Nobody tells you life is easy. We hear it from quite early on. Usually around the time you make your GCSE choices in highschool. I like to imagine a scenario where my father sits me down and explains to me that life from now on will involve careful planning and making lot's of good choices whilst my mum cooks us a lovely family dinner in the background. I imagine him lovingly patting me on the shoulder whilst telling me how proud he is of me so far. Of course this wasn't how it was at all for me. My dad didn't even live/work in the same country as me growing up and our relationship was strained at best back then. My mum however was and still is amazing. But unfortunately we'd just lost my nan and this wasn't just like losing someone who you happened to see a few times a year or on occasional weekends. Mum and I had lived with my nan my whole life and she was, in my eyes, a second mother. The last thing I cared about was making good choices. It was too painful to even imagine a day without her, let alone an entire future.
I messed up in school. I had been expelled by 15 and I never really had any sense of regret or understanding of those consequences. Maybe even now I don't fully understand. It's something that's always causing chaos in my life. The inability to make a good choice. The impulsivity to always however make a bad one. And this bad habit of mine has slowly, at almost 27, caught up with me. I got through bad choice after bad choice with the attitude of "It's ok, everything will work out. There's always a way around it". But then I hit a brick wall. Tens of thousands of pounds of debt, a repossessed house and lot's of other mistakes along the way has finally resulted in a stalemate. No, everything is not going to be ok. Currently, things couldn't actually be worse. The stress of these bad choices has at last cast me in shadows and I truly see no way out. My ability to work my way out of a bad situation into a semi-better one has been worn out. Now I am back sleeping in my childhood bedroom, unable to even function as an adult, let a lone a mother or wife.
Somewhat of an intervention was called recently when my husband returned from work and I lay sobbing in a duvet in pyjamas I'd worn for 3 days straight. I'd ended our marriage. He told me he was worried. Asked me what was going on. I told him I couldn't cope anymore. I couldn't pretend. I couldn't take care of myself. I didn't want to fight it anymore. Was it the stress of the children? The fact we had a nest of rats living in our downstairs bathroom? The bailiffs chasing me for years of debt? Was it the stress of years of unhappiness eating away at the core of my soul or the fact I'd been battling chronic illnesses for the last few years with no solution? A doctor was called as was my mum and the decision was made. I was sick, mentally and physically and the solution was that I needed some space to figure things out.
Already consumed by the guilt I felt for pretty much every thing I had or hadn't done in life, there was more to add. The acceptance that I truly wasn't a good mum anymore. I'd failed completely. My children could not go another day witnessing the vacant zombie mother they'd been so unfortunately blessed with. So that was that. A bag had been packed and I moved back in with my mother until I was able to get the professional help I now needed and still need.
Why is it that I had to go down this route? Why couldn't I be like all the other mums I know? They make it look so easy. You see the occasional Facebook breakdown but you know it's not the same as the turmoil you are facing more days than not. It has never been the children that were the hard part. Sometimes, just simply lifting my head off my pillow is difficult enough.
Thoughts race through my mind so fast I can't decipher them. Make tea, let the dog out, go to the toilet. But which order? Already I'm faced with the inability to make a decision. I'll boil the kettle first. But then I forget what I'm doing and sometimes I just stand there at the bottom of the stairs doing nothing.
Sitting down with mum whilst she enjoys a glass of wine we discuss my 'issues'. She wants to know what hurdles I'm facing and why I can't seem to jump them. It all boils down to one thing I don't understand or really have a name for. Sensory overload. I can hear the humming of a lamp. The dripping of a tap. The dog licking his paws at the other end of the house. I can smell the slightest scent. Silly little noises that nobody else seems to notice. They interrupt my thoughts and they're loud. Everything is muddled up. Colours are not correct anymore. I failed my eye exam and was told I had became colour blind in my adult life which is almost impossible for a female. I can't get dressed because I can't stand to feel the texture of my clothes against my skin. I am so highly sensitive to food, alcohol, people's feelings and well... just about everything. It's drains me to the point of absolute fatigue.
Good old mother gets onto google.
"Perhaps you're autistic?" she suggests, then reels off a list of things that match me to a T.
I actually laugh because the idea is ridiculous. I don't have any special gifts. I socialise well despite my unwillingness to want to on the inside.
"It can't be, you'd have known when I was a child," I tell her. And so she reels off a list of things that I did/didn't do as a child that could possibly in the smallest way possible be related to autism.
It isn't unusual for an adult to become diagnosed later in life but I looked at the website and I didn't match the crucial criteria. So we ruled autism out. Then we came across ADHD & ADD. And everything. made. sense. It was definitely possible that this was what I was dealing with. It explained everything and just reading article after article, symptom list after symptom list, I finally had some clarity. There may just be a reason for my inability to be a responsible grown up afterall.
