…I know you are reading this poem
As the underground train loses momentum and before
running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.

from Dedications XIII – Adrienne Rich, The Atlas of the Difficult World

Kids aren’t for you, they are for someone else. Someone who knows how to get a broken fridge out of the front door without a spreadsheet.

Four years ago, this was a thought in my head, along with many others which added to the tally that I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to have kids.

My fridge was wet.

I had a good job. I had finally moved out of my crappy sharehouse. Instead of taking it to the tip, I took my fridge with me, too overwhelmed to do anything further than the move itself, having scraped out years of furniture and VHS tapes that ex-housemates had left behind. I had been aided by friends and family that gave kindness I didn’t feel I deserved, I couldn’t ask them for help with this. I should be able to take care of this myself.

The fridge was wet, and it was screaming at me to do something; while I watched television; while I took yoghurt out of it, wiping the bottom of it, and everything else with a tea towel.

The purchase of a new fridge would be a test of my newly diagnosed ADHD. Of the medication. I would need to do it perfectly. If I didn’t, it meant that the medication had not fixed me. That it was not ADHD. That I was just a bit shit after all.

I researched whether to buy it online, or whether to buy in person. I researched how to get rid of the old one. I researched the merits of top freezer vs. bottom freezer¹.

Finally I realised I wanted to try out the doors in person, feel how they opened and closed. And I wanted to buy it from a large store on the side of a highway, and for its sign and name to feature a character who had gone maaaaadd about their prices, or similar.

In the end, it took one afternoon to buy the fridge. The main reason I finally did it was because my washing machine had completely broken, so it was more urgent to get it done (ha).

Looking back, the research put me in good stead – I knew what I was looking for, and was not dissuaded from my specifications. And they took the old fridge away with them when they delivered.

The new fridge was great (and the washing machine). The light turned on when you opened the door. There was a bit for ice cubes. It was not wet where it was not supposed to be wet.

I sat with my psychologist, after buying the fridge, and wept, and wept.

I had been figuring out, with her, if I was able to have a child – emotionally, physically, mentally.

I said to her, “I have ADHD. It’s taken me four months to buy a new fridge. How the hell am I supposed to be able to take care of a child?”

She frowned, gave a little shake of her head: “Can you picture the attunement to the child?”²

I think I literally said Pfffft.

“Pffft, of course I can,” I said dismissively, “who can’t?”

I could picture it vividly – a natural extension of the way I had always connected with children.

Understood them as people, complete with complex emotions and needs. Fun and funny. Who needed people to meet them where they were. Who didn’t?

But I could picture something – someone – deeper than that. Something that always reminded me of the Adrienne Rich excerpt at the top. I felt like someone was patiently waiting for me.

Before the diagnosis, and after, I have always had a surfeit of love. Sometimes it has been put places where I ended up wounded, disappointed, confused. But I knew I had it to give. And I know, for me, that the point of all this was to not keep it to myself, for fear of being hurt again.

So when my psychologist asked about attunement, of course that question deserved my Pffft – I believe I even waved her away.

“Of course I can picture an attunement with my child. I can picture it, feel it, in 4D. It’s just there.”

There was a pause from my psychologist.

“Sam, no one comes to see me because their parents were crap at buying fridges.”

I’d say there was a pause for effect, but I don’t think she knows, to this day, how important this sentence has been for me.

She continued, “If you have the attunement, the ability to empathise and connect, which is what ADHDers are excellent at, then the practical stuff can come later.”

I could.

And she was right.

And it has.

I am lucky that a dozen little moments, exchanges, and one big, big diagnosis, lead to me having a baby. To allowing myself to try.

This story is why I am passionate about coaching. Seeking support doesn’t have to be about having a baby – but it does have to be about allowing yourself to at least consider the life you want to have, while liking the person that you are, regardless of whether it works out as planned.

The word positive has been ransacked, but I don’t think it’s the right word anyway. Maybe, hope? Whatever – this is why we need poetry.

The practical stuff is needed – but only if we don’t weaponise it against ourselves.

Only if we don’t focus on it to the detriment of all the things that make ADHDers excellent, especially if we are given the time and space to be ourselves.

My kid’s first word wasn’t “Mopping.”

It was “Wow.”

1. Turns out, much like toilet paper placement, and whether you keep the tomato sauce in the fridge or on the shelf, it’s down to where, and how you grew up. ↩︎
2. Just a little caveat in the name of precision and clarity – I am paraphrasing our conversation, and what my psychologist said, as I can’t remember the exact words ↩︎