A reflective series on family and missed ADHD (Part 1)

And what it means to understand our parents more fully without losing sight of what it cost

Over the past year, I’ve found myself looking back at my family with a different kind of attention. Not because anything in the past has changed, but because the language I have now is different from the language I had then.

This series is an attempt to explore what happens when new understanding arrives after the fact. After childhood and the patterns that shaped you, when a relationship is no longer changing in real time.

My mother died last year.

At the time, I didn’t have a framework to help me make sense of the dynamics between us. What I had instead were impressions, adaptations, and a long‑standing sense of disconnection that I couldn’t quite explain.

Since then, I have learned about ADHD, particularly how it can show up in adults, and how often it went unrecognised in earlier generations. This knowledge has shifted the questions I ask about that relationship.

This is not a series about diagnosing a parent after they’re gone. I don’t know if my mother had ADHD. I can’t know that. What I can do is notice patterns. Patterns in how she moved through the world. Patterns in how I experienced her. Patterns in how those experiences shaped me, and how they continue to show up in my own life and parenting.

As I’ve followed those patterns, I’ve found myself holding more than one truth at the same time. That something important was missing in our relationship. And that there may have been reasons for that absence that none of us understood at the time.

This series sits in that tension. It draws on my family’s story, not as a template, but as a lens. A way of exploring what it might mean to revisit relationships once we have access to language that wasn’t previously available.

Along the way, I will be writing about:

• how ADHD can show up as patterns across a lifetime, not just symptoms

• how coping strategies can become what we think of as personality

• how gender, culture, and historical context shaped who was seen and who wasn’t

• how neurodivergence and trauma can interact in ways that are hard to separate

• what it means to recognise these patterns in ourselves and across generations

• and the kind of grief that emerges when understanding comes too late to change the relationship itself

This work is not about simplifying the past. It is not about replacing one explanation with another. And it is not about moving anyone toward forgiveness, reconciliation, or a more palatable version of their story.

If anything, it’s about allowing more complexity. Understanding can soften some things. It can add context, and sometimes compassion. But it doesn’t erase impact. It doesn’t undo what it felt like to grow up inside a particular set of patterns.

You don’t need to reinterpret your own experiences as you read this. You don’t need to agree with what resonates or turn it into a conclusion.

If this series offers anything, I hope it’s this:

A way of noticing.

A way of holding more than one perspective at once.

A way of loosening the stories that formed in the absence of language without having to replace them with something definitive.

You’re welcome to take what fits. And leave what doesn’t.

Next in series: We Didn’t Have the Language Then (Part 2)