The Up & Coming Magazine

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I was diagnosed with ADHD at 42. Though I can look back and clearly see several of the symptoms were bright lights in my childhood such as, overly talkative, an over sharer, starting projects and not ending them, short attention span, no attention span for what I deemed boring, my high grades and happy-go-lucky attitude overrode the desire to have a closer look. After all, it was the eighties and nineties, and we just weren’t assuming girls sat on the spectrum. However, after being surgically put into menopause, all these symptoms began to affect my day-to-day life. It should be noted that the symptoms of surviving childhood abuse can look identical to masking neurodivergence. It is common to overlook a variety of symptoms when you are always in survival mode. Months after surgery, what doctors first assumed was a hormonal imbalance ended up unraveling years of masked behavior of ADHD.

I was angry. I truly thought I was going to end up on Snapped as a woman who took the life of her husband because he was loudly chewing his chips that day. I am not typing that for dramatics; it really was that bad! After two doses of 10mg Adderall, I was a completely new woman. This was a life-changing event for me and my family. I could see the world in full color. I didn’t interrupt people. The boring “must-attend” work meetings that could have been an email became something I could sit through. I was no longer annoyed with the smaller details that make life beautifully chaotic. It was like taking a breath for the first time and feeling as though I could control the pieces of me that I never could figure out how to correct course.

Like most women who have late diagnoses, I ended up down the neurodivergent rabbit hole searching for symptoms and solutions for my children. At this time, my middle son had already been diagnosed with Autism and a few other learning challenges. However, I was about to embark on raising him full-time. His dad and I lived in different states. I have been the summertime, long holiday mom since he was nine years old. I had to learn what it was going to be like to create routines, schedule his many therapeutic appointments, introduce new foods while embracing his safe foods, and everything in between that truly never was my responsibility. It was daunting. Even more so because somehow, I needed to become the mom that helps him thrive while torturing myself with lists and predictability.

It’s true that in the neurodivergent world, the first bullet point of any success list is making a list. Keeping yourself organized and well-scheduled is how you make the days easier to get through is the advice of every professional I have spoken to. I hate lists. Let me repeat, I HATE MAKING LISTS. Yes, I’m shouting. While I will absolutely jot down things to do in a meeting to ensure I don’t forget, I have no desire to create a weekly menu, much less start and end every day the exact same way.

I digress. This kid really needs me to show up for him in the most predictable way. Dinner is at 5:30 pm EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. It is not at 5:29 p.m. Nor is it at 5:31 pm. It is at 5:30 p.m. sharp! His therapy appointment starts at 4 p.m. every Tuesday. It cannot start at 3:59 p.m., and it most certainly does not start at 4:02 p.m., which is normally when his therapist walks out to greet us. She works just as hard to make sure to be in the lobby at exactly 4 p.m. as she is fully aware that the level of predictability is what he is going to thrive in. However, he is sixteen, and there is a certain level of reality in the working world he is going to need to adjust for. Every day I am challenged with understanding where do I make his world comfortable versus push him through the pain of a schedule change? If you have the magic answer, I’m all ears. What I have learned is that the more notice of a change I can give him, the longer he is able to adapt and the less likely for frustration on his part.

For instance, we plan our weekly dinners on Sunday evenings. While we are all eating, I stand next to the fridge whiteboard and go through our specific days assigned to us in choosing what we are going to eat. It’s not rocket science since we rotate about five safe meals, but it does take some discussion and reminding the boys what we have now versus what we can go grocery shopping for. After a few months of creating this habit, I realized that if I was no longer in the mood for spaghetti on Tuesday, I could easily text my son at school about wanting to make a change without any real reaction from him. It seemed that if he was part of the discussion, stepping away from the predictable was acceptable.

I was so stressed about this weekly commitment; it didn’t dawn on me that he could be flexible. I started playing with this idea in other areas of our lives. Whatever we planned on Saturday could change that morning if I bounced the idea off him. Noticing these little things has made our lives ten times easier. However, I am also human. I don’t always pause long enough to remember what helps him as I shuffle two kids, a full-time job, work travel, writing, and keeping a pace of something that resembles me without the title of mom. The internal juggle is loud and vibrant. There is no escape, but there is coping.

One of my larger challenges that stems from childhood trauma is my inability to follow through commitments outside of a two-week window. Through many decades of therapy, I have been able to recognize and embrace this quirk about me. I decided I didn’t want to course correct but rather put tools in my basket for the life that exists outside of a two-week window. Add in ADHD into this equation, and I had to relearn what is or isn’t something I want to change about myself. I appreciate my ability to work well in a crisis and/or short-term projects. If someone needs rescuing, I am there! You need a room organized that I could do in a few hours, absolutely, give me a call. However, I had to lean heavily into my trauma education when climbing the ladder through the corporate world to create a plan that led to success. If I am honest, I left my ADHD undetected. For example, if I have a six-week project, I need to implement short-term strategies that keep me on task, organized, and interested throughout the duration of each step. However, something implemented into my work life doesn’t always fall so easily in my personal relationships.

Still, I am fortunate to be raising this incredible human being who desperately needs me to organize his life outside of two-week windows and keep the momentum. Do I dare implement the same strategies to keep my brain active? Absolutely. Is it working? Not always, but I don’t have the privilege of giving up. While I could never imagine life without being a mom, being a neuro-divergent human raising another neuro-divergent human is no easy feat. On my overstimulated days, I don’t get to phone it in. I have come to rely on screen time to give myself a break from his constant need for conversation and attention. I give direct communication about needing space to calm my mind before I make dinner. I have even had to create rules that state, “you cannot ask me about dinner before 7 am” to get through my morning cup of coffee. Which, of course, means that at 7:01am, we are discussing dinner. In so many beautiful, twisted directions, it is more than I can handle. It’s a daily struggle to remind myself to take a deep breath and not shout in frustration. It is a constant reminder that I must put on my oxygen mask first, while the child who is taller than me is unable to take a breath. It’s dealing with the ugly looks from total strangers who assume he is a spoiled child who wasn’t raised with manners when we are out in public and he loudly states, “that person smells really bad” or he wants to eat with his hands instead of a fork and knife. Or why is my 16-year-old climbing the rocks like a 3-year-old when clearly, they should know how to wait for a table. The ugly look of assumptions doesn’t go unnoticed as my hypersensitivity sees them all. The judgements of what they think both of us stand for hurt and remind us we don’t fit in.

In all the negativity that surrounds beating this stigma of what a child should act like by a certain age, I am also gifted with creating core memories that change his course. I love watching his vocabulary expand to describe emotions. The day he was able to recognize I had a headache without telling him was HUGE. That was the start of feeling empathy for others by reading body queues. I cried happy tears retelling the story to his therapist. Months of hard work teaching the same emotional intelligence lessons were paying off. The times he saved his allowance for a year to buy his brother a birthday present or ask them to go on a bike ride together, reminds me that he does participate and invites us all to create beautiful memories, too. Watching him go from an overwhelmed freshman in high school to stating, “I don’t want to ever change schools,” is just as rewarding. While it is easy to get lost in the chaos of our daily lives, when I step back to reflect on how life has changed having him around full time, I can easily think of all the goodness he brings to our life.

While he may not fit in everyone’s box of what a successful teen looks like, I have never felt like I fit in, and I am doing okay. It is my job to keep him safe, teach him how to think, and give him the courage to be uniquely himself even in a world filled with judgement and criticism. I cannot pretend to be an expert on raising children on the spectrum but, I am the expert of raising my own children. Their success story is all their own. It is a privilege I get to be apart from it, but it is not my path to pave.

The test is real, if you believe in that sort of thing. Somewhere, I was assigned this beautifully chaotic life to make sense of and iron out. While the challenges are a force to be reckon with and the human experience isn’t always that easy, can’t we all say that? However, I suggest the next time you are out in the world and see a grown child throwing a tantrum or a mom sitting at the park on her phone instead of playing with her kids, you pause and leave the judgements aside. You have absolutely no idea about the internal battles anyone is facing. You have no idea how many times I have had to discuss the same topic over and over while he works to contain it in an emotional and logical box that only he knows how to organize, and it’s only 8 a.m. Kindness is free. May we all have the grace to be kind to everyone in this messy life.

This was written by our contributing writer, Tiffani Morgan.