I am pretty sure I have undiagnosed ADHD.
I say this as a millennial who grew up in an era where that particular diagnosis was not exactly on the radar for kids who were keeping up in school and generally functioning in the world. We didn’t diagnose it. We just called it being scattered or creative or high energy and kept moving. And so here I am, decades later, connecting dots.
The case is strong. The obsession tangents. The starting of everything and the finishing of some things. The very specific spiral where I decide I’m going to clean the entire house and begin in one corner and then migrate to another task mid-task and then remember a third thing while doing the second thing and somehow end up doing four things at 40% each. My husband can read the energy the moment it enters the room. He has a face. I know the face. The face says I am going to quietly exit the vicinity before this becomes something I get asked to participate in.
Here’s my honest take though — on the career side, I think it genuinely benefits me. The ability to think from multiple angles simultaneously. The creative leaps. The energy for juggling a lot of things across a lot of different spaces. The way I can be in three conversations at once and synthesize something useful from all of them. In a professional context that wiring has served me well and I’m not sure I’d trade it.
Where it gets complicated is at home. With the kids.
Because everything I have read, everything I come back to, everything the research consistently says is that kids thrive in consistent environments. Routine. Predictability. The same response to the same situation so their nervous systems can learn what to expect.
And one of the genuine features of ADHD — not a bug, a feature, just not always a convenient one — is inconsistency.
I caught myself this week. I’ve been in this beautiful groove of Bluey mom energy — present, playful, let’s just be together energy — and then something shifted and I was suddenly deep in a new conviction that we aren’t doing enough learning after school. That we need structured at-home learning time. Thirty minutes before outdoor play. A schedule. A system.
I could feel myself creating a new inconsistency in real time. And I sat with that for a minute.
Because some of the meltdowns, some of the dysregulation, some of the pushback I attribute to them might actually be a response to me. To the shifting expectations. To the mom who is all Bluey one week and suddenly has a learning schedule the next. Kids don’t know what version they’re getting and that uncertainty costs them something even when my intentions are good.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable thing to sit with.
I don’t have a clean resolution to this one. I’m not sure whether I should get a formal answer on the ADHD piece or whether I just keep working with what I know about myself and try to build more consistency in the places that matter most for them. I don’t know if what I experience is a superpower I should lean into or something I should get support around — probably both, honestly, depending on the day.
What I do know is that awareness is something. Catching myself mid-spiral and asking is this serving them or is this serving the part of my brain that just needs a new project — that’s a muscle I’m building.
Slowly. In between four other things I’ve also started.
Fellow ADHD brains — diagnosed or suspected — how do you navigate the consistency piece with your kids? Does it feel like a superpower, a challenge, or both depending on the day? Drop it in the comments.
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