Mostly I prefer silence. My husband has always slept with a white noise machine (he says he doesn’t have ADHD but he does — take my word for it). I do have diagnosed and treated ADHD and that machine is called a noise machine for one reason: It Makes Noise. I detest it. I have always slept well, and I do want to hear the night sounds if I’m awake enough.

On to my daughter. In second grade, before formal diagnosis (I knew it, no one else did), she would sit at the kitchen table, a book on tape (with a plot) behind her on the countertop, and do her spelling homework which included the writing of sentences using the word. She could do all 15 of them, and very competently and originally, AND know the story to which she had been listening.

I understood this, but was – and still am – thunderstruck by the fact of that “noise” being not repetitive or “white,” but a whole other brain activity she did simultaneously.

She is in fact a linguistic — I don’t know what to call it, but “prodigy” no longer fits as she is 15 — talent. But nonetheless, that’s amazing.