Hi, Katie.
My darling daughter Miss KT was a challenge from the get-go. I carried her in a front carrier for weeks. She had horrible colic. She was intense. To add to the mix, her father (aka Useless Boy) was little help/support, and I had a demanding job with a one-way commute of nearly 2 hours.
I threw up my hands, requested a demotion, and we moved back to our hometown, where all the grandparents were. Continued intensity from Miss KT, like throwing herself on the floor hard enough to make her nose bleed at 18 months. Continued uselessness from her father, and we finally divorced. Then I had to ride herd on her and go to work and do everything else by myself.
Job change, bought a house, job loss...Miss KT started kindergarten and was - you guessed it - intense. She was fast and loud and just never let up, almost relentless. We struggled along for a couple of years, I remarried, and her fourth grade teacher suggested she be screened for ADHD. Textbook case. We struggled with finding the right balance of medications, changing when they stopped working, trying different ones, until she hit about 14.
She became total hell to live with. Demonic. Talked about stabbing people while they slept. I did not sleep at night. She'd slammed her bedroom door so many times it was hanging by a thread, and one day, she tore the door off and threw it at me. She ran my toothbrush through the toilet that she'd left backed up with a massive poop. We called the cops on her, and it seemed to make an impression for a while. She sold the city bus pass we got her, so I stopped buying them. She threw her lunch in the trash before even leaving the yard, I stopped fixing them. I would occasionally give her a ride to school if I happened to be running errands, but one day we made it three blocks from the house when she started up and I told her to get out.
I finally told her she was killing me and needed to go live with her father for the summer. Not permanently, we're in a much much much better school district. She proceeded to call my mother and cry that I'd thrown her out. She lived with my mom for nearly a year.
When she moved home, she had become, for the most part, a civilized person. medication compliant, helped around the house, polite and pleasant, neat and clean...graduated high school, did one year at junior college here and then transferred to a college in Santa Cruz. Spent a year there, until the college shut down, and decided to transfer to a college in Portland, Oregon. It took her a while to settle in, but she made friends, got involved with school activities, found a job, met her husband, graduated from college, got married, got a job...
She's been in Portland for almost five years, and she loves it. I'm happy for her. I do miss seeing her, but honestly, I didn't want her staying in our little nothing town, even for college. All of this is to say that yes, Katie, there is hope. Get the right supports in place (for Miss KT, it was insisting that she be allowed to graduate on the state requirements, not the no child left behind ones the district wanted) and read every scrap of paper that comes home, especially at the beginning of the school year.