In My Weakness

At the age of 53, I was in a marriage that was failing and a strained relationship with one child and close to a decade of intense struggles with the other, I sat through my youngest childs' graduation from high school.  This was it, it was over, raising children days were gone.  My marriage lay in ruins.  I had more questions about who I was and why I failed so miserably at things than I ever had in my whole life.  I had major conflict avoidance issues and after growing up in a divorced household, a self-esteem that was less than zero.  I was sabotaging every relationship I was in and I would pull away from all the other relationships to avoid the defeat that I knew would come eventually.  It was May and I had a counseling appointment with yet another counselor.  Over the past almost decade I had seen a handful of counselors trying to figure out why I was the way I was.  I am not a stupid person.  I have an engineering degree and a masters in theology and another master's certificate in professional coaching.  But after all the reading, all the podcasts, all the TED talks, all the counseling and all the trials and failures, I still kept coming up short.  And then 1 week after my youngest child's graduation from High School, I sat in the newest counselors office.  We had already met 2 times before.  Now after a 3rd session, she looked at me and said, "what do you know about ADHD?".  I sat for a second, "well not much, I've assumed it is that thing that makes kids not sit still because their parents didn't know how to discipline them is all I've ever known."  She smiled, then said, "why don't you look up the symptoms when you get home and let me know what you think."  I agreed and went home.  She had me curious, so I did look up the symptoms that same day.

What I read would forever change my life.  The totality of what I know now did not hit all on that day but it is fair to say, that in one 20 minute span of looking up symptoms for ADHD, I found answers for every issue I had ever had in my life.  The magnitude of the "lifequake" that happened that day was not readable by any Richter scale.  It was off the charts.  What follows on this page is the aftermath.  It is the story of the things I learned about myself told in a way that will hopefully help someone else finally understand why their brain works the way it works, and maybe, just maybe, you can find out before you are 53 and done raising your kids.