Seeing Patterns in the Past

Annie Mack
Mar 13
3 min read

Updated: Jul 6

My parents and grandparents have passed away.

Identification of ADHD later in life means I've lost the chance to talk to them about their experiences, but I can look back and reflect on their lives to make sense of this thread running through the generations.

My hypothesis is that ADHD runs in my maternal line. The trauma in our history adds another layer of complexity.

My grandmother's story

Doctors diagnosed my maternal grandmother with Parkinson's Disease in her late teens, an extraordinarily rare occurrence. She lived a long life, but relied heavily on her husband. Knowing what I know now about dopamine-related conditions, I can’t help but wonder whether there was a biological thread weaving through her life, my mother’s life, and now mine.

Not as a simple cause-and-effect chain, but as a shared sensitivity.

A shared wiring.

A shared fragility in the systems that regulate movement, attention, and emotion.

It’s only in hindsight that I see how unusual her story was and how it may have shaped the generations that followed her.

My mother's story

Trauma marked my mother’s entrance into the world. A difficult birth. Blood everywhere. A newborn set aside, believed to be dead.

She survived, but the bond between mother and child did not. Trauma marked my mother’s entrance into the world.

Her father and grandmother became the primary caregivers. My mother and grandmother never developed a deep emotional relationship. What happens at the very beginning of life has a way of echoing quietly through the decades.

I now understand how trauma, attachment disruptions, and neurological sensitivity can all intersect.

It's hard to unpack, but these are the ADHD signs I see in my mother:

emotional sensitivity, she felt deeply and struggled with depression
irritability and frustration over small things, disproportionate emotional responses
interrupting conversations and difficulty keeping track
being forgetful in daily life and losing/misplacing things
struggling to remember details, having to write everything down
frequently overwhelmed, finding household routines difficult
lacking the motivation to start or complete tasks
intelligent, but underachieving
hyper-focusing on one thing while neglecting other important priorities

The story of women with ADHD

As I’ve learned more about ADHD in adulthood, especially how often it goes unrecognised in women of her generation, I see my mother with a new softness.

She wasn’t flawed.

She was unsupported. And navigating a brain that worked differently in a world that didn’t understand that difference.

My father's story

My father’s story is harder to place neatly. He was an alcoholic, shaped by his own childhood trauma, and the ripple effects of that left deep marks on my family.

Some of his problems came from drinking. Some came from the man he was, even without alcohol. All of it was heavy to live with.

Understanding him isn’t about compassion for his actions; it’s about understanding the environment that shaped me. The emotional habits I learned before I had language.

When I look at his life now, I see patterns there too: trauma, dysregulation, inherited pain. I see how those patterns met the patterns from my mother’s side.

I see how the meeting of those currents formed me.

Seeing myself more clearly

All my life I sensed that something in me was different.

I see that I likely have ADHD too, just as my mother probably did. And I see those traits in my sons as well, not as problems, but as part of our family wiring.

There is something freeing about recognising a pattern, not as a personal failing, but as a story stretching far behind you.

It’s not about blame or diagnosis. It’s about context.

It’s about looking backward with compassion so you can move forward with clarity.