Hello Bloom Kids ad: Amanda Thompson

A retired nurse told my mother that the children in her day weren't sleeping either. They were lying in the dark and not telling anybody. If your kid has ADHD, and bedtime is the hour of the day you brace for, and somebody a generation older has ever said a version of that to you, you'll know why I couldn't answer her. We were in her kitchen and Nate was in the living room with the TV on, and she said it the way you'd say the traffic was bad. Children went up when they were told and that was the end of it. I didn't have anything to say back. That's the part I keep going over. Not that she said it. That I stood there with a dish towel in my hand and could not think of one sentence that wouldn't have sounded like an excuse. Nate is 9. He has ADHD. He has not gone to sleep before 10:30 in four years. Most nights it's closer to 11, and the last hour of it is the same hour every time. He's out of bed wanting a drink. He's out of bed because he's remembered something he has to tell me. He's out of bed standing in the doorway not saying anything at all, just standing there, until I get up again. I've been going up and sitting on the end of his bed since he was six. Some nights I fall asleep there and wake up at 1 with my neck locked. And then 5:40 in the morning. Wide awake. Downstairs. Talking. My husband and I have not watched anything together on a weeknight since Nate was five. Not because we don't want to. Because by the time he's down, neither of us has anything left to say to each other. So when my mother says children went up when they were told, what she is actually saying, without meaning to, is that I am doing something she didn't have to do. And I have been quietly agreeing with her for four years. It isn't that I hadn't tried. I want to be clear about that, because I know how all of this sounds. Melatonin, two and a half years of it. Started on half a milligram, which worked for about a month. Then it didn't, so we went to one. Then two. Then three, which is where his pediatrician stopped me. Magnesium gummies from the drugstore, then a different brand off Amazon when those did nothing. Blackout curtains. A white noise machine. A weighted blanket that cost more than I told my husband it did. No screens after seven for eleven months, which I kept to more strictly than he did. A wind-down chart with pictures on it that we made together on a Sunday and that he ignored from the Monday. Chamomile tea, because my mother suggested it, which I want on the record. An earlier bedtime, which made it worse, and a later one, which also made it worse. And then last spring his pediatrician started talking about clonidine, and about how we'd manage the dose as he got bigger, and I sat in that room doing the arithmetic on a nine-year-old and how many years of bigger there are. I am not listing all that so anyone feels sorry for me. I'm listing it so it's clear I wasn't a mother who'd done nothing and then complained about it. Here's where it turned. My mother had an appointment at the hospital in March, an eye thing, nothing serious, and I drove her because she doesn't like the parking. We were an hour early because she is always an hour early. So we sat in the waiting room, and there was a woman next to us about my mother's age with a canvas bag on her lap, and the three of us started talking the way you do when there is nothing else to look at. Her name was Pat. She'd been a pediatric nurse for thirty-one years and had been retired for eight. My mother told her, in the same friendly way, that children in her day just went to bed. And Pat said, kindly, that children in her day were also not sleeping. They were just lying there in the dark not telling anyone. My mother laughed. I didn't. I asked Pat what she meant. She said the thing nobody explains, and she said she'd spent three decades explaining it to parents in corridors, is that sleep isn't something a child's body simply does when the room goes dark. It's something the brain has to start. And it can't start it if the chemistry isn't sitting there ready to be used. Then she named it. Dopamine. Serotonin. Norepinephrine. I actually put my bag down on the floor. Because those are the three. Those are the exact three words a pediatrician says to you the week your child is diagnosed, and then never mentions again. Pat went through them one at a time, and every single one landed on a specific night in my house. Dopamine is focus, she said. When it's low the brain goes hunting for something to hold onto. That's the third trip out of the room. That's a nine-year-old standing in a doorway at ten at night with a fact about the Titanic that cannot wait. He isn't stalling. He's looking for something interesting because his brain has nothing to hold. Serotonin is settling. When it's low he can be genuinely exhausted and still not able to come down. Which is why "he's tired, he'll go off" has never once been true in my house. Norepinephrine is drive. When it's low, that's 5:40 in the morning on four hours, flat by nine, everything about the day harder than it needed to be. And a harder day makes the next night worse than the one before it. She said if all three are running low, bedtime is simply where you notice it first. It isn't the only place it's happening. It's the loudest. Every parent I have ever met in an ADHD waiting room knows those three run low. That is the diagnosis. That's why he can't sit still, can't wait his turn, can't let a small thing go. Nobody had ever told me they are also what a brain needs to shut itself down at night. He wasn't refusing to sleep. He didn't have what it takes to start. And then Pat said the thing I've thought about most. She said none of this was my mother being right, and none of it was me being soft. She said the children in her day who couldn't sleep were doing exactly what Nate does, and their mothers were doing exactly what I do, and the only difference is that nobody had a word for it so everybody assumed it was the mother. My mother had gone quiet next to me. So I asked Pat about the melatonin, because I'd been giving it to him nearly every night for two and a half years. She said the trouble with store-bought melatonin is that it's a finished hormone. It's made in a factory and dropped in from outside, and all it does is tell the body it's night time. It never touches the chemistry that actually lets a brain power down. And a body handed a hormone every night starts leaning on it instead of doing the work itself. Which is exactly why it worked for a month and then didn't. And why every time I went up a dose I bought myself a few more weeks and then lost them again. That's also the answer to my mother, and I didn't work it out until I was driving home. She didn't have anything that failed, because she didn't have anything. I've had a cabinet full of things that each worked for three weeks. That isn't the modern world being soft. That's what happens when you keep handing a brain the finished thing instead of what it needs to build it. Then Pat asked me what form the magnesium had been in. Gummies, I said. And a powder we gave up on because he wouldn't touch it. She said that's the other half of it. Most of a supplement is broken apart in the stomach before the body gets to use any of it. Half a dose at best, and often much less. So my most consistent stretch, the month I did not miss once, he was probably getting half of what was on the label. And she said the gummies are the worst of them because of the sugar. Sugar before bed spikes and then crashes, and a crashing brain is more wound up. So the one thing he'd take without a fight was working against the thing I was trying to fix. Nearly three years of that. So I asked her what she'd actually give him. She said what a brain needs is the raw material to build those three itself. Magnesium, zinc, B12, folate, vitamin D. Saffron, which she said has research behind it for mood and attention in children. L-theanine, which settles a child without sedating him, so he's calm and still himself. And she said it has to be in a form that doesn't go through the stomach, or you're back where you started. She wrote the name on the back of her appointment card and gave it to me. Bloomwise. I didn't order it in the parking lot. I'm the one who reads things, which is how the cabinet got the way it is. So I read the label about eight times over two days. Fourteen nutrients in one. Magnesium, zinc, the B vitamins in the form a body can actually use, saffron, L-theanine. No sugar in it. Nothing to swallow, they melt on his tongue. Two in the morning and two at night. Nearly everything I'd been buying in separate bottles, already chosen and already measured. The first three nights, nothing. Same doorway, same drink of water, same me on the end of the bed at ten thirty. I wasn't surprised. Nothing had ever worked before. The fifth night I was at the bottom of the stairs waiting for him and I stood there long enough that I gave up and went and put the dishwasher on. He didn't come down. Nine days in, he asked me for his melts at breakfast before I'd remembered them. After four years of arguing with him about every single thing I'd ever tried to get into him, that was not a small thing. Two weeks in, we got through a whole morning without anybody shouting. I was almost at work before I noticed my shoulders had come down. Three weeks in, he was falling asleep somewhere around nine, and staying asleep, and my husband and I sat downstairs and watched a whole movie on a Tuesday. About five weeks in, my mother came over for the weekend. She was here on the Saturday night when he went up at eight thirty, and she was still here twenty minutes later when he hadn't come back down. She didn't say anything about it then. On the Sunday, drying dishes next to me, she said he seemed easier. I said he was. And then she said, "I don't think I would have coped with that." That was all. She went back to the plates. Four years I'd been quietly agreeing with her, and she hadn't known she was saying anything. I'm not going to sit here and tell you this fixed my son. ADHD doesn't get fixed and Nate is still Nate. He came down at 9:40 last Thursday to tell me the Titanic had four funnels and one of them was fake. Some nights are still long. What I can tell you is that the nights don't stack up anymore. A bad one is a bad one. It isn't the beginning of a bad week for four people. This is the one we use: https://hellobloomkids.com/products/bloomwise-kids-meltable There's a 60 day money back guarantee on it, which is honestly the only reason I let myself buy one more thing after what's already in that cabinet. If nothing changes you send it back and you're out nothing. First order is 50% off, one kit per child, about a month each. I'd get more than one. I ran out once and it took us most of a week to get back to where we'd been. My mother rang last week and asked, before anything else, how he was sleeping. She has never once asked me that in four years.