Part Two….

I thought out loud, “How in the fuck did this woman get the memory card of my life?” I felt like Lauren Hill’s “Killing me Softly” was happening live and in real life, but to me.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I started talking to my husband about the similarities. I wanted to judge his reaction. If he agreed, then maybe I was not crazy or a victim or attention seeking. If he agreed, maybe I really was not the source of all the lazy and bad things in the world. Is it possible that I have ADHD life for real and am not the family fuck up?!?!

Jaw drop, shock.

Well, sort of shock.

My doctor diagnosed me with ADHD about four years ago. I was not in a place where I was able to see that or the symptoms clearly enough to validate treatment in my head. At the time I was in therapy and chatted about this with my therapist. She said enthusiastically, “you do NOT have ADHD. Your grades in school do not reflect ADHD and I would definitely know.”

Well then, chapter closed. I do not have ADHD.

But every single thing this woman is saying in her book is me and my story. All. Of. It.

This blog and social media space was initially intended to highlight Maxwell’s story and how we navigate life, having a medically complicated child. However, as often in life, I decided to course correct. Somewhere In The Middle isn’t just about Max and his medical complications and health struggles. Living in the middle is about accepting the beautifully perfect human being that you are, just the way you are. You don’t have to fit into a particular support group or wear a certain label to be part of a receptive and loving community.

If I want to find more people in the world that think like me, then I have to share our story. No one else is going to do it.

Somewhere In The Middle is a blog about our life. We are two ADHD parents with different symptoms covering the entire ADHD spectrum (in-attention husband, time blindness me, etc). We have one angsty, depressed teenager. We have one glitter queen with raging anxiety because of undiagnosed ADHD, and we have Max. Max is our eight-year-old son who has a long list of medical complications, and significant conditions. Bringing up the rear is trauma, emotional and sexual abuse, cancer, grief, death, sexual discrimination and oh, learning at 45 that you are not the worst human alive; you actually have a different brain.

I want to run to my mom and dad waving a flag that says, “LOOK! I was not making things up, I was telling the truth, I wasn’t trying for extra attention, it’s not my fault!” The only two people who need to know this information. I need them to know.

But I can’t do that.

I can’t tell them that my constant talking, over the top empathy, scatteredness and big feelings were not my fault. I just want them to know that my blacksheepness – my label of the fuck up – it’s not my fault. It was the wrong label.

This is a layer of pain that I did not expect when I was diagnosed or when I accepted my diagnosis. It cripples me that my parents left this world thinking I was the source, the target, the problem.

It was always so much easier to be angry and disappointed in myself than to accept how I was being treated. I always felt like I was deserving of all the bad because of all the bad I’d put other people through. Therefore, I have to spend my entire life rolling out red carpets for everyone but myself because I have to make up for the shitty human I was.

Why was I a shitty human though?

Survival. When you are learning to survive, you don’t think about other people’s feelings or even the long term effects. You make decisions in the moment based on the totality of your knowledge base at the time. Often, we look back and judge ourselves or others for their behavior during a particular event or time of their life. However, we can only do our best with what we know at the time.

Rich and Roxanne’s work has changed my life, and I don’t say that lightly. Rox gave me permission to course correct; to stop swimming upstream against the current but rather chill at the inlet of the bay and wait for the tide to roll in.