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I Was a Ritalin Baby — Part One: Teddy Hot Fire
How to have ADHD in the 70s
When I was 2 years old, I drank a “household substance”.
Selsun Blue dandruff shampoo, to be exact. That was my first toxic ingestion, but not my last.
Photographic evidence above.
This didn’t happen because my parents didn’t have childproof locks; it happened because my mom turned her back for one minuscule moment. I entered our walk-in pantry, climbed up some drawers, stood on a countertop, and scaled a row of shelves to grab the bottle of intriguing, blue liquid.
My next adventure was exploring my father's 5’ tall, cherrywood dresser. I opened the drawers, stepped my way to the top. and proceeded to drink some High Karate after shave. Unfortunately, I don’t have printed evidence of this scandal.
Ingesting household substances was just the beginning of my nursery exploits. A few short weeks after my drinking binges, I would perform my next trick.
One afternoon, my mom put me down for a nap. After closing the door, she called her best friend Carol. As she gossiped on the 1970s gold wall phone, the one with the wildly long, coiled cord, she heard me yelling from my room.
