I Finally Understand Why My ADHD Makes My Emotions Feel So Big
In order to support her children, Amy Marie H. has prioritized managing her condition.
As told to Leila Barghouty
I was diagnosed in the mid-80s, at the age of five, as a smart, school-loving kid, which is very atypical. Most women who have ADHD like mine find out through their kids. But it’s always been a piece of my life. It wasn’t something people talked about and it wasn’t something that was easily understood.
One of the things I’ve learned is that there are two ways that emotions look with ADHD: Are you a hurler or a hider? Sometimes people have big emotions. They’re gonna yell. Their big emotions come out. And then some of us go inward with our big emotions. That is definitely me.
One of the reasons why motherhood is a challenge is that you have visions of what your life’s going to look like. I wanted be the mom who took my kids to the fall festival and hosted the Halloween party, and then volunteered in the class. But then you’re in that situation, like, “I’m so overstimulated. It’s so loud. My kids are overwhelmed and don’t want be here, and we don’t go great with sugar.” Letting go of your vision is a big process. There’s a lot of grief in that.
My hardest point was my late-30s. When my oldest was six, we became foster parents. And then I got pregnant. And then my father-in-law went into hospice care in our home. From the outside, you could be like, “That was a lot. You had a lot going on.” But it wasn’t even that. It was the emotions. It was the overstimulation. It was the lack of downtime and recovery. It was the accumulation of all the little things, paired with the ongoing, unrealistic expectations of what you think you can handle.
- In addition to diagnostic symptoms of ADHD, which medical providers regularly use to diagnose the condition, many people have associated symptoms that affect their everyday lives, such as executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation. The latter can show up as “irritability, having a short fuse, or being easily overexcited,” according to the American Psychological Association.
One of the things that’s really hard for the ADHD brain is that we get ourselves into situations where it feels like we should be able to do way more than is humanly possible. Now I’m at a place where I really know and understand that about myself. But for a long time, I had a lot of shame about that, feeling like there was something wrong with that.
At times it has felt like three full-time jobs: trying to parent kids with big needs; trying to navigate things you inherently struggle with in terms of executive function; and also trying to manage your own mental health.
It’s the easy things that are hard, and the accumulation of them. Remembering to pack the lunch, remembering to put the water bottle in the bag, remembering to pull the chicken out to defrost, remembering to unload the dishwasher.
My need for downtime has been hard to accept. I felt an expectation that people wanted me to be a high-energy person. I can show up one day and be very high energy and volunteer in a kid’s classroom and be the fun mom, but then I need to recover. I need a good margin in my life, and I need a lot of exercise. It has taken me years to accept that and not feel like that made me a bad mom.
So, how do I manage these big feelings? I realized I had to make managing my ADHD an ongoing priority, in order to manage my life and my family, to support my kids, and be the kind of mom I want to be.
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