a lava lamp going.” He goes, “There’s an air conditioning unit always going on and off. There’s two girls over there that are always talking about this boy that they both like.” Like he literally rattled off ten distracting elements in that classroom. “I’m really trying to listen to you, but all of these things are happening at one time and it’s almost impossible.”
Elizabeth Rynecki
This is That Sinking Feeling. I’m Elizabeth Rynecki.
I don’t have ADHD, but my younger son Owen does. And I’m the daughter of a ship salvage engineer. And I know those two worlds — the world of ADHD and the field of ship salvage — don’t seem to have much in common, but I see a lot of connections between the two.So let me explain.
For more than 30 years, my father’s job was to travel around the world helping ships in maritime distress, trying to rescue damaged ships that were in danger of being completely destroyed.
Alex Rynecki
I’ve worked in a lot of places: Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, Panama. I had a couple of projects in Italy, Spain, India. I’ve worked all over the world.
Elizabeth Rynecki
My dad did everything from providing on-site casualty engineering analysis for beached freighters to implementing damage control measures on partially submerged cargo containers. By my tween years, he’d authored dozens of books, manuals and reports on the topic.Many are still available from the US Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage.
If you’re having trouble visualizing his work, maybe you remember the Ever Given. That’s the cargo ship that was wedged across the Suez Canal: its bow and stern, stuck on opposite banks, massively disrupting global maritime traffic and world trade for almost a full week. My dad didn’t salvage the Ever Given, but throughout his career, he worked on jobs like it.
And while shipwrecks defined my father’s working life, his long absences to remote salvage jobs shaped my childhood. Which meant it was often just me and my mother for weeks at a time. Sometimes he’d call home on a ship-to-shore radio. But calls were short, reserved for details like his travel itinerary and to let us know he was well. And when dad came home, it was usually an abbreviated stop — a layover as he unpacked from one far flung destination and then repacked for another.
Alex Rynecki
Ships when they’re at sea have accidents. And typically, there was a ship loss every day in the world — one major ship, large ship — and a major accident of some sort every hour.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Each of those salvage consulting gigs accounted for his income and our family’s relatively privileged lifestyle. Dad retired from his salvage work when I was in my teens.
Alex Rynecki
Actually, one of the reasons I got out of the business is I never had a failure. And that was getting to be scary. Think of the odds of that. And I never had a failure.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I was happy he was home for a few years before I went away to college.
My dad was never one to talk about the past, but I’ve always been intrigued by how a family history, one you didn’t personally experience, can shape your life. In my 30s and 40s, I wrote a book and made a movie about dad’s Polish childhood and his survival of the Holocaust. So when I reached my 50s, I began researching his ship salvage career, partly because I wanted to better understand his work and because it gave me more time with my dad.Time I hadn’t really gotten as a kid.
At the same time I was reading my way through his reports of twisted ship hulls and staring hopelessly at diagrams explaining the physics of broached ships, my son’s ADHD was getting exponentially worse. And so I began to see my son’s ADHD through the lens of ship salvage.
I get that most people aren’t connected to maritime salvage in the way that I am, and that they haven’t even thought about ships as much as I’ve obsessed about them. But when I decided to make this podcast, I didn’t worry about that, because I felt confident I could explain it all in a way that made sense, which actually has been harder than I originally thought.
I also knew that if I was going to talk about the neurodivergent experience, I wanted to include voices from the trenches. Which is why, peppered throughout this podcast, you’ll hear a chorus of voices about navigating life with ADHD: the clunky acronym for what the medical establishment currently calls attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a term that’s actually been changed more than half a dozen times since it was a condition first cited in 1798. But I’m not here to talk about terminology.
In this episode, we’re talking about teachers, classrooms and 31,000 barrels of crude oil.
*
Elizabeth Rynecki
At my desk, I have a photograph of my son, Owen. He’s sitting on the lower rung of a split rail fence, a large meadow behind him. A carefree smile lights up his face. We’re in Lake Tahoe. He’s six. He’s wearing dark blue cotton sweatpants and a white t-shirt. The stick he’s been playing with rests across his lap.
I miss that seemingly happy kid: relaxed, enjoying a sunny day. It’s not that everything was perfect, but I did not yet know about the twists and turns that lay ahead for him and for us.
Teachers found my son incredibly bright and charming. It was effortless for him to engage adults in conversation, with a sense of humor and a surprisingly sophisticated vocabulary. And at the same time, he had strong negative reactions to a wide range of sensorial issues. He hated tags in his shirts, loud noises, and overly warm air. Many seemingly small or insignificant things overstimulated him.
During his preschool years, if someone said something Owen didn’t agree with, he often balled up his fist, pressed his nails into the palm of his hand, and growled. And when that didn’t get across the stress he was feeling, he might throw a pen, stomp out of the classroom or shove his desk sideways.
And although his Montessori school was a place that professed to cherish differences, they found Owen’s emotional and physical responses more than they could handle. Which is why, at four years old, they suspended him. Twice. A decision that I not only found completely baffling, but left me in tears.
And we were lucky they didn’t expel him — a threat they made at more than half a dozen parent teacher conferences, in which they expressed their complete exasperation with our son. I understood that his behaviors were challenging, and that the school felt concerned for the safety of students and teachers. But who suspends a four year old?
By the time Owen was eight, I’d taken him to individual therapy, family therapy, group therapy, occupational therapy, a socialization skills workshop, and a friendship group, all in service of trying to help him cope with what at the time I called his ‘anger management problem.’ He struggled with just about everything having to do with school, especially keeping his emotional reactions in check. Curious to know if my memories of that time were the same as Owen’s, I asked him about it.
Owen
*big sigh* What is the exact line you want me to say?
I’m Owen. My ADHD has sort of always been a source of anger and frustration and not really understanding how the world worked and why everything was so hard.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I remember the time he tossed his math textbook in the air because the assignment was boring. Or when he found a writing exercise too hard, he wrote the word yes all over his worksheet, then crumpled it before tossing it in the garbage.Afterwards, he hid under a blanket, and when a classmate checked on him, Owen grabbed at the boy’s face. Later at recess, when a game didn’t go his way, he choked a girl, resulting in yet another school suspension.
I understood that he wasn’t always particularly angelic, and I knew he had a tough time conforming to expected behaviors, but I didn’t understand why he had so much trouble controlling his emotions. And I didn’t know how to help him. Neither did his teachers or his therapists. And so I told him he needed to get his act together, because if he didn’t, there might be more suspensions. Or worse, he might get expelled.
Frustrated with how things were going with Owen. I talked to my dad about it. He’d never had to deal with a troubling kid. I was a goody two shoes. Dad’s words of wisdom have something to do with telling Owen to pull himself up by his bootstraps and to change or the road ahead might not be too kind to him. This wasn’t particularly helpful, so I pivoted away from asking Dad for advice about my kid, and instead asked him about his salvage work, about which job had been the hardest.
Alex Rynecki
It was the Sea Witch. Probably one of the most difficult jobs I ever had, or at least I say that in retrospect.
Elizabeth Rynecki
In the summer of 1973, a container ship, the Sea Witch, was outbound from the docks of Staten Island. Just past midnight, the helmsman reported steering difficulty. There were a series of horn blasts. Then the Sea Witch engineer received the unusual and urgent instruction: reverse the ship’s engines! But before he could, the Sea Witch slammed into the starboard side of an oil tanker known as the Esso Brussels. The collision ripped a gaping 40-foot hole in the side of the ship and seriously damaged the oil storage tanks. Sleeping crew members were startled awake by the massive jolt. An electrical spark crossed paths with a heavy spray of oil mist. The force of the impact ignited 31,000 barrels of crude oil. The massive explosion could be heard and seen a mile away at the Staten Island Ferry terminal.
The fire aboard the tanker soon spread to the Sea Witch, whose bow was fully embedded into the hull of the tanker. Now fully ablaze, the engines aboard the Sea Witch continued to run, pulling both ships down the river.
It was so bad that the US Coast Guard made a film about the disaster.
US Coast Guard Film
The two ships, locked together, began to drag the single anchor of the Brussels and drift toward the Verrazzano Bridge.
Elizabeth Rynecki
As they passed under the bridge, flames licking just below the roadway, drivers panicked. Some tried to speed away from the monstrous flames. Others abandoned their cars on the bridge and ran towards the safety of land.
As I watched the Coast Guard video, I kept thinking about how I was the tanker and Owen was the Sea Witch. Or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t really matter who was which ship.What I knew for sure is that we were crashing into one another. And while our interactions were less cataclysmic than the Sea Witch and the oil tanker, Owen and I repeatedly collided, sometimes in spectacular fashion, and we often drifted at cross-purposes for days or weeks at a time.
My husband Steve likes to remind me we’d been dealing with these sorts of clashes for years.
Steve
When he was in preschool, he bit the substitute teacher, or he would throw a chair, or in grade school he might punch someone. So his initial reaction is to anything that strikes him the wrong way.
Elizabeth Rynecki
And as a teen everything got more intense, more frightening.
Steve
And his initial reaction is essentially as — as emotionally devastated and angry as someone can be without being physically violent.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Owen would get in trouble, and I’d swoop in and talk to teachers, ask for forgiveness, and reassure school staff that I was diligently working with Owen to help him make changes.
Teachers recognized my son’s differences long before his struggles to sit still expanded to include explosive reactions.
And while parents often know their kids have an assortment of struggles, teachers see firsthand every day the way ADHD behaviors get in the way of learning. And just about every parent we talked to had a memory of a teacher telling them something was different about their kid.
Lauren
In her kindergarten year, her teacher said something that kind of triggered me. He said, “It does not matter what she has around her. She could be sitting in the middle of the rug by herself without a single thing or a person around her, and she’s going to find a way to get distracted.”
Elizabeth Rynecki
But educators don’t just point out the ADHD. They’re also often quick to judge it, noting students just aren’t trying hard enough, without ever really offering understanding and support.
Corey
My report cards at in grammar school always said ‘not working up to potential.’ I don’t really have a strong memory of having ever really finished that homework assignment. I’ve never finished a book in my life. I mean, maybe, like a short one. I think that was 30 years ago. Anything that’s ever assigned to me in a class, even in my most recent six years as a PhD student, I can’t complete. I can never complete the reading.
Annalivia
Because, you know, people, especially teachers, they’re like, “well, you’re so smart, but why can’t you do the work?”
Shannon Watts
My parents hired a tutor for me, and that tutor helped me with my homework and helped me get organized and put in my folders. And I wouldn’t hand it in. I think people thought I was willfully being difficult, when in fact, I just couldn’t make my brain work the way other people’s brains worked.
Elizabeth Rynecki
By the time Owen was 11, the professionals were able to rule out autism as a diagnosis, but they weren’t entirely sure what to make of him. When he was 13, a team of psychiatrists concluded that his behavioral problems pointed to ADHD. But the conclusion was buried in a single sentence on page seven of a twelve page report filled with the results of dozens of tests, like the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System and the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale.
And perhaps more importantly, at least from my perspective, was that the report concluded that his combined presentation of ADHD was, and I quote, “mild,” which to me meant negligible, as in practically nonexistent. And since I didn’t really understand ADHD and I didn’t think the label described my kid very well, I concluded Owen’s problems weren’t ADHD centered, but were personality issues.
Let me say that again. I thought my son’s behavioral struggles were personality quirks. From my perspective, his problems were his fault. And if he could just shape up, the social and academic issues would vanish. And then my life would be so much easier. For the school, everything about his behavior was cause for deep concern. And for society, my kid seemed troubled and out of control.
But for Owen, the emotional dysregulation struggles were and still are very much connected to his ADHD. I found it hard to remember that he didn’t choose to have outbursts when he was distressed. Just like anyone with ADHD, his fight or flight responses to challenges were part of his brain chemistry. Everybody gets frustrated, but Owen’s reactions would be turbo-charged. Every situation was intense, blown totally out of proportion. And so many of the people we spoke with talked about these super intense emotional reactions.
Anonymous Mom
My son’s first response is always, you know, flames shooting out of his head and screaming.
Steve
His emotional reaction is going from 0 to 60 in like a 10th of a second. He’s enraged, and you didn’t see the transition.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I was in constant communication with his teachers and school administrators in a way that parents of a neurotypical kid just wouldn’t have to be. We mostly helped Owen manage the ups and downs of grade school and junior high, but by high school, his ADHD went from being moderately challenging to incredibly difficult. He struggled to get up in the morning and often wanted to skip school. He hid in the confines of his cave-like room below a pile of heavily weighted blankets, surrounded by a teetering pile of stuffed animals, wearing headphones to block out the world, hoping he wouldn’t have to deal with people, school assignments or adulting.
Those sound like common battles between teens and parents. And there’s certainly overlap. But everything is so much harder for teens with ADHD. My son struggled with school expectations and everyday tasks: brushing his teeth, taking a shower, doing the dishes. These chores aren’t thrilling, and most people have them on their to-do list just to get them done. But for a person with executive functioning problems, it can be paralyzing, making them totally unable to do any of the expected tasks. And there’s a lot of shame attached to this. Their peers can do these things without even thinking about it. But for my son and other ADHD folks, mundane and boring tasks are the Achilles heel to their existence.
Corey
I don’t really finish a lot of tasks.
Rachel Blatt
It’s really hard for me to have the routines. I don’t like routine. It bores the hell out of me.
Anonymous Dad
For my wife, the shame involved with not being able to complete tasks in a normal work environment has given her so much trauma, that me even suggesting it, it’s led to her essentially screaming at me, like “what do you expect me to do?”
Elizabeth Rynecki
Like most parents, I worried and speculated endlessly about Owen’s future, how and whether he could overcome the steep challenges he faced and how I might help him meet those challenges.
I wanted to help, but it seemed like my help so far only served to make his situation more difficult. And although Owen was a relatively sweet teen who kept out of trouble outside the school environment, we had a lot of battles. And the stress was hard on everyone, especially my husband, who often mediated our increasingly heated arguments.
Steve
I often see myself as a little foam buffer between you and Owen. Because you both have very strong personalities.
And honestly, I think you’re both coming from a very, you know, positive place, right? Owen wants to be independent, and you want the best for Owen, and you want certain things, and those things are not always compatible. It’s a pain for me, honestly. I mean, my natural tendency is to not be confrontational, so I’m always trying to diffuse emotional situations.
And in fact, with Owen, you can often only get what you want with a less aggressive approach, and you can’t get all of what you want. And that’s actually part of the struggle for both of you. Neither of you gets all of what you want, and it’s really hard.
Elizabeth Rynecki
We rarely grounded Owen. His behavior never warranted that sort of punishment. But he did experience more serious consequences at school. In fact, when he was 13, the same year he received his official ADHD diagnosis, he was suspended twice for physically assaulting another student. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. And on his worst day, a day that he desperately did not want to go to school, I made him go anyway. And then, at school, he talked to a counselor about feeling suicidal and was sent home with the suggestion that he needed a change of some sort.
It was glaringly obvious to me that the behavioral tools he’d used with modest success before were now not working at all.
Owen was never expelled from school, but it’s something the school said that they would consider if his behavior continued. And it’s a threat educators often use when dealing with students struggling with ADHD behavioral issues. Even the schools with statements of support for neurodivergent students — their brochures full of platitudes about seeing every student’s unique nature fully — are often challenged by kids with ADHD.
Anonymous Mom
Things went kind of reeling out of control, and my son was almost asked to leave the school for children with disruptive disorders, you know, but he was going to be asked to leave the school for children with disruptive disorders because he was too disruptive.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Kids with diagnosed behavioral problems such as ADHD are suspended from school more often than their peers. Of course, kids who are out of school on suspensions aren’t learning the material, are more likely to fail class or to be held back a year, and are more likely to drop out of school altogether as the cycle continues. They are also more likely to end up in the juvenile and ultimately the adult justice system.
Shannon Watts
When I tell you I got into trouble as a teenager, like that would be putting it mildly. I think my parents thought I was going to go to jail for the rest of my life. I think I thought nobody ever had my back or had my side.
And so I was very disrespectful to teachers. I mean, really anyone in authority, and especially my parents. And I think I just felt like, ‘this is not unconditional love.’
Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos
I mean, school is like prison for these kids. Mostly it’s kids going into the classroom and having to sit down and listen for hours on end. And to be in classes that are not particularly interesting to them, and don’t speak to their lived experience. It’s not just very hard for Neurodivergent kids. It’s also very hard for neurotypical kids, right? It’s a lot of hoops that our kids have to jump through. Neurodivergent kids are like, “f-off with your hoops. I’m not interested in them.” Right? And when they do and say things that maybe push back a little bit, they’re punished. And I see it in action every single day.
Elizabeth Rynecki
The school to prison pipeline is a real fear for parents of kids with behavioral problems. This is especially true for children of color who have ADHD, many of whom haven’t actually been diagnosed and aren’t getting the support they need. And the threat of “you better shape up or you’ll end up in prison” is a statement that kids with ADHD hear much too frequently.I know Owen heard it, because I told him exactly that.
Nick Petty
One doctor, she said that a lot of, that a high percentage of people with A.D.D., wind up committing suicide or overdosing or going to prison, and it was all stuff of that caliber. So it was pretty intense for me to hear that.
Elizabeth Rynecki
This kind of warning sometimes works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. And while having ADHD doesn’t mean you’re inevitably going to be experimenting with drugs, Kids with ADHD often do impulsively risky things.
Nick Petty
From there, I had experimented with pot. I got unfortunately into other drugs. I got in trouble, I got into the opiates, I went to county jail. You’re kind of like, ‘well, I’m doing bad, but I mean that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, because that’s what the teacher told me in sixth grade.’
Katherine Ellison
My son went to a private high school that was specifically billed that these are kids who who can’t really manage in other places, and we have all this special attention. And it was absolutely the worst place in the world for him. And that’s where he discovered drugs. And there were some really harrowing times after that. He barely, barely graduated high school. We kind of pushed him across the finish line.
Elizabeth Rynecki
Although having ADHD means that you can end up in more trouble with school authorities, it should go without saying that having ADHD doesn’t inherently put you on track for a life behind bars. But untreated, whether medically or with behavioral changes, it can be incredibly difficult to manage. So it’s no surprise that kids with ADHD can benefit from a lot of extra support. Support that comes from a wide range of professionals. A really wide range of professionals. An absurdly wide range of professionals.
Linda Lawton
Top of the heap, most expensive is psychiatrists, and they prescribe the medication. Marriage family therapists. Special education teachers. Classroom teachers.
Paula
The school psychologist.
Anonymous Mom
Behaviorist. Therapist.
Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos
Tutors.
Ann Rivello
Psychotherapist.
James
Psychiatrist.
Ann Rivello
A licensed clinical social worker.
Annalivia
ADHD specialist.
Katherine Ellison
Child psychiatrist.
Anonymous Mom
A consultant in pediatrics.
Rachel Blatt
A lawyer.
Elizabeth Rynecki
It’s a privilege to have both the time and the money to put together and coordinate the services needed to help. Beyond the uneven and generally modest assistance most schools can provide. And believe it or not, that brings me back to the story of the Sea Witch.
Eventually the Sea Witch and the oil tanker came to rest on the shores of Staten Island. By morning, the majority of oil fires on both the water and aboard the tanker were either extinguished or under control. Fires aboard the Sea Witch burned for 13 days. As a result of the collision and subsequent fire, three of the Sea Witch’s crew died: two members died in the inferno, and the captain died of a heart attack while awaiting rescue.
As for the tanker, her captain and 12 crew members died. The 63 known survivors suffered from smoke inhalation, exhaustion, cuts and bruises.
When all the fires were out, the two ships were separated. The tanker was eventually taken to Greece, where she was rebuilt and put back into service.
As for the charred hulk of the Sea Witch, which she was eventually moved to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she remained in drydock for the next eight years.
Eventually, the damaged forward portion of the Sea Witch was cut away, leaving only the valuable back portion of the ship with the engine and most of the machinery. There are a lot of technical maritime logistics that explain what happened next. But basically the Sea Witch fell sideways into the dock at a rather precarious angle. It’s what happened afterwards that held the biggest lessons for me. No one could figure out how to fix the listing ship. So my dad, the ship’s salvage engineer, got the call to come and take a look.
Alex Rynecki
The problem was if you inserted water back into the dock, into the dry dock, and you try to refloat the stern section, it was unstable because the center of buoyancy was in the wrong place.
Elizabeth Rynecki
If things went wrong, the ship could roll over completely.
Alex Rynecki
So then the question was, how do you shift the center buoyancy on this massive structure?
Elizabeth Rynecki
The solution: build a 250-ton steel frame buoyancy assist module with inflatable rubber reinforced membrane bags that would be inflated, one by one, in a predetermined sequence. This would provide the buoyancy needed to refloat the stern.
Alex Rynecki
We put in airbags and we blew the airbags when the water flooded the dock. And the ship refloated.
Elizabeth Rynecki
My dad would be totally appalled by this oversimplification, but it’s kind of like a giant pool floatie.
Alex Rynecki
But it was really a tough job.
Elizabeth Rynecki
It was a tough job because it required incredible precision in both design and installation of the apparatus, as well as in the inflation process to get the ship floating upright again.
Everything was calculated and recalculated, checked and rechecked. Nothing was left to chance. All the complexity and planning and expertise worked exactly as it was designed to, and the ship floated freely. A coordinated team of experts working toward a common end is exactly what I wanted to help Owen with his ADHD. I desperately wanted something more than a 504 plan that mostly languished in a school filing cabinet.
Noah
A 504 plan gives kids extra time, things like that. It allows a kid to get up and stand while doing work.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I don’t want to be entirely negative about a 504. A well-designed one with teachers who have the needed time and interest and training can be of significant help, but there’s more that schools can offer. Ideally, an individual education plan, otherwise known as an IEP.
Noah
The IEP which is given to kids who are either special ed or have special needs. It follows my daughter all the way to college. And so what it does is it allows her to get specialists that come in and pull her out of class to help her with certain subjects that she’s struggling in.
Tatiana Guerreiro Ramos
Parents don’t know what they’re entitled to. Under the law that governs IEPs, which is the individuals with Disabilities Education Act, there’s a mandate called the Child Find mandate. Which is an affirmative responsibility for any district to seek out, assess, identify kids who have learning differences, and then provide supports for those kids.
Rachel Blatt
So the challenge I have with one of my kids is that he is so smart, he doesn’t get any – he can’t get an IEP. But his executive function is like nonexistent. Like I find his homework crumpled up in the bottom of his bag. Everything’s turned in late. And the school still, they don’t see the executive function piece of it as an issue. They’re willing to wait for him to start failing in school and let that hurt his self-esteem till they do something.
Elizabeth Rynecki
We had a similar struggle. Intellectually, Owen could absolutely do the schoolwork. But with his ADHD, everything was an uphill battle. Each assignment, every project, every set of math problems involved cajoling, arguing, crying, and us begging him to do the work. And then when he did sit down to write his essay, it would be filled with sentences about how stupid the assignment was, or how unfair the teacher was. Or if he had to do a series of math problems that should’ve taken him 20 minutes, it instead took him three hours. Because after each one he’d complain, wail about how ridiculous it was that there were so many questions. Maybe an IEP would or wouldn’t have made a difference. But having teachers who did not understand that my son’s social-emotional regulation difficulties were directly related to his ADHD was definitely demoralizing.
I know that we were fortunate enough to be able to have the time and emotional energy to help him. And maybe a 504 or an IEP would have helped shift some of the burden onto the school, rather than squarely putting it in our laps. But for an assortment of reasons — some personal, some having to do with school politics — Owen never had an IEP. At some level, the approach to the plan with their 504 or an IEP or any name or acronym wasn’t important to me. What I always really wanted more than anything was a giant pool floatie for our lives.
Someone could probably make a documentary series about where we went wrong with managing Owen’s ADHD, and how we could do a better job next time. But while that’s not going to happen, I can look back to the Coast Guard’s film for insight.
U.S. Coast Guard Film
In summary, this accident teaches us that although we have made great strides in the construction of vessels, we cannot be complacent. There is no substitute for vigilance of personnel in the prevention of marine accidents.
Elizabeth Rynecki
There will probably always be ship disasters and work for maritime salvage engineers.
For me, the lessons of the Sea Witch are different from the Coast Guard’s. My dad’s work was never about preventing disasters, but about dealing with the aftermath. And while some might think dad’s work was easy, it wasn’t. Ship salvage is complicated, and so is ADHD.
Anonymous Mom
These kids’ brains are so complicated and so individual. There’s a saying in the autism community, “if you think you know something about autism and you know an autistic person, you only know one autistic person and no autistic person is the same.” And I think it’s the same with the ADHD brain. And it’s so much more complicated than it’s portrayed in mainstream media.
Elizabeth Rynecki
I used to have this fantasy that making the perfect learning and development plan for my son would give Owen the tools and support he would need to succeed. A metaphorical customized steel frame buoyancy assist module with inflatable rubber membranes. Of course, it’s not so simple. Human problems are complex and ever-evolving, and serious problems are often laden with emotions like guilt and doubt, sorrow and resentment. And then, of course, there’s judgment and shame. But that’s a topic for another episode. In fact, our very next one.
Thank you for listening to That Sinking Feeling.
It should go without saying, but here I am saying it anyway. If you have questions about ADHD, please consult a professional. Also, I hope there are no errors in the descriptions of the Sea Witch salvage job, but if there are things I haven’t gotten 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 this series.
Owen
I’m Owen. I’m the son of Elizabeth Rynecki.
My thoughts on doing this podcast? It’s a bit of a favor to my mother. I appreciate her. I think she’s wonderful and I want to help with her work. But don’t use anything about me complimenting my mother. She’s a horrible, evil person.
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 Landau
My name is Allison Landau.
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. We’d also like to thank Julie Caskey for early editorial input. Audio engineering provided by IMRSV Sound.