The Power of the Piddle

When I was a kid, nobody could really figure out what my dad did with the majority of his time. He seemed to move around the house looking somewhat laboriously engaged but at the end of the day he often had nothing to show for it and yet somehow appearing as though he desperately needed a nap. My mom, in a tone that left none of her agitation to the imagination, would call this, “piddling.” 

“Where’s Dad?” 

“Oh, he’s piddling, as usual.”

None of us had any idea all those years of sharing a house with the man that he had off-the-charts ADHD. 

In his fifties, he finally got diagnosed and with loads of education and a healthy dose of stimulant medication, a lot of my dad’s barriers to success removed themselves. 

But the piddling never did.

This many years later, in my own middle-aged life, I am beginning to view it through a more generous lens than my mom did. I choose to see piddling’s power instead of its imperfection. 

You see, while I soared through my adolescence and college years with unstoppable albeit procrastination-saturate academic and personal successes, I had no idea that I was paddling twice as hard as my contemporaries. It wasn’t until a dose of out-of-nowhere impairing anxiety at the onset of parenting small children that I began to frame myself as my father’s child. My Inattentive Type ADHD hadn’t been dormant underneath all that childhood and young adult success, it just had been unknowingly coped with by a decent IQ , sizeable protective factors like the safety nets of my loved ones filling in, and low-enough stressors not to overcome me. 

Until it did… and therapy and a neuro-psych evaluation tapped me into my root struggle: ADHD. 

Want to hear the bummer of my mid-life diagnoses? 

My dad passed away before I learned of this big thing about myself. 

So here I am close to his age when all those growing up in our house were so bamboozled by Dad’s perpetual lateness, alarming inefficiencies, and loveable incompetence – and I’m a female replica. And the one thing I want to do since my diagnoses, I can’t do: heal the annoyances I’d had with my sometimes-unreliable and always-offbeat ADHD dad in person.

Instead, I’ve healed them in his absence by treating myself with the kind of compassion and patience that I know he would have benefited from. And one of the ways I do this is to allow myself the freedom of unashamedly piddling. 

In a season when productivity is a requirement to survive busy family and parenting life, it definitely can be seen as irresponsible. After all, who has the time to walk around aimlessly in a bunch of different directions starting and stopping a bunch of different stuff and getting nothing truly worthwhile done? 

I’m jumping up and down saying, “Me. Me!” 

What I mean to say, to clarify, is that I make the time to piddle.

This carved-out time I call the “piddle block.” If I’ve planned well enough, I reward my efforts of staying on track 92.5% of the time with a free-form 7%. (The unaccounted for 0.5% is, obviously, when I take showers with cocktails J).  This sevenish percent is deliberately inefficiently spent and knowingly without purpose. And, best of all, I give myself permission to abandon whatever I start, if I start anything, guilt-free. Leaving a small devastating mess in my path of unfinished tasks is a small price to pay for the liberation and joy earned from allowing myself to engage in said tasks without so much pressure. 

I’ve noticed that sustained discipline to a structure, an organizational system, a routine, a locked-down regiment (all super recommendations for ADHDers)… well, that type of persistent  responsibility, when there are no breaks, can make my ADHD side sort of rascal-like. She (my ADHD) doesn’t love being suppressed and stomped out for lots of days in a row and when she is, this makes the other parts of me both a little less amazing and a lot more cranky. If I’m trying too hard to squelch Her, She becomes like a dieter who won’t allow herself any sugar: sad and mean and eventually apt to hide in the pantry inhaling an entire package of Oreos. I find that if I toss a cookie Her way from time to time, she’ll more successfully stay on track for the long haul.

That cookie is piddling. Piddling means that I design an allotment of time to let my brain go on an irresponsible little vacation, to let the sister off the strict diet, to let the puppy off the leash, and to just be. To be Really. Really. Irresponsible. With time, with resources, with space, with efficiency, with it all. 

My microwave is usually in the background doing its little reminder beep about the coffee warm up I’ve done in there as I’m pouring myself a new cup, and I don’t care. I start a decorating project and abandon it with nails and frames and hammers littering the floor like confetti beneath the half-done wall collage, and I don’t care. I get out five books I want to read and impulsively go back and forth between them reading just the sensational tidbits that interest me like a 1^st grader would do, and I don’t care. I waste time and run up and down the steps forgotten things on every floor a million times and I don’t care. I doodle excessively while talking on the phone in my robe, and I don’t care. I pull off when I see a yard sale sign even though I don’t have cash and end up having to apologize and put everything back, and I don’t care. I walk past the dishwasher a zillion times knowing the right thing to do is unload it but I don’t, and I don’t care. 

All the other minutes of all the other days, I follow my rules… I care. But when I set out to piddle, I set out to break all the rules… and I don’t care. My husband and my family and my house may not say thank you, but ADHD does. We decide we love each other more after the Piddle Block. It’s like a pressure release valve that brings me back to center.

My dad spent a lot of his time bringing himself back to center. His piddling may have driven us all a little crazy and I’m sure mine has the potential to drive my current housemates crazy, too, but grace abounds. For me now and for my dad, even after he’s gone. It is now that I realize: without a doubt, piddling is a worthwhile alternative to us ADHDers driving ourselves crazy.

What It’s Like Being a Mom Without One

My four-year-old was recently trying to grasp why Daddy had produced her a Grandma but Mommy hadn’t. We were in the van, just us two, after having dropped a million other kids off at a million different places, and I wasn’t in a particularly warm nor coddle-eriffic mood. I finally just said it: My mom is dead. 

The aggravatingly inquisitive type, she kept peppering me with follow ups. How did she die? When did she die? Where did she go when she died? When will you die? I forgot she was four for a second and found myself accelerating to the bottom-line sort of steeply, “There comes a time when all of our bodies are all done living, Sweetie. Everyone eventually dies.” 

To which she lost it. 

Flailing in her car seat, hyperventilating, she screamed between breaths, “I! Don’t! Want! To! Die!”

I wish I had my mom here to help me explain things better to my kids.

Lucky for me, I got to have my mom through teaching me how to put a tampon in, at my wedding to her charming son-in-law, and for the exuberant announcement that we were pregnant with twins. Not so lucky for me, I lost her before she could meet those twins and their subsequent siblings, before a peppering of mental health spirals I’d never seen the likes of, and before several cross country moves that left me feeling desperately family-hungry. Now at age forty if you asked me what grieves me most, that’s easy: that my mom was never able to hear the word from my babes she most longed to hear: “Grandma.” 

When it was starting to become clear that cancer was going to get her, I had a friend who had lost her own mom lovingly take me aside one day and say this: “Whatever you do, make sure you have all her recipes.” I’m thankful for this, because I made sure to secure every last one. Mom’s Angel Biscuits, her Bean Dip, her Fudge, her holiday Peanut Butter Balls… they will continue being made in the exact way she made hers. Once I lost one of these recipes and staved off the mounting panic by remembering I am not her only memory keeper… I had enough aunts with their own handwritten copies to serve as co-conspiring historians. 

Recipes aside, though, there’s so much that is lost. There’s this ring with blue sapphires surrounding two small diamonds shaping the loveliest of flowers all secured in white gold that I’d never seen her wear and made no sense to have found lurking in her jewelry box; she only wore yellow gold. Was it from an ex? Was it special to her in a way I’d love to know? I’ve asked and nobody can explain; its information I’ll never know. Lost.

But the biggest loss is the one I never had: my mom as a grandma. I still get a lump in my throat the size of Hawaii at the thought of the exceptional grandmother my kids aren’t getting. Just as bad is the reverse thought: the exceptional grandkids my mom isn’t getting. All the giggles, the baking projects, the playground trips, the personalized birthday gifts, the first haircuts, the lessons, the holiday traditions, the no-nonsense disciplining, the famous line by which Mom was known best – when they whimper over a skinned knee— “You’ll live.” 

I had no idea I was holding all of these expectations for my kids and my mother’s relationship until I realized there’d not be one.

How could I have? Right up until the end, I thought my mom was invincible. 

When a disfigured, unhappy mole on Mom’s shoulder first alerted us all to her melanoma skin cancer, my father and she were quietly cryptic about what lied ahead. “Just surgery to remove a cancer spot,” is what my brother and I breathed in over the phone, quite satisfied with the conclusive explanation. “Great, no worries then?” was where our appetite for inquiry and sixth senses screeched to a halt; we were away at college and clueless. What was kept from us was that my mom’s diagnoses was stage four status, nor did we know to look into what the word “metastasized” meant. 

Which is the only reason, months after the surgery to remove Mom’s “spot” and once things had in my mind gone completely back to normal, I would ever go into a line of questioning drilling straight down to the future. Filled with reflective levity and ignorant that I was treading on delicate ground, I asked Mom the question, “What are you most looking forward to in the life you have left to live?” My mom got quiet, then looked away towards something that was not me and said, “I’m looking the most forward to being a Grandma and watching you be a parent.” I didn’t understand that, when she looked back at me with pink-rimmed eyes, this wasn’t sentimentality of the general variety. Even though I didn’t know it, Mom was aware that the chances her cancer would show back up were staggeringly high and that she had no idea whether or not she’d get to have any of the things she most looked forward to. 

The cancer did show back up. Several more times, in several different organs. And my brother’s and my ignorance evaporated; Mom was in trouble. Between her seasons of wellness, she fought. She fought with everything she had, and she fought even when she didn’t have anything at all to give to her battle for survival. More surgeries, experimental chemo, clinical trials, radiation, hospital bed after hospital bed. But in the end, she died seven years after that college phone call. And that was also the day my twin baby boys were two weeks old.

So, she did get to exist as a grandma for a couple weeks. It’s just that she wasn’t very lucid or mobile, and I, tethered to a NICU with premies a couple hundred miles away, couldn’t introduce her grandchildren to her in person. The days on bedrest leading up to the birth of my babies and the days after their birth nursing them to health in a hospital were some of the hardest I’ve ever endured; I wanted to be a daughter to my mother in her final days but no one besides me could be a mother to my brand new babies. There were about thirty minutes, though, when I got to hold her hand. One of the greatest miracles of my life is that after my husband and I got the call that set us blazing on the three and half hour interstate path toward her, my mom held out until we arrived. She stayed alive for me so that I could have thirty minutes, and there we were: me a new mom, she a new grandmother. When I look back, I’m both aware of my gratefulness for that time and aware of its tragedy, the newness of both of our roles was not ripe enough to have one of them taken away. 

Now my babies are a total of four, ranging from middle schooler to pre-kindergartener. With the exception of the four-year-old who is now scarred for life thinking about her own imminent death, they are all developmentally capable of handling the complexity of their Grandma’s passing. And they know her well, too. I tell them story after story. I show them picture after picture. And, in-between these intentional sharings, they get me: a living, breathing daughter to their Grandma, one who often catches herself saying, “You’ll live,” over their mild injuries and the feeble attempts made at getting attention. 

It’s not always easy to be a mom without my own, but I know I’ve got a cheerleader. I can honor my mom by remembering that, even though her absence leaves a wound deeper than any skinned knee, I too will, in fact, live.

I Shouldn’t Have Gotten Off My Mental Health Meds and Other Confessions

I created this while smack-dab in a low mental health place over the Summer. My anxiety was causing my hand to no-joke shake with the paint brush in it, yet I felt so sure: everything I was going through (everything I ever go through) was material; it will take me somewhere.

Well, it happened again.

I feel like life for me over the past decade has basically been this: me scurrying around scooping up my marbles, then losing them again. Scoop em up, lose em again. Scoop, lose, scoop, lose.

The particular Marble Scattering that just occurred, though, I mostly did to myself.

In late Spring, I had successfully thrived through several consecutive months of strong mental wellbeing and successful management of my ADHD symptoms. I had all my personal/home support systems in check, was straddling clouds of inspiration and creativity, found myself plowing through to-do lists and social endeavors like a John Deere tractor, enjoyed almost all of my inner thoughts about myself and the world, and generally found life to be manageable, maybe even - dare I say it - easy.

Let me pause here to offer my medication backdrop: My anti-anxiety go-to med for these ten years has been Lexipro. I have done lots of personal development around acceptance of this gift from modern medicine; therapy and inner work have assisted in my slow descent off the pedestal that used to be a shrine to my ego. When anxiety first presented in my early thirties, I used to sit on that pedestal - suffering and panic-ridden - as if by not accepting the assistance of pharmaceutical intervention I somehow was stronger (albeit iller). But then I got wiser. I've written a "Medication Manifesto" to myself and have it tucked away in my journal for regular review, its core message that I am strong for all the work I put into my wellness - medication included - and that it's not cheating. After all, strong people accept help.

But, after having just explained to you how much comfort I had worked hard for surrounding the gift of Lexipro, I still had this quiet eagerness to get off of it. Without even consciously knowing it, I think I was secretly looking for enough evidence, enough stability, enough consecutive weeks/months of my marbles well-kept to warrant an off-ramp from anti-anxiety meds.

In May, I was solid. And I was ready to hit the eject button to my pal, Lexipro. I said, "Thanks, old friend. You were there for me when I needed you, but life is telling me I'm ready to move along now. I'm grateful for you, and I will now say my goodbyes. SEE YA!"

So, I did. I removed Lexipro from my regiment.

Oh friends, that was not the right move.

I don't mean to throw life under the bus (because it's just doing its thang, nothing personal of course), but shortly after I said ta-ta to Lexipro, I did unexpectedly lose my favorite housecleaner/laundrymanager/homeorganizer (my beloved Jane) and I did transition from school mode into summer mode with four kids around (I thought I had a balanced-out summer plan with proper self care but apparently not - the ample amounts of me-time I glean during the school year didn't transfer over) and I did have back-to-back houseguests (which sorta throws me off without enough reset time between).

Actually, to be fair, life only threw the first curveball in that list. The others I knew were coming. I was just too much of a dingbat to not account for them when I made my "I"m OK to go off Lexipro" decision. Like I said, I was in conquer-life mode when I made the decision, not prepare-for-the-worst mode. Oh, and also, I was on Lexipro when I made the decision to go off Lexipro. Kinda twisty, the way that works.

By early July, I had lost a couple marbles. I was instantly aware... on standby as I ramped up mindfulness meditation and self care as best I could. But by mid July I had lost the whole lot of those fucking things, my mind a pretty panicky and whacked-out place, my body affected by sleep loss, appetite loss, heart racing, and overall pretty darn shaky.

I texted my favorite full-disclosure people to fill them in and got back on Lexipro on July 14th.

It's been a slow return to mental health wellness since.

And, since I'm 76% not embarrassed about it, I'll say that because Lexipro was taking a much longer time to kick in and since I was forced to admit that I couldn't handle continuing to go downhill during the wait, I layered on a second medication to try to get some relief.

And I did.

So, here I am - a little beat up and weary - but better. Much, much better. And fully aware that anti-anxiety meds might be in my life for a lot longer than I was expecting. I can live with that.

I'll stop here to share with you what one of my favorite people gifted me as I was getting better:

 I was feeling like my inner tube might actually be losing air, but it turns out if you're breathing then you're doing the most important thing right and that must have meant my head was in fact above the water. 

Thank you, my dear friend who reminded me of this when I needed it most.

Now onto a confession that is related by a thin chord to my Summer/Early Fall mental health bottoming-out.

It probably comes as no surprise to those who know me that I'm a sharer. I'm often filterless, No Holds Barred, unbridled, honest. Sharing by writing often exposes me further, and that's by choice. I tend to just wholeheartedly put it out there. This style isn't for everyone, I know. (Some of my peeps probably silently wonder, "Does she know she can have a thought and keep it to herself?") I've adopted two philosophies surrounding this: #1) That, while my sharing might not be for everyone, it might just be for someone. #2) That, in a time when public consumption of personal information is often one-dimensional (think social media), the light shining on only one surface area of the complex stones of our lives, I'd like to offer for public consumption the gritty angles, too... the unpolished, rugged surfaces of our crazy geodes. The spotlight belongs on those parts, too, because if those angles of all of our lives are only allowed to be seen by the darkness, then that darkness and its bedmate - isolation - will start consuming the best, glittery parts, too. Darkness, the selfish bastard.

On to the confession.

I liked my dress in the picture below. I had found it by sheer luck at a consignment shop just in the nick of time for the fanciest gala of the year Scott, through work, invites me to. Bag in hand, I skipped out of that shop like a toddler with an ice cream cone, a childish grin on my face. At this point, I was finally feeling good internally, I was pumped about a steal of a deal on the most glamorous dress I've ever owned (frugality for me is like crack cocaine), and was genuinely eagerly to go on a date night with my husband knowing I'd feel pretty.

So, when the night came, I had one of our kids take this picture on the way out the door and no sooner had I proofed it (no lipstick smears? all four eyes opened? how're my boobs... even and in the right places?) did I plaster the hell out of it on my Facebook page.

Can I admit that I checked probably six times throughout the gala to delight in the Facebook comments and likes? OK: a dozen times. OK: fifty.

Gaaaah. Why am I such a shallow son of a gun?

My closest peeps knew this was a happy ending photo to a Marble-Losing period of time (which is probably why I fell a bit into social media self-involvement in wanting people to see it). The other twenty-two and a half Facebook friends of mine - the ones who haven't seen me since high school or college or acquaintances from church/school or even my neighbors on the street - they don't know the following:

1) That the weight loss that allowed me to fit into this dress was the unhealthy kind, the kind not won voluntarily nor by hard work. In fact, during the past couple months, I'd look at my body in the mirror and frown at my diminishing, gaunt figure, thinking I was wasting away. Since, with my anxiety, my appetite decreases and feelings of nauseousness increase, this weight loss was a mental health by-product, not a get-skinny phase.

2) That whatever toneness that might present in this photo is a product of exercising almost daily during this bad patch; the endorphins offered by a cardio work-out were some of the only things that made me feel mentally better. So, while I am a lover of running, I don't necessarily normally run every single day. I had been running every single day. Again, this extremeness is a mental health by-product, not a get-fit phase.

3) That the smile on my face is genuine and real and relatively freshly so. Most pictures from the previous period would not have been so, given that I was struggling so big time.

4) That my front yard normally looks like that of the family in "Overboard" before Goldie Hawn straightens them out: we don't take good care of our belongings or our lawn. The frame barely cuts out bikes, balls, cardboard boxes used for play, toys, weeds, and a gaggle of kids. Glam is not how we roll normally, which, along with reasons #1-3, is why this picture can come across as ashamedly deceptive.

It's ultimately ok to get gussied up by comparison to my normally sloppy life. It's even OK to share it. Just as long, in my belief, as I'm sharing all of the other difficult angles of my life in an equally bright light... which is what I hope this post does.

Thanks for hearing out my most recent dip in mental health.

It's. All. Material. It'll take me somewhere... hopefully to the someone reading who needs it most.

What Is a Stay-At-Home Mom To Do When She Hates Doing The Stay-At-Home Things?

I was at Snooze slurping up a delectable chai with a girlfriend when I confessed all my help. She, a full-time working mom and the task-master wizard of her busy family, listened to me intently as I listed out the employees on my dole. “So, I have this gal who does our house’s big deep cleans and then another gal who does light tidying and takes care of all the laundry a couple times a week and this other gal who babysits one day a week during the after-school hours to give me a break from, well, the after school hours.” 

P.S. I’m a stay-at-home mom. 

P.P.S. I’m a stay-at-home mom with no job and thereby one who earns right around nada per year (to the nearest dollar). 

P.P.P.S. I’m a stay-at-home mom who makes no money yet shells bookoo of it out to do the stuff that conventionally falls under the purview of a stay-at-home mom

I took a breather at this point in my breakfast date to say what I’m sure sounds like the obligatory see-I’m-not-a-snot snotty thing to say. But, truly, if you knew me you’d know I mean it in a big way.

“I am actively grateful that I can gift myself with this help. These women save me.”

And, since I was on a vulnerability roll - at least three confessions deep - and since she was nodding and smiling encouragingly instead of grimacing at all I’d said so far, I laid on my final one: 

“My therapist suggested the other day that it might be a good idea to hire a ‘personal assistant,’ someone to manage my emails and school communications and papers and finances and RSVPs and birthday-gift-purchasing and all things administrative. Basically, this person would keep me on track. I can’t believe the support I already have, when there are millions of moms who would kill for it, but I really can’t believe how much it excites me to think of the possibility of a personal assistant, too. Do you think I’m crazy, as a stay at home mom, to consider it?”

She looked at me square in the eyes and said, “No. No, are you kidding? Not at all. Because the smartest individuals I know have a solid handle on which things take away from their sparkle, find ways to get all that covered, and are then that much more available to sparkle at what they sparkle at.”

I’m pretty sure she didn’t use sparkle that many times, but my memory and vocabulary aren’t as good as hers, and I think you get the gist.

I believe her. I really, really believe her. I can even hear myself coaching someone else who might be boggled by aspects of their job with the same sensible speak. But, for reasons I actually think I understand, I need to hear it said over and over again to me, in my job. 

And those are the reasons: 

1) Because it’s me, and I know you would probably raise your hand high if I asked you if you were harder on yourself than everybody else in the world the way I am with myself. That’s chicken shit, and I know it. I just need a chai and a pal to occasionally remind me of the stench of the lie that I don’t get the same grace I give [most] everyone else (cuz I ought to)

2) Because my job is such a tricky one. I know its value and I want to be in this SAH profession, but the fact that it doesn’t bare money screws with me, since everything I offput (the stuff that takes away from my sparkle) requires output (cold, hard cash). It feels hard to justify. Especially since right now my actual sparkle looks like: reading, writing, running, painting, meditating, socializing, volunteering, and playing. It’s not like in my free time I’m teaching illiterate kids to read or fixing the world’s problems. 

WAIT. I KID YOU NOT. I JUST DID A FUNNY LITTLE THING. 

As I was writing the very, very first draft of this article, I spun out the last sentence of that previous paragraph, the one in italics, as a bonified joke. As in: It would be different if with all the extra time spared from doing mundane domestic tasks I was somehow educating children or making my surroundings a better place in a global sense. 

Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

That IS what I do as a SAHM. With the help of my husband, I – among other things – teach my kids to read and am rearing them to be the type of humans that pay attention to the world’s problems, hopefully putting some elbow grease into helping solve them.

That’s where I sparkle. 

[Except on the days when I don’t feel like reading to them and the days when I don’t feel like making everything a teachable moment. Those are usually the days I am teaching my kids a whole different lesson: how to cuss. But - on all the other days - I sparkle.]

As for the math issue (my input and output charts not making business-sense), I work on choosing gratefulness instead of guilt that our family has the resources for my SAH budget to be persistently in the red. And what I’ll say to you out there who don’t have this luxury: Creativity is a powerful thing, and there are so many different iterations of my particular framework for farming out stuff. I outsource, but you could trade services (you offer interior design expertise and they plant your flowers, you cut their kids’ hair and they give your house a deep clean) or maybe you do pick up a little work that pays or maybe there’s a neighborhood Grandma/Grandpa who, when asked, could be a source of much volunteerism. The key is to get outside any thinking that says you have no choice. Creativity can be just as much a lucrative source as money.

So – back to the story – I think I’m going to get myself a Personal Assistant, my fourth employee, while serving in a job that brings in lots of value but no cash. 

And I’ll have another piece of my peace back to go do all that sparking.

How to Heal an ADHD Fog when a Consequent Anxiety Swirl Is Trying Its Best Not To Let You

Your brain won’t work, which is challenging enough. But then your mind goes berserk. Meanwhile, life doesn’t stop to accommodate your below-baseline functioning. Read on to discover the five things I do during periods when both my ADHD and Anxiety flare up to annoyingly debilitating proportions. 

I compartmentalize my cabeza into two entities: the brain (cognitive) and the mind (mental/emotional). I think of ADHD as a cognitive issue and Anxiety as a mental/emotional one. For me, BOTH go haywire on occasion at the same time, feeding off of each other’s negative impacts like ill-behaved schoolyard bullies. 

It goes likes this: When my ADHD symptoms heighten, so too does my anxiety about not having the consistency or sharpness of my cognitive faculties to do the particular life I have to do. ADHD up / Anxiety up. Except that it doesn’t end there, because the nature of anxiety is that it is selfish: it sweeps up all the scraps of energy we’ve got, cognitive and otherwise (and remember, there’s not much of the cognitive kind to start with in this ADHD fog), and sucks it into its black, scary, bottomless hole. So it’s more like this: ADHD up / Anxiety up / ADHD up higher / Anxiety up higher…

When this happens for me, I’m not going to lie: It. Is. Hell. It starts with me feeling an edge of overwhelm, then goes to me feeling completely and totally stupid, then goes to me feeling panicked and both my heart and my thoughts slamming hard and fast in my chest/head pretty much all the time. 

Allow me take you on the wild ride that is an ADHD/Anxiety flare-up:

*ADHD means I can’t be productive.  Anxiety means I can’t relax.

*ADHD won’t let me solve problems. Anxiety makes me think I have problems I don’t actually have.

*ADHD makes it hard to focus. Anxiety keeps me inside my head, making me even less available for the things I already have trouble concentrating on.

*ADHD makes planning difficult. Anxiety, a control freak, convinces me I need to plan everything down to the tiniest of detail.

*ADHD makes it so that any task requiring my brain feels hard. Anxiety, consequently, makes my heart pound and my pits sweat every time I approach a task requiring my brain. 

*ADHD makes small things I did before with ease seem big. Anxiety makes small things I did before with ease seem bigger.

*ADHD makes it difficult to keep up with life’s demands. Anxiety tells me not only that I’m falling behind on life’s demands, but that that means at any given moment everything will fall apart.

*ADHD makes me nervous I’ll screw up in situations when I can’t rely on my brain. Anxiety picks up steam and becomes a beast of its own, making me nervous without pinpoint & all the time.

*ADHD makes my filter broken so that ALL the feels, thoughts, memories, to-dos, stimuli, choices, and shades of grey of both my internal and external world are striking me at once. Anxiety tells me if I let one slip through the cracks and go unaddressed, the sky will fall. 

*ADHD makes me forgetful, confused, unable to figure out basic things, and communicate awkwardly. Anxiety makes me worried I’ll get found out any moment that I am forgetful and confused and unable to figure out basic things and unable to communicate smoothly. (You can see the flashing signs here segwaying to social anxiety)

*ADHD makes me even more frazzled when I’m rushed or under pressure. Anxiety tricks me into thinking I need to be in a state of rush and pressure. 

*ADHD makes me perform unintelligently. Anxiety makes me feel scared.

Here’s the first thing I want to say to you if you are in this place right now: You are not alone, because I am just now crawling my way out of this very place; you’ve got a soul sister in me. Here’s the second thing I want to say to you if you are in this place right now: find a moment later today when you are distraction-free and maybe wearing ear buds with relaxing, classical music piping in, and read these five tips. I promise, they won’t tax you, they’ll help you. 

1) G.O.Y.I.: Get Off Your Island

There are two ways I know to do this:

a) To [re]read ADHD resources. I bust out my copy of Sari Solden’s “ADHD in Women” and log on to ADDitude magazine’s online resource and check out blogs written by ADHD moms and dust off my stacks of articles and clippings written by ADHD specialists or just plain ole people like you and me (See? You can already feel successful because you’re doing it now!). 

There are hazards here: I have to laugh because during a particularly rough spiral I dutifully followed my own advice and got on ADDitude magazine’s online resource. Thinking it would make me feel better, I was attempting to read about new research surrounding the validity of ADHD as a health crisis. STRIKE ONE. So many stats I couldn’t follow or remember! So much data I couldn’t synthesize! (And all the pop ups! I know online marketers gotta online marketing, but SPARE US, the ones who can’t redirect worth beans). Heart beat quickening! When I finally realized that line of academic ADHD reading wasn’t helping, I switched to the articles that were from ADHD coaches/therapists with all sorts of organizational strategies and advice. STRIKE TWO. That just stressed me out! Feeding my family and bathing felt like gargantuan tasks... there was no way I could make my way to Target to buy a new basket system or install a new time management app. Heart beat quickening! (Even though my anxiety said: Girl, if you don’t act now on that organizational system, EVERYTHING will fall apart, I told her to stop having a cow and that I’d stay on my couch drinking my tea, thank you very much.). So, what I’m saying here: AVOID reading anything that makes you feel you have to do anything. Now is not the time to implement strategies, to add anything. That requires cognitive juice and you have NONE. You’re sort of in crisis and folks in crises don’t need MORE (at least not at first); they need to feel not alone.

The purpose of this reading is support. When I touch in to the ADHD world, reading about brilliant men and women who struggle with basic things and mental health sidecars in the same way I do, it makes me feel oodles better. Nothing’s changed. My ADHD is still there and my anxiety is still there. And life is still hard while I’m waiting for this distressed time to subside. But what it does is this: It stakes down a bridge leading me from my little isolated island to the vast set of experiences/struggles of others like me. And that’s worth its weight in gold. 

b) To rely on your FDP (and maybe no one else). FDP stands for Full Disclosure People. I have three: my husband, my beloved mother-in-law, and my bestest girlfriend. Mine happen to all be neurotypical, so they don’t have to be folks that “get it” first-handed. They just need to be nonjudgmental, curious, supportive, patient peeps who have your best interest in mind. I have the good fortune, probably due to the fact that my ADHD is inattentive type, of not behaving that much differently in my ADHD/anxiety spirals (risky behavior and impulsive decision-making not my Achilles tendon). If there’s anything that shows on the outside, it’s probably running around in circles getting nothing done, tightening my grip on everything in an effort to control it, losing my funniness because there’s no quick wit to be found, and socially acting awkward since my mind is so blank and I’m having such difficulty following the pace of conversation. That’s just the outside. The inside: I’m a freakin mess: panicked, filled with self-doubt, and my physical body perpetually worked up. 

My point: My husband doesn’t even know unless I tell him. So, I do. I tell him and the others where I am with my struggles, what I’m doing about it, and ask them if they have any reflections themselves. I let them know what I need from them: to be treated a tad more tenderly than usually. I tell them they might notice me backing away from commitments, even with them. I ask for them to see this as taking care of myself, not something frightening like withdrawal or isolation. I tell them that I like when they ask about “it” but that I might say I don’t want to talk about it long or at all. And I ask them to treat me otherwise normally, not holding back on telling me their stuff, both good and bad.

In doing this, I am instantly sharing the island I previously inhabited alone with my favorite three people. THAT feels a lot better, too.

There’s a reason I specify to keep the number you share with down: Not everyone is a) as nonjudgmental, curious, supportive, and as patient as your FDP nor b) equipped to handle or understand conversations around learning disabilities and mental health. 

I’ve made the mistake - in the name of authenticity and vulnerability - of sharing what I’m going through with folks who have scarcely had a wonky mental day in their lives and those who put me in “weird” box from that day on and those who it made feel so awkward and uncomfortable that I found myself wanting to give them a hug. I hate to encourage faking it. But putting on your big girl/boy undies and tromping through as best you can with your mouth button-lipped – except with your trusted FDP – is OK. You get to choose who you invite on your island, and I say: choose carefully. 

2) O.B.L.: Operate on a Basic Level

Already, when I am at steady baseline, I make sure my protective factors are high. What I mean by this is that, since life as a person with ADHD is more challenging than life as a neurotypical, I need to bubble wrap myself with loads of self-care, in fact loads and loads of self-care. As a SAHM of multiple kids with their own special needs, this means farming out many of the household tasks under my charge, saying no to lots of volunteer stuff others seem to do with ease, making sure my calendar doesn’t get too filled, and doing lots of hobbies that promote relaxation.

But when I find myself below baseline, in one of these ADHD/Anxiety swirls, I Bubble-Wrap-Myself on steroids. I O.B.L. Again, your Anxiety will have something to say. She (Anxiety) will tell you that the only way to exist in your family, in your work, in your home, in your life is to eat on china (not paper plates), guarantee all major food groups are included in dinner (not just Taco Bell), fold and put away the laundry RIGHT NOW (not leave it in the basket for family members to pluck from), obsess about the work project due next week since a month ago (not trust that your planning is on track), and keep every minute busy and filled (not sit on the couch watching Season 1 of Golden Girls) – and then She is going to tell you that if you don’t fulfill all these requirements, people are going to notice and be suspicious/judgmental of you. Ignore that Bitch. J

The only way to heal, I’ve found, is to convince myself that I need to heal… I need to practice rest and relaxation as best I can (and hush Anxiety). And that means being OK with a very, very basic level of functioning. What to do is this: Take a look at the tasks under your charge ongoingly and in the next few weeks. Then slash all the ones that can be slashed (Reality means there’s certain stuff you cannot remove, and that’s ok because you’re offloading the rest). Paper plates, carry out, slacking on all areas of home management, not writing thank you notes, saying no to invitations, buying gift cards instead of the perfectly thoughtful gift, avoiding chaotic environments like the grocery store and retail shopping, taking a hiatus from volunteer work, asking coworkers to temporarily fill in on tasks that overwhelm you, not returning unurgent phone calls, letting the kids watch more screens, and lounging or piddling with all that spare time – for the time being – is my plan. It doesn’t sound like a productive plan, but it IS going to get me back on my feet faster, reducing my ADHD and anxiety, and I call that productive. 

3) Mantra & Ear buds, Ear buds, Ear buds.... 

So, I just got finished encouraging relaxation and yet relaxation is the very thing my head and body won’t seem to let me do very well during one of these spirals; figuring out what to do with myself feels intimidating. Here’s me: “I finally found a way to clear out stress-free space for myself and deciding what to do with this time is actually making me anxious. What gives???” 

Ironically, relaxation often involves the brain. For example, I can’t read for very long when I’m in this space, even light pleasure reading. Readingconfuses my brain! As a solution, I recently came up with the idea of listening to an e-recording of a book, but logging onto the library website to reserve an e-book online fried my muddled brain (couldn’t figure it out), and I gave up. SHIT! Even journaling, something that normally is very therapeutic, can become obsessive and unhelpful (since I am confused about what to say and how to say it during these times). DOUBLE SHIT!

What I try to do is piece together as much cognitive-free self-care as possible (usually exercise, meditation, art, massage, and getting wrapped up in a binge-worthy TV series or juicy movies) and for all the other hours and minutes of free time that I’ve cleared out and even while I’m conducting normal daily tasks, I wear ear buds and practice a mantra. The ear buds help filter out extraneous internal and external stimulus, which is usually calming. The mantra brings me back to my body through my breath, which I find easily gets shallow and tight without proper attention during these seasons. My mantras are usually two sentences, one on the belly-inhale and one on the belly-exhale. My favorites are:

“Everything is OK. One thing at a time.”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff. Slow your ass down.”

“It’s all material. It’ll take you somewhere.”

“Now is not forever. Be here now.”

“When you get in a jam, there’s always another way.”

“Stop worrying over yourself. No one cares.”

“It’s the ADHD and anxiety. It’ll end.”

“Be in my body. Be in my body.”

4) F.T.C.: Force The Calm (and get sloppy) 

My mindfulness meditation practice has taught me that it’s not helpful to force anything. Striving is to be replaced with “being.” Control and force replaced with “acceptance.”

Sorry meditation, I’m straight up going rogue here. 

When my Anxiety is putting its most alarming foot forward, working up my body and mind from sun up to sun down, I employ the F.T.C. method. I Force. The. Calm. Since Anxiety is tricking me with panic, I trick it back with forced chill. This requires thespian skills, because it’s acting the way you want to feel instead of how you’re actually feeling in hopes that the two will meet in the middle. 

Here’s what I mean: I walk like 1/10 the speed my body/mind says I should, like I’ve got all the time in the world. Even though my muscles are tense as hell, I sit and stand in a leisurely posture – flopping my arms and legs around haphazardly like I don’t have a care in the world. I even force myself to be sloppy with time and belongings, loosening up despite how tightly it feels I need to hold on. I grab the first thing in my drawers to wear, instead of trying to work at matching something. I speak more purposely slowly, too – not trying too hard to communicate well or clearly – just slowly.   

What I’ve found is that if I show Anxiety that the world will stay on its axis even when I’m slow, sloppy, and yield to my ADHD disorganization instead of showing it who’s boss by over-working, then I reduce Anxiety’s power over me. And my ADHD likes the slow, sloppy pace, too… my cognitive performance generally improves when I’m not rushing it along. When I’m back in the saddle, I’ll re-employ all the strategies that keep me on time, with the right belongings, wearing matching clothes, and possessing a more erect posture. But for now I F.T.C. and get OK with sloppy.

5) S.A.E.C.: Smile At Every Chance  

I foolishly signed up to volunteer on a committee’s exec board in the role of “Nominations.” Basically, this meant that over the course of the year I was responsible for “nominating” folks to fill the twenty-some volunteer positions on the committee for the following year. In an ADHD/anxiety spiral, I bowed out of my Nominations exec board position altogether. This felt flakey and shitty, and I was doing lots of self-loathing. Then, I decided to do something different: LAUGH. Because, seriously. Can we all see the irony of me hunting down someone to fill my vacant Nominations slot when the job requires filling people in slots? 

S.A.E.C. can be about your own F-ups or it can be about looking up at the park and seeing a three-year-old accidentally nail his older brother in the groin with a kickball. Life is mostly ridiculous and absurd and funny, and the more I pay attention to its ridiculousness, absurdity, and funniness, the more I am offered a touchpoint that has nothing to do with my own problems, a break from me. 

Watch movies that make you laugh, find Youtube bloopers that make you snicker, allow your loved ones to kid and chide, and most importantly – during this time when you may be convinced to approach yourself with rigidity and legalism – decide that you won’t take yourself too seriously. It’s just so much better to crack a grin at how much moosh is swirling around in that brain of yours instead of beating yourself up about it (and no one’s noticing as much as you think they are anyhow). 

In closing, take heart and be kind to yourself while you are waiting for your ADHD and Anxiety to heal, for your cognitive sharpness and emotional peace to return. I PROMISE: it will. 

                       (and email me at runnintj@yahoo.com if you need me to convince you)

Five Things I Learned The Hard Way This Summer

1) The spread is real. 

Here's the thing: I like my spread. I have four kids aged 4 to 12, and it’s cool that way. But did you know that a four year old's idea of summer fun is different than a 12 year old's idea of summer fun? I mean: can't they just morph to a common interest level, say the average of an 8 yr old development or so? THAT, I could deal with. I could go to google and type in “Summer Shit 8 Yr olds enjoy...” And BAM. That would be what we do together every single mother loving summer day. But no. I have a 4 yr old who cares about 4 yr old stuff. A 7 yr old who cares about 7 yr old stuff. A 10 yr old who cares about 10 yr old stuff. And a 12 yr old who is - well - a tween.

I was on a walk with a friend asking her if her oldest is such a damn party pooper all the time and she says, "What does your oldest say no to?" I said, "Well, just yesterday I tried to convince him to go to the zoo and when that got shot down I tried the splash park." And she's all like, "Tricia, those aren't age appropriate activities for someone who's 12." 

And I felt equal parts enlightened and pissed. Because I had to strap on a bathing suit and pretend to have fun stomping around in a concrete area at said splash pad that's basically a glorified sprinkler with my preschooler at the ripe, wrinkly age of 40... HOW COME MY KID CANT SUCK IT UP?? That’s the pissed response. The enlightened one was more ashamed, “You dunce... you’re not aging up with your kid. Get more creative and he’ll come alive.”

But I don’t know if you know this:  creativity and exhaustion don’t live together. Maybe I’ll just give him a sedative next time before I force him to dance around in the water with us. I know I’d have appreciated one.


2) You lose all ability to socialize normally.

On July 7, I managed to only be late to a hair cut appointment by 15 minutes. Luckily, Julie was still willing to make magic happen with my haircut. Now, Julie and I do very well together and normally - I’d like to think -  I am a bubbly force in her day. But on this particular day at this particular point in the summer, I really was having a hard time forming thoughts or sentences. I was trying really hard to follow her words and then make words of my own, but not really doing a bull's eye job. There was a pause between fragmented attempts at speech and she tried with this: “How was your fourth?” I immediately felt scrambled... how do I sum it up? So I went with, “She’s a force. She’s got straight blonde hair and gets wound up like a top faster than lightning and I’m convinced she’s quite definitively smarter than me.... [pause] She’s something.” 

I’m like: HOMERUN!! Self, you just nailed a character analysis in a coherent way in less then 45 minutes! I admit, I was sorta smug about my performance. 

Until Julie said: “Cool. I was meaning... like... the Fourth of July.”

We both laughed. Because sometimes insanity is funny.

#3) Plans to organize are for people who follow through. I am not one.

It was around the time I accidentally unearthed a bag of misfit game pieces and homeless legos and ridiculous pencils erasers I hadn’t remembered putting in Sullivan’s closet and hadn’t been touched FOR FIVE YEARS that I announce: WE ARE GOING TO SPEND THE FIRST WEEK OF SUMMER DEEP-TIDYING OUR ROOMS!

Each kid had an assigned day that first week of summer with my personalized attention and I was so excited about the blanket system. In the hall outside each room on Tidy Day lie three blankets. EVERYTHING in the bedroom gets hauled out. EVERYTHING. And placed on one of the three blankets: #1) items that belong elsewhere in this house, #2) items to pass along/donate, and #3) items that return to the bedroom in a place that makes sense. Oh, and a massive trash can for CRAP. 

And I did it! I did it, people! With every kid! (Lie: I worked from oldest down and by the time I got to Campbell I was tidy-ed out. Her room might this very second have apple cores in the closet for all I know). 

But - and here’s where I fail in most projects I start - I quit early. I’m picturing here BossBaby swiping the cookie back from the tubby baby’s hands: “Cookies are for closers.” Well, I don’t deserve a cookie, because I didn’t close. I got as far as consolidating all the rooms’ “donate” and “re-home in our house” items precariously stacked onto two blankets upstairs. 

The end.

That’s where they still are. 

That’s where they’ve been since June 6. 

So now, instead of having cluttered rooms, we have a cluttered hallway that blocks the rooms. 

Perfect.


#4) I have no love in my heart for showcasing.

Now that my kids sign up for summer stuff based on their interests, we have onboarded "specialty camps." Let me help you understand this... You pay a bagillion dollars for a five-day-long experience of 2-4 hours each day for your child to expand their knowledge in ________. Fill the blank with whatever you like: horseback-riding, pottery, ice-sculpting, the Steeplechase, bedazzling... if you can think it up, somebody's making money selling this stuff.

AND THEN ON THE LAST DAY (usually Friday, when all you want is a Bloody Mary) THEY REEL YOU BACK IN TO WATCH A "SHOWCASE." This summer, I've sat through a cooking class showcase, a rocket launch showcase, and a writer's symposium showcase. 

a) Do these people not get why I sign up for summer activities? (Teaser: Cuz I don't want to be an active participant in parenting for a chunk of time - all five days of it, please.)

b) I want my money back. At least 1/5 of it.

5) Every week is distinctly different. 

When people around me say things like, "We found our summer rhythm." I suddenly feel like I am not a native English speaker, because WTF. What. Foreign. Language. Are. You. Speaking.

Here’s rhythm. The school year goes as follows: It begins with specific daily start times and end times five days a week. 9 months go by. It ends. 

Here’s summer: one week the activity you sign up for is drop off at 9:12 and pick up at 12:44. Pack a lunch. No peanuts. Bring 8 forms on first day. The next week the activity is drop off is 11:00 but we’re going on a field trip so if you’re later than 11:10 we’ll leave without you and make sure you sunscreen, bring a lunch that’s vegan, a snack that’s under 4 ozs, have your immunization records tattooed behind your child’s ear, and only your spouse, your step-grandmother or your sister’s goldfish - all with background checks - are eligible to pick up. By the way, that’s at 5:22. 

Take weeks 1 and 2, add a bunch of other original, obscure details that one must take turns shedding then memorizing anew each weekend that buffers these bite-sized schedules and that’s what weeks 4-9 of summer look like too. 

I’d take Groundhog Day over and over over this level of freshness. 

Rhythm = August 12, the first day of school. 

Bring it. 

For other hilarity surrounding Summers Past, click here.

For

Like a Palm Tree...

I recently treadmill-ran my way through the S-Town podcast, am in the middle of the book Bird by Bird, and literally just read the last page of Everything Happens For A Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved. 

I’ll say I already knew it, because it makes me sound more astute and self-aware, but the honest to goodness truth is that I was sorely in need of this bold refresher: Life is in the business of building flexibility in us. More: by its end, requires it. While these three conduits to brilliance I've recently studied could not be more varied in content, each resource yielded it, this reminder about flexibility. 

S-Town is an investigative podcast about a place called Woodstock, Alabama, where a deeply intelligent man (John B. McLemore) suffers from the belief that both the planet and society are doomed, all while begrudging his hometown for being an ugly, corrupt, small-minded microcosm for everything else wrong in the world. Bird by Bird was written a bunch of years ago, right around when I graduated from 8^thgrade, and tells every last secret its author, Anne Lamott, has on her gift of writing (and living). And then Kate Bowler, who published Everything Happens for a Reason just in the last year, is a professor at Duke Divinity School who has committed her higher education to studying the American obsession with prosperity theology (think Joel Olstein). Oh, and she also is living with Stage Four Cancer, openly trying to parse out the prosperity in that.

The New York journalist responsible for the storytelling in S-Town, after months and months of research and countless trips back and forth to and from Alabama, about this one thing he thought he was chronicling through the eyes of John B, winds up pulling anchor, sailing for a bit, and then re-anchoring for the unfolding of a whole new story. And it works. Not because it was a premeditated plot twist. Nonfiction has no such luxury. The listeners stay on, unphased by the pivot, equally as drawn in as we were when we thought we knew what we were signing up for because that’s exactly the way it works in real life: pivots abound, anchors are always getting yanked.

And I promise I wasn’t at all giving fiction a bad rap earlier when I said it underscored reality. I mean, yes, it underscores reality - second place to what is right in front of us. But what I learned in reading Bird by Bird is that in order to make fiction work, in order to have it mimic the truth that is right in front of us in a way that is, as Simon Cowell would say, Believable!, is to allow the characters you create to tell the story (NOT you). She says, “Characters should not serve as pawns for some plot you’ve dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, ‘Now what happens?’ The development of relationship creates plot.” She explains that if this practice is committed to deeply, often fiction writers end up swerving this way and that, perhaps landing quite far and by unexpected routes from how their novels were set up from the start. Turns out, you have to master flexibility even while you are the boss of your own book, even while you hold all the cards… can pull all the strings… are the lone puppeteer. Because the truth is what Anne says: the development of relationship creates plot. And relationship (with people, with ideas, with our world) – in the real world and in the believable imitation of it – is nothing if not unpredictable. 

Lastly, this Kate Bowler gal. I mean. She’s a bad luck magnet and somehow finds a way to pull off a memoir solely about herself in a hilariously not-self-centered way. She takes the reader down into the terrain of her life: a frustrating physical disability in her 20s that leaves her nearly without the function of her arms while the deadline of her dissertation bares down, then the hard reality of fertility struggles in her 30s, then a miracle baby boy, followed all-to-closely by a cancer diagnosis wrapped in a hopeless package of “30% chance of survival.” I would be friends with Kate, because in all of her accounts, she never once sounds pitiful. She cusses and gets pissy at God and even burns one of her favorite dresses the day she finds out she has cancer, because it seems way too “before cancer” to ever be worn again… and yet none of it sounds the type of pitiful that makes my heart yuck. Instead, it sounds the type of real that makes my heart cheer this remarkable woman on. The book's thesis, in the aftermath of a diagnosis, a rigorous chemo treatment, a year of getting two-month intervals of permission to keep living, I'd say is this: “No matter how hard I try, I can’t save myself.” I can think of no other thing than death staring you down that will serve as a greater teacher of flexibility. Our good health, if we have it, is a puffy little package that allows us the luxury of believing we will see through what we plan to see through. Until, like Kate, we’re robbed of that certainty -- until we recognize that we can’t save our own lives, much less our own plans, our “plots,” our scheming and dreaming – we will blindly prefer what is rigid, sure. 

I'm reminded of my most recent visit to Florida. I've vacationed there since the time I was a small child and can remember playing the road trip game with my brother on our long venture south: Who Can Spot The First Palm Tree? But it wasnt until this year's Florida trip, with my 40th year of life nearly complete, that I gave those palm trees a hard look for what they really are. Those suckers can bend, baby. In a strong wind storm, I stood out on the balcany and marveled as their long trunks endured the whipping, swaying this way and that with the fierce gusts. It made me realize something: There is a strong that is galvanaized, steely, permanent. And then there is a different type of strong: pliable.

Life is in the business of building flexibility in us. Every last one of us. To our very last day. 

I don’t know about you, but my overachieving nature – knowing this – wants to be ahead of schedule. I’d like to yield to this exercise, like a palm tree, sooner than I absolutely need to. Won’t you join me?