Interior, last week
I am working at the dining room table. It is covered with autism textbooks, journal papers, folders splayed open like mens legs on a train, and printed sheets bearing anxious titles like Final Final Draft #3. Charging cords snake from a large monitor, two laptops, two phones and the heating pad on my chair. Several empty cups of tea sit on several notebooks, each open to a hectic list. Too many projects have come to their pointy end at once.
I drop my glasses on the floor. I don’t have time for this shit, I mutter to myself for ten frustrated minutes as I crouch between the table and the piano stool, searching through cords and debris. Eventually, I find my glasses. They have, of course, been on my face the whole time; the whole situation nothing but a confection of my overloaded nervous system, a sputtering hallucination of synapses leaking data.
I joke that my office is in the tearoom, because at any point, people wander past my table to do a comedy bit, stop for a chat, ask for life advice, peanut butter toast or a lift to the station. Sometimes they squeeze in behind me to practice piano, or ask if they can put the television on above my head. I have a lot of balls in the air. Work and uni are busy. Let’s say those balls are made of plastic. I also have three teenagers. Let’s say those balls are made of glass, and that dropping them is not an option.
There’s a tipping point where keeping both the plastic and the glass balls in the air becomes unmanageable. About the same time as I lose my imaginary specs at the dining table, one of the kids begins spiralling, and not in the good direction.
The thing about parenting is that there are seasons when you are needed in much more intensive ways than others, and they aren’t predictable. One day you are sweeping your iceberg and watching a gull dive and swoop, and thinking about salmon for dinner, then there’s a crack, and the the little corner you’re on breaks and floats away from the rest. Just you and one small, struggling bear are on it, while all the other parts of your life and family are back on the big iceberg, which you still need to sweep, but from a distance now, with some sort of…. long… cord? I’ve lost my analogy. You know what I mean.
Until you can get the small berg back and attach it to the big one, managing the person in crisis is added to the general schedule. New normal commences. Keith takes on extra load, and things drop away: menu planning, social activities, any cleaning beyond the essentials, that empty space where games and gags lives.
After a week of rain, damp laundry festoons the house. Spinach rots in the bag. The doom piles colonise the corners. My hand weights sink accusatory divots into the ottoman where they have rested for weeks, my daily practice lost, and my elbow hurts, strained in my restless sleep.
When you have ADHD, you can often function well with a varied and changeable list of roles and become very calm in a crisis, especially when you understand and scaffold your brain. But this wiring affects executive function: working memory, the ability to focus and filter distractions, skills in planning and organising information. In times of stress, my brain starts to feel like a gently leaking colander, too full to retain new information. Overwhelm feels constant. Any demand is a threat to the integrity of the whole structure. One more ask, and the whole thing could crumble. Please, my nervous system asks: give me rest, peace, space to unfurl. Soon, I tell it. Soon, later, soon, later.
Then the lightbulbs click on. Sailing off on the little iceberg like this sparks memories of the bad kid-wobble we navigated two years ago, and I serve myself up some of the middle aged wisdom I’ve gained over the last couple of years as Keith and I scrambled through, figuring it out as we went: fail, try again; fail, try again.
You learned a few things, I remind myself. You learned that you need calm and order in your world to stay calm and ordered, because managing the nervous system of another person in parallel to your own is a particular kind of work, and it requires steadiness. You learned to recognise your capacity, and then you learned to honour it. You learned that just because you can keep a surprising number of balls in the air with barely anything left in the tank, it doesn’t mean you should - at some point, the bill is going to come in, and you’re going to pay for it. You learned how to read the signals that your body sends to say: enough.
I resign from a great deal of my work, and then I turn my attention back to steering the little iceberg back to safety; with all the planning and the admin and the small tweaks and the watchful gaze required. I embark on an intense spring clean, bringing order and hygge to our small universe.
The first clear day, all the critical work having been handed off and completed, I check my diary. It is gloriously empty but for an old ‘save the date’ to adjudicate the local primary school spelling bee. I send off a quick email querying if it is still on the docket, and at what time, and then I get in the bath. My phone rings.
‘Hi Rach… are you still able to do the spelling bee?’
‘Of course! Just let me know when.’
‘Well, it’s in the morning…’
‘Oh! What time?’
‘Um… now? All the kids are here in the library.’
I would have sat up in horror if I wasn’t pretending not to be nude.
‘Give me ten!’
Moments later I am down the road, glasses on and performing my favourite role of the year, for which I try and channel a ‘Weakest Link’ presenter vibe of serious gravitas, combined with sample sentences for each word to make the children laugh. The kids are gorgeous. Nobody knew I hadn’t found any undies and was free-dogging yesterday’s trousers. Wherever you go, I am reminded, there you are.
Five Things to Spark Joy
Watch a specialty performing arts high school musical production and try not to cry at the incredible talent and purity of young dreams on stage. Life-affiming.
Embark on a RHONY rewatch and explain to your scientist husband why Real Housewives of New York season 8 is the most iconic of all, with the exception of Kelly Bensimon on Scary Island and perhaps the moment where Aviva threw her prosthetic leg in anger across a restaurant.
Watch this clip of Finn McFeely dancing to Don’t Rain on My Parade. Keith and I could not stop rewatching. The control! The expression! Glorious.
Take a person with Alzheimers to see the Devil Wears Prada, so that when the end shot appears of a spectacular New York skyline accompanied by swelling strings, they clutch your arm and say ‘But how did we get there!’ That’s movie magic, baby.
Introduce a new boyfriend called Pickles to the family who is so easygoing he will do the washing up while his girlfriend tries to work out the harmonies to Do You Hear The People Sing from Les Mis with her Mum and Dad on the piano. He’s a keeper.
