During a recent phone call to my mom, she told me about how she was looking forward to teaching an ADHD course at a vocational college. I felt a familiar pang in my chest.
I was first diagnosed with ADHD at 23 years old (then re-assessed at 25 years old with results I am finally trusting two years later) during a rough patch where I moved from the US to the Netherlands for grad school during the pandemic.
My mom has been teaching this ADHD course for about twenty years, alongside her parenting courses, but I’ve never seen her identify with the condition. Outside of her ADHD course, in regular conversation, I have heard her speak on the various issues of people with ADHD, recommending ways they can overcome them, by giving examples of how a neurotypical person like herself, with more executive functioning, would approach such an issue.
So on this recent phone call with her, after she brought up the ADHD course again, I just asked her point blank, “Mom, why do you teach this course?”. She told me it’s because she has dyslexia, a learning difference, and knows how hard it is to navigate the world where people have certain expectations of what you can and cannot do, and the way she navigates that world breaks these assumptions. “For me,” she said, “school was a can’t, not a won’t”.
I got the impression that she teaches this class since she’s knowledgeable, she has been asked to do it, and it’s fun for her since it helps her give instruction to others on how to navigate cognitive differences using certain tricks/hacks. I was pretty touched by her explanation, it felt real and grounded to what I know about her, and matched the image she projects, of a compassionate expert. “And besides,” she quipped, “don’t you know that having ADHD is a super power?”.
All I could think about were the countless limitations and challenges that come with having this condition, issues that, after experts threw their hands up and said, “We don’t know”, were mostly then ignored by her and my dad throughout my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Unless, of course, they made my family look bad.
“Mom, I have ADHD,” I said, to which she responded, “oh yeah, that’s right”. I had told her three years ago, after receiving the first diagnosis. To enforce some of my boundaries, I declined to disclose exactly how I am dealing with it when she asked. I didn’t need the judgment or the lecture on what I could and should be doing instead.
She said “at least you weren’t jumping up and down on the walls and sticking your face under the soda fountain like a certain little boy we knew back in the day.”
“Well yeah,” I said, “I was a girl, I was expected to sit still and act appropriately otherwise I would lose my friends. Instead, I was a space cadet, never in my body, so no need to jump off the walls.”
“At least you made good grades,” she retorted.
“‘Cause my anxiety kept me going. I was terrified of failing and being exposed.”
She sympathized for a moment and then changed the subject. Our phone call ended on a good-natured, light-hearted tone. But the lack of acknowledgement of my ADHD diagnosis and experiences still stuck with me long after I hung up.
The literature on women/girls and ADHD when I was growing up was non-existent. How was she to know? But my cousin, who was born before me, was diagnosed. Sure, she had more of the bouncing off the wall and poor inhibition symptoms that made intervention to prevent disruption necessary for the sake of her classmates, but what about someone like me? I was such a miserable kid. It’s so frustrating.
My pain of having to deal with a misfiring and mis-wired brain was somehow my burden to bear alone since I developed the skill of keeping it to myself. I reached my breaking point during the pandemic, during the first year of grad school. With access to navigable healthcare for the first time, I was finally able to seek specific help for ADHD. I wonder what would have happened if someone took my feelings seriously even if they weren’t disruptive when I was a girl. And I used to wonder where the resentment brewed.
I feel as though there is a wall between my mom and me, where neither can speak our minds without the risk of hurting each other’s feelings. Otherwise, I would say:
Mom, I wish that back when you were a kid that your parents weren’t such dicks to you. What happened to you as a child was immensely unfair. Your dyslexia was disruptive to your family obsessed with their image and you not making the grade was an optics problem. Honestly, you probably struggle just like me.
I just wish somehow you had a blueprint for how to raise me without the pressure to make me look and act to some unrealistic standard imposed on you by your (toxic) family. I want authenticity with you, but each phone call, I wonder more and more if it is possible. I'm tired of knocking on a door that won't open.