When your household is a hot mess of ADHD, CPTSD and the collision of teen and menopausal hormones…
I sometimes think back to the 90’s, those halcyon days we were given permission to drink as much as the lads, told that girl power meant we could focus on our careers (and accompanying large nights out in Soho drinking Caipirinhas and Sea Breeze at the Atlantic or the Player) and have children later. But as the test bed of this era, no-one had thought through that it meant you would likely hit the menopause as your children hit teen angst, drama and hormones.
I think this time would be challenging enough without the collective PTSD and ADHD that channels through our living quarters. A couple of years ago I realised that I have always been ADHD, part of that group of women who realised that so much of their lifelong peculiarities and behaviours were actually ADHD (thank you ADHD Chatter). When people said, ‘I don’t know how you do all that’ — always with some random cake making or DIY in the background - they actually meant it. That the ladette culture perfectly fitted my need to calm my ADHD brain with booze and was the perfect mask.
When my eldest was young she was deemed ’spirited’, that term we now realise actually means neuro-diverse, the one at the baby groups that moved around the room in whatever guise she could from 9 months, was challenged with eating and sleeping from birth. We will never know how ‘ADHD’ she is without trauma, if it would be manageable, if she could draw on the strengths of it whilst mitigating the concentration lapses and impulse control.
Now in mid teens, PTSD has engulfed her, taken hold like Voldemort (incidentally the term she called her father for years) as the ability to block trauma expired.
Once the disclosures were in the open, once she had been allowed to stop seeing her father in the court battle she had hit depression. Her 7 year old self saying she didn’t want to go to Brownies anymore as she didn’t want to see other people experience joy. But this lifted until puberty struck and the damming realisation that she couldn’t fight the flashbacks and shadow memories anymore.
Over the past 3 years I’ve seen months of her lying in a darkened room with only TikTok and a vape as company (I buy her vapes as it is preferable to self harm), bought a steady stream of McDonalds and Meal Deals as it is all she can eat (until finances meant I have had to limit). Her school attendance drop to under 50%. I see the ADHD symptoms still, and whilst I know that trauma and ADHD have a high comorbidity wonder how we can be in such a melting pot.
Ironically now I have quit drinking (best thing I have did and thank you to the Reframe app and all of the women championing sober life which doesn’t look like AA but an active, positive life choice) I am buying Sourz and Lidl dupe peach schnapps and Malibu on a Friday night for her.
There have been days when I have gone to her room and found her, counting her fingers as her therapist has taught, to manage the waves of panic and crushing fear that have come from a night full of graphic flashbacks and horror.
All I have wanted to do is hurt myself to take away the pain of seeing her in such agony. Smash things (I don’t do either of these things, I do manage to quell) to block the sheer hatred I feel towards the man, her father, that has caused this.
And then I manage to get her to school. A relief, I tell her the distraction will be good, seeing friends will shift the horrors of the night.
And we get to school, and we are met with ‘why are you late’, ‘why are you in the wrong colour leggings’, ‘why haven’t you done your homework’.
When she is out of earshot they say; ‘she needs to be in school’, she is fine when she gets there, ‘she is just wanting an excuse to not come to school as lots of children do’, ‘she looks fine to us, we can tell she is using it as an excuse’.
And I want to smash things up. But instead I tell them they are insulting me and her. Her make up is armour that helps her face the world, the two hours of eyelash applying and hair straightening part of the process of her building the armour, that they haven’t seen her spend the morning controlling panic attacks.
