Odd Time Signatures, Explained

If any of you live with a drummer you’ll understand this.

For those who don’t, drummers are fascinated with splitting time into smaller parts, parts that they can then add, subtract, re-measure, and turn around into some amazingly esoteric piece of drummatica to amaze and delight their audience.

My middle son is a drummer — a really good drummer. He loves jazz musicians like Don Ellis who spent his entire musical career figuring out how to put a measure into “19″. Yeah….there’s something to bend your mind around.

But in an odd way, the drummer thing just fits this kid. ADHD and smarter than me, he’s been my biggest challenge from the day he was conceived just about. At age two I was convinced he wouldn’t live to be four. At four, I waas sure he’d flunk out of school by the end of first grade. I fought the medication thing for a long time and finally did my homework and gave into it. Once I’d shed all the preconceived notions and really did my homework (Tom Cruise, go to hell!), I felt as though I’d been freed from my little guilty “bad parent” prison.

Giving into the medication also meant facing my own ADHD….did you know that there’s a 30% chance that ADHD will pass from parent to child? So says my favorite online ADHD doc, WebMD’s Richard Sogn. Once A (not gonna publish my kid’s name here for everyone to see….he’d kill me) was on the meds and so was I, our family was on a fast path to living in those odd time signatures…

I’m convinced that the reason that A is such a good drummer has a relationship to his ADHD, and that all of us with ADHD wake, sleep, eat and run to a completely different rhythm than the rest of the world. I can remember being told as a child that I had an uncanny sense of time…could pretty much predict the time to the minute without a watch. Rhythm has always been at the center of A’s existence, whether it was feet moving, hands tapping, or even singing if he thinks you’re not looking…it defines him, even if his particular time signature is in “19″.

So this blog is about living in odd time signatures — signatures defined by the patterns and rhythms of parent and child who struggle to remain inside the normal flow of daily life even as we’re redefining it to fit our own special, fragmented and sometimes odd, patterns.

If you’re reading this and care, I recommend WebMD as a great resource for learning about ADHD, and their ADHD message boards aren’t so bad either. One of these days when I have a second or two I’ll put up some links to other areas, too, but WebMD is the primary resource for me these days.