Do you ever feel as though you’ve lost complete control of your life? As though someone else – your kids, your husband, your boss – is pulling the strings and making you dance to a tune you didn’t choose?
My life has been that way recently. Last month, my 85 year old dad (who’s blind) came to stay with us for several weeks, then of course with the Thanksgiving holiday, we had additional company. Last week, my oldest daughter moved back home after closing a chapter in her life.
Family is always welcome in my house, but I have to say that sometimes it’s hard to make adjustments. Because I have Attention Deficit Disorder, I am easily overwhelmed. With the addition of new people in the house, different sleeping arrangements – just having my whole daily routine in general disrupted – I feel lost.
People with AD/HD work very hard at maintaining some sense of control in their lives. I think that’s especially true for moms, because we typically are in charge of running the house and managing the kids as well. If you’ve got AD/HD, you work really hard at setting up routines and systems to help you stay on top of things, and the least little thing can totally throw you off.
I’ve found, too, that to really do something well, it needs my full attention, and that everything else gets a little short changed. Some women, for instance, can manage to keep the house clean and organized, balance the budget, remember everything that needs to be remembered, and still work a full time job.
I can do one of those things well, but not all at once. For instance, I can remember a time when my house was spotless and I knew where everything in it was kept. Believe it or not, my kids were little at the time. The thing was, that in order to maintain that, other things suffered. I sometimes forgot appointments or to mail things on time, and I didn’t work outside the home.
Over the years, I’ve learned to put routines in place and structure where it’s needed, so that more things in my life are under control. They help keep me on track most of the time, and when something happens to throw me off track, it’s not so hard to get back on. Next time, I’ll share some ideas with you that have helped me.
