Not a Symptom List: How ADHD Shows Up as a Life Pattern (Part 3)

After my mother died, and before I had any framework for understanding ADHD more deeply, I still found myself circling the same question: What was going on there? Not in any dramatic or confrontational way. More like a quiet, persistent confusion that never quite resolved. Because when I looked back on my childhood, and then across my adult relationship with her, nothing pointed to a single, obvious problem. It wasn’t one event. It wasn’t one trait. It wasn’t something I could easily explain to someone else. It was a pattern.

Growing up, the most consistent thing about my mother was inconsistency. There were moments when she seemed more present, small windows where I caught glimpses of something warmer, more engaged. But they didn’t last. They would close again without explanation, and I was left back in that familiar space of distance, trying to recalibrate myself. As a child, I didn’t think in terms of patterns.I thought in terms of “What did I do?”

The wider environment complicated that further. My father’s drinking shaped the atmosphere of the home in ways that were hard to name at the time. There were moments that felt unpredictable, and at times unsafe. But even within that, I found myself orienting toward my mother, waiting for something steady, something anchoring. And when that steadiness didn’t come reliably, the confusion deepened rather than resolved.

Even as an adult, I found it difficult to describe what was missing. If someone had asked me, “What was your relationship with your mum like?” I would probably have said something like, “Fine, we got along.” And in a surface sense, that was true. There was no big rupture. No single story that explained everything. Just a long, quiet thread of disconnection.

It’s only more recently that I’ve started to understand that some experiences don’t make sense as isolated moments, they only become visible when you look at them across time. Not as symptoms, but as patterns.

When people talk about ADHD, it’s often framed as a list:

• distraction

• forgetfulness

• impulsivity

• difficulty staying organised

But lived experience, especially across decades, rarely looks like a checklist. It looks more like:

• energy that comes and goes unpredictably

• engagement that can’t always be sustained

• good intentions that don’t consistently translate into action

• responses that feel delayed, absent, or out of sync

• a kind of internal overwhelm that isn’t always visible from the outside

And sometimes, it looks like being there… without quite being there.

I think this is part of why it took me so long to even begin asking different questions. Because there was nothing obvious enough to point to and say, “That’s the thing.” Instead, there was a repetition of smaller moments: Not being noticed. Not being responded to. Not being protected in ways I needed. Again and again, across different stages of my life. Until those moments formed something coherent, not in shape, but in feeling.

As a child, I adapted to that without conscious thought. You don’t sit down and decide how to respond to a pattern like that when you’re young. You just… adjust. You become more independent. You lower your expectations. You stop reaching in certain ways. And eventually, those adjustments feel like personality.

 Looking back now, I can see how much of my understanding was shaped by the absence of explanation. If something happens once, you might question it. If it happens repeatedly, and no one names it, you tend to personalise it. You assume it’s about you.

Becoming a parent has made that part more visible to me. I can see how quickly children look for meaning in what repeats, how they organise themselves around what is and isn’t reliable, often without ever saying it aloud. And that makes me hold my younger self a little differently now. Not as someone who misread things, but as someone who was making sense of a pattern with the tools available at the time.

This is the place I find myself returning to as I think about ADHD, not as a label applied after the fact, but as a framework for noticing patterns that were previously invisible. Because when I revisit those years through that lens, I don’t just see absence. I see inconsistency. I see difficulty sustaining connection. I see something that looks less like indifference, and more like interruption. Something getting in the way. Not just of action, but of consistency which, for a child, can feel like the difference between connection and absence.

I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that ADHD explains everything. And I’m not suggesting that naming a pattern removes its impact.

The experience of that inconsistency was real. It felt like distance. It felt like being alone, even in a shared space. Children don’t experience patterns abstractly, they experience them in their bodies, in their sense of safety, in how much they can rely on someone being there when it matters. Understanding a pattern later doesn’t undo that. But it can shift the question slightly. From: “Why didn’t she show up?” to “What might have made showing up so difficult to sustain?”

That shift doesn’t resolve anything neatly. If anything, it adds complexity. Because it means holding two things at once: That the pattern was real. And that the reason for it might not have been what I assumed at the time. I’m still learning how to sit with that. Not as an answer, but as a different way of looking. And maybe that’s all this is, at this stage, not a conclusion, but a practice of noticing. Seeing what repeats. Seeing what was never named. And gently loosening the stories that were built in the absence of understanding.

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

Next in series: Surviving Isn’t Free: When Coping Becomes a Personality (Part 4)