Everyone loves to blame my ADHD.
Forgot to RSVP to the birthday party? ADHD. Lost the permission slip? ADHD. Walked into Target for toilet paper and left with three pillows, a candle, and a pair of flip flops? Fine, ADHD.
But lately I’ve started to wonder if my ADHD is even the problem. Maybe the real problem is that I am carrying the mental load of an entire family while simultaneously trying to work and remember where I put my coffee.
Because spoiler alert: Even moms without ADHD are drowning.
From the moment I wake up, my brain is responsible for remembering that my son has lacrosse at 6pm, my daughter needs to wear blue for spirit day, the dog is almost out of food, my third grader needs her camp form signed, we are low on laundry pods, and somehow I need to figure out what everyone is going to have for dinner.
And none of those tasks are physically visible. No one sees me mentally calculating the amount of brownies I need to bring to the cookout while also wondering if I responded to the teacher’s email about missing homework while also trying to remember the new wifi password.
My mental load is like having 97 browser tabs open at all times. My ADHD might add a little annoying background music playing in my brain while I’m trying to do the math, but the truth is I was f*cked long before that.
People assume that ADHD means I can’t focus. But the truth is, I focus on everything. In fact, I am focusing on too much. And because I am a mom, no one is handing me a checklist. I am the damn checklist!
I don’t have that much trouble completing the tasks. I have trouble remembering that the task exists. Remembering who needs new sneakers, which kid is currently boycotting pasta sauce this week, who needs a birthday party gift, who has an early release day; it’s a full time job just remembering to remember. And truthfully, it is frying my brain.
And of course, my ADHD doesn’t help. And sometimes it means I will lose my phone while holding it. But it’s not what’s killing me. What’s killing me is carrying the operational responsibility of my four kids, all while society is still trying to make us feel like motherhood is not a real job.
And in the past few years I have realized that medication and some simple strategies can really help my ADHD. But what I have yet to find a fix for is the fact that mothers are expected to quietly carry around a shit ton of invisible labor — all while smiling and showing up and looking cute.
So, yeah — I have ADHD. But if you dropped a neurotypical woman in my brain for a week she would likely also come crawling out like she had just been thrust into some chaotic scene of Jumanji. Because it’s not that my brain works differently; it’s that motherhood requires women to function as the unpaid interns of everyone else’s lives. And that’s enough to make anyone forget the permission slip.
Samm is an ex-lawyer and mom of four who swears a lot. Find her on Instagram @sammbdavidson.
