At the end of my sixth grade year my mother decided that I needed to move to live with my father was living in Irmo, SC. He was living with a woman and her son. This was an altogether new chapter in my dealings with people. Joan my stepmother and her son Bryan were my new family that took some getting used to. Joan owned a cleaning business here in town and was not surprisingly very neatness oriented. To this day I maintain that Joan and I could not be more different. But sometimes people who are different teach us more about ourselves than those we consider our friends.
Bryan my younger step brother became the first real confidante that I had has as a child up until that point. I was an only child so I really did not have much experience with kids my age in a non-threatening situation. School had become a constant hardship and I had sought out people who were in similarly troubled situations.
That seventh grade year I started at what was then called Irmo Middle School. It was a tough time for me. Starting a new school, meeting new people and also the academic load was much heavier. The school had about as many people if not more in three grades as my former school had in all twelve grades. I don't recall what kind of grades I made that year but I'm sure that they were just mediocre at best.
In the eighth grade some of the teachers in my classes suggested that I see the school psychologist at my school. They felt that for some reason I wasn't reaching my potential as a student. The psychologist put me through a personality test, a Wechsler IQ test and also got to know my parents and I to get a sense of our family situation. I didn't realize this until my mother told me but the psychologist felt I had something called Attention Deficit Disorder. Apparently my father whom I was living with at the time did not feel it was a problem and so did nothing about it. He thought that I would probably grow out of it since it was similar to problems he had experienced in school. Well he was wrong.