From a fairly young age, I was always busy. I enjoyed doing things all the time and vividly recall waking up on Saturday mornings to ask my parents, “What are we doing today?” as if each weekend were an opportunity for a new adventure. As I moved through adolescence, I just thought I was good at multitasking and had mastered the ability to juggle multiple things at once.
When I first heard rumblings of ADHD, the picture that came straight to the front of my mind was a young boy literally bouncing off the walls, almost in a sugar-high state, going a mile a minute and couldn’t sit still. Call it a stereotype, a stigma, or maybe just a figment of society’s imagination of what we think ADHD looks like. Fast forward to my graduate classes, and I started to learn that ADHD isn’t an excessive amount of energy. It quite literally is a chemical imbalance and/or biological difference in brain functioning and structure. It cannot be “cured” or eliminated by changing a person’s diet. It is not “caused” by too much television, screen time, or poor parenting. In fact, I read in a book that, in ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), the individual has an “abundance” of attention, but in short bursts or on high-interest activities. Regardless, ADHD is becoming as common as a cold these days, and studies have a wide range of theories on what might be causing the increase.
Enter the McDonald family: mom, Janelle; dad, Ryan; oldest son, Brice & youngest daughter, Blake. Each one with a different combination of ADHD symptoms which, naturally, make each one of us hypersensitive to the others’ quirks and ticks. My husband was diagnosed in middle childhood; I received my diagnosis in the middle of perimenopause (more on that later) & we just recently completed a full psychological evaluation for our son, which came back with ADHD with a side of anxiety (shocking, right?). And the youngest one–she’s 110% ADHD with a focus on the hyperactive component. Our house is a mix of chaos, dysregulation & systems that we’ve tried to set up to help us function at the best possible level.
So how do we function in a house full of chaos? Some days, we are thriving. We use systems that we have put in place: locker shelves for backpacks after school, trays for schoolwork, bins for each family member to put their shoes. Other days, we are barely keeping our heads above water: clean clothes piled up in laundry baskets, bins of mismatched socks in 3 different rooms, blankets spread out across the loft from the last fort my kids built weeks ago and promise they are still using. Over time, we have learned to minimize tasks for the kids by breaking them down into manageable things they can accomplish on their own without overwhelming their entire nervous system. I have learned that when I can clean and organize one space, my mind becomes “less messy”; when I explained that to my husband, he started to understand where the whole “rage clean” phenomenon comes from & makes more of an effort to keep things in order.
Bottom line: life is messy these days, and when you live in a house with four different people whose brains work in very different ways, it can get to be exhausting. But I’ve found that as we start to understand how and why we feel the way we do, we can start to build systems, even as minor as they might be, to help make things at home feel like they are under control (even when they’re not!)
