A Thousand Thoughts

I can be pretty painfully real with my older child. He sees some very unfiltered displays of frustration from me. I really worry some days that despite everything, I’m damaging him and shaming him purely by what is created by him plus me. Sometimes I think we are an explosive combination. And this is my best self – my ADHD medicated self. This might well be as good as I get, because now I’ve got the knowledge of my neurotype, I’ve got the medication that made more difference in a week than twenty years of anxiety-focused medication and various iterations of cognitive behavioural therapy.  And I still feel the rage tingle up the back of my neck and head because he can so effectively press my buttons. 

The hair-trigger reactions that dogged me my whole life, and which were truly debilitating with two small children, and a host of other pressures, losses and challenges, are more or less a thing of the past. That medication really has been a life changing thing (coupled with seriously upending and reorganising our whole lives for the good of everyone in our family). But still. 

Anger. Intense reactions are scary when you’re a kid and they’re scary when you’re a parent and you feel helpless in the overwhelm, the impossibility of managing all the things happening all at once. Sometimes it’s too much and we’re just like our kids, losing it over ‘nothing’, ‘overreacting’, saying things we may not mean – basically being dysregulated.

I don’t leave my kids to wonder if it was their fault. I will always apologise. Always. I take the moments I need to calm down, and then I emphasise not only that I’m sorry for yelling or being cross, but also the ongoing struggle that it is. I tell them that I don’t like doing that and am trying not to. I might explain the reason, if it was being stressed, or hungry, or overloaded with noise around me, but mostly I try to make clear that it is not their fault. That’s the guilt I don’t want them to carry. That’s the guilt and misunderstanding I carried as a child, and that’s the change I will make as much as I humanly can.

I remember that heavy child-like responsibility for a parent’s feelings, whether or not I understood what had transpired. So not only will I relieve my kids of blame for my reactions, I will also let them know my feelings are not their job to fix.

Anxiety is powerful in our bloodlines, and in our little PDA people, so I take it two steps further. Where appropriate, and it’s a daily judgement call, I make clear if something that was said or done did affect my feelings. I will be explicit. ‘When you said that, that really hurt my feelings.’ And I include the flip side to this: I reiterate that I will always be honest with them, and that means not only can they trust that I will tell them if there is a problem, they can trust that when I say that there ISN’T a problem, there really isn’t. 

A teacher once told me when I went for help with a problem that he was only paid to tell me things once. Obviously that was bullshit, and he was a shit teacher. Well I’ll tell my kids these truths again and again. As long as it takes. I don’t know if it’s enough, and I don’t want anyone to try to tell me it is. It will be up to my kids to decide whether it was. I just want to be doing what I can.

[Photo ID: a photograph taken from a distance, showing me and one of my small kids sitting in the fork of a large tree. The tree is growing on the edge of the creek and we are on Turrbal and Jagera land. The sky and leaves reflect in the water.]