Most healthcare professionals working with our families rarely inquire about how we are coping. Several years ago, in those early days of Nai’s diagnosis, one of the first things to fall away for my husband Kes and I both was traditional self care; for me, hair and nail appointments became sporadic, and retail therapy (shopping on lunch breaks was cardio y'all, lol) became unrealistic. And it’s because, ultimately, Moms like us require something deeper than fleeting escapes and empty consumption; we need radical self care.
According to Learn & Unlearn: Anti-Racism Guide: “Radical self-care is the prioritization of placing your needs before someone else's. Radical self-care is carving out a space for yourself by defining your own self-care. It is radical because it is the act of fully engaging in self-care and ourselves. We know ourselves the best, what we are feeling, and what we need. It is because we know ourselves best, that we can assert what it is that we need. When we are addressing ourselves, it positively trickles out to the community and the environment around us. It is healing. It is self-acceptance. It is radical.”
My brain has always worked “differently”, and I was relieved to find a new level of self-acceptance after being diagnosed with ADHD in postpartum. Once we left the toddler years, we learned that our son, W, also had ADHD. This added another layer to developing new strategies and tools as a family. At times it can feel like double the chaos, but being on this journey with W has also helped in two ways: 1) having a kid who is also neurodivergent has allowed me to see ADHD behaviors and tendencies from an outside perspective and 2) it has motivated me to keep trying new tools and skills so that W can grow up practicing them from an early age. Living in a household where two out of three people are neurodivergent (W’s dad is the walking definition of executive function!), means that most of the decisions we make are based around our ADHD. And like many parents in our neurodivergent community, we have found that some of the things that work for our family may not “make sense” to more neurotypical folks.
