A is for ADHD and autism, B is for backburner, C is for clarity (and Canada!)

This week I waved my daughter, aged 21, off to Canada for eight months on an optional year abroad tagged on to the end of her degree.

For a while there, I thought she wouldn’t make it.

Three weeks ago, she had nowhere to live, no flight booked and, each time I suggested we look together at getting things sorted, she was ‘too stressed to think about it’.

She’s also got herself loved up since she first signed up for her Canadian adventure and, for two and a half weeks before she was due to go, rather than sorting out her sh*t and/or earning money to fund her sh*t, was out with her. She coped with the impending separation by ‘not thinking about it’, which, seemingly, was the same tactic she used regarding everything that needed to be sorted to enable her to not just arrive in Canada but have somewhere to live when she got there.

 

The alarm-snooze cycle

Ava gets overloaded when she has stuff to do – so much so that, rather than do those things, or at least some of those things, to help clear the decks, she will instead set ten different alarms on her phone, write a list covering every detail of what she has to do – and then retreat into task paralysis. Staying up late watching comfort TV and scrolling through her phone, only pausing to snooze the constant alarms buzzing on her phone, then feel even more overwhelmed the next day as her list grows and her achievements wither.

Image AI generated

It’s been the same with every assignment she has had to do while at university – she’ll do everything but make a start on it until the deadline is almost crushing her, then stay up all night to get it done.

This approach recently bit her on the bum when her dissertation and two of her final assignments were all due in the same fortnight – a result of her having been given extensions and still leaving everything to the last minute where they collided spectacularly.

This time, instead of doing her usual staying up for two or three nights to get them done, she got septic tonsillitis as a result of being so run down and stressed, resulting in me driving up and down the motorway keeping her fed and medicated while she worked through the pain and turned in her work – then slept for a week.

She does generally manage to pull it out the bag – and still achieve firsts – but exhausts herself and everyone around her in the process.

 

Deliberating, delaying and dreaming

So it was great to wave her off to Canada on Tuesday, knowing that, once again at the 11^th hour, she’d organised somewhere to live, four other people to live with, her flight and her visa. But we were both up most of the night the night before (during which I made a total of four trips from the hotel room to the car and back to collect things we’d forgotten while Ava sat stranded and soaking in the shower because we’d forgotten to bring shampoo). And we had to do an emergency repack literally as we were leaving for the airport as we couldn’t fit everything in!

But, in the rush of the moment as Ava was heading to check-in, I also managed to buy her the wrong SIM card (UK only) and put my car keys in her rucksack side pocket for somewhere to put them – the fact that it – and therefore they – would be going to Canada with her momentarily escaping my attention. It was actually Ava this time that alerted me to the fact.

So maybe we’re not so different. I too find that I can spend most of my working day deliberating, delaying and dreaming, only to be struck with motivational panic at 4.30 pm when I realise it’s almost the end of the day and I’ve not got anything done.

And I too write endless lists on little post-its stuck all over our house, then hyperfocus on the lists and how much there is to do, rather than just making a start and crossing things off.  

More and more, I’m realising that the autistic and ADHD traits that I see in my diagnosed children are also traits that I myself have – but which, growing up in the 80s, I never had the language, knowledge or self-perception to understand and which, since marrying a partner with AuDHD and then going on to have three children with the same diagnoses plus OCD chucked in for good measure, I haven’t had the time or energy to process.

Perhaps now, that time is here.