Now, before I get started here, I want to say that there are something like 88million books on ADD/ADHD and how to function, raise children, cope socially, spiritually, emotionally, and even hormonally. There are books that compare the ADHD thinking process, to the thinking process of someone without ADHD. Books on men with ADHD, women with ADHD, girls with ADHD, boys with ADHD. There are books with tips on how to function at work with ADHD, books to help you eat right with ADHD and books to help you stay healthy with ADHD. If you trip over a book on ADHD in the street, there is probably a book on ADHD that will have tips on how to cope with tripping over that ADHD book in the street –with ADHD.
I am not here to give tips, or tell anyone how to cope with ADHD. I am here to tell you about my personal experience with ADHD; however readers should feel free to leave comments with tips, or recommend books that they’ve found helpful. I may also take the liberty to repost those comments at a later date if all credits/citations are in order. For now, I will stick to my own stories.
As I have mentioned, I have suspected for many years that I have ADHD before I finally asked for help and was diagnosed. For the most part, it didn’t really matter to me that I might have ADHD, I never allowed myself to use it as an excuse for anything, still I felt inadequate and often I simply thought that I was crazy.
Housework, in particular, is something that has always overwhelmed me.
As a child, I shared a room with my sister and we cleaned our room only when our parents absolutely insisted. We were both equally messy and we both equally resented the other for her part of the mess. When we finally got our own rooms (my mother likes to tell this story), my room was roomy and for the most part clean, but my sister’s room was smaller and still messy. Not because she was messier or lazier than me, but because once my room was clean, I obsessed over it. I remember lying on my bed and just staring at my clean room for hours. My sister, I believe, still found her messy room overwhelming and being older than me, she just had better things to do. (I wonder if she’ll read this and be upset with me…)
When I was a teenager, a friend of mine came to live with our family for a little while and she shared my room with me. We were long time friends and confidants, so we sometimes bickered like sisters. Once she moved in, my room was immediately messy. The thing was, it was my mess mostly and I couldn’t deal with it. Sharing my room just made me feel out of control and overwhelmed. I was worried about touching her things, worried about where to put my own things and losing things, or misplacing her things. I worried about where my space ended and hers began. She would ask me to help her clean the room and I would just shrug. I honestly had no idea why I needed to avoid it altogether.
As a young adult, in my first marriage, I worked a lot, grabbing all the overtime I could and since our apartment was roomy and we didn’t have a lot of “stuff”, it was fairly easy for me to maintain. Even after my daughter was born, I worked all day and left her with caregivers until evening, so the apartment was almost always left neat and clean. This was true as well in my second/current marriage, though I had my little junk drawers here and there – my little pockets of chaos. I still worked many hours and we eventually fit a monthly house cleaner into our budget.
My housework routines and efforts began to change for the worse when I had my two younger children and became a work-at-home mom. Working for myself, I could no longer afford a house cleaner. Still the house was kept clean, except my little pockets of chaos got bigger and bigger. The laundry room became my hell hole and my office became my free-for-all, which was terrible because my step-daughter slept in my loft/office when she stayed with us. I always felt bad that she had to deal with my madness up there.
With my ADHD, I’m a “piler not a filer” – and my office was filled with piles of magazines, paperwork, lists, mail, bills, my daughter’s school work, you name it and I’m sure you’d find it in a pile in my office. Occasionally, I cleaned my office half-assed and other times I had to step over piles and books just to get to my desk. When we moved out of that house, the dust in the corners of my office was so thick it was embarrassing. You just can’t dust something that you can’t get to.
In the last few years, under a great deal of stress, my ADHD has gotten much worse and my issues with housework have been the portal through which it has manifested a great deal. While I do try to keep things clean, the messiness has beaten me to a pulp. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve looked at my husband and cried “I just don’t know where to put things!” When I do get organized on rare occasion, I find myself being that obsessive little girl staring at a clean room, trying to keep the world out, becoming easily frustrated when something goes out of place and eventually giving up.
More often than not, my house is a mess with a clean kitchen. And yes, I HAVE read FlyLady.com. I want to go a few rounds with her in a dark alley somewhere. Of course I’m joking… seriously, I am.
(To be continued. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting Blog #2 part two: Housework -
A dissection of a day in my life of housework.)
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