Oh Look Shiny

My life can often be described as chaotic.  This is mostly due to my own choices, over scheduling myself, but sometimes I am simply dealing with the chaos that surrounds me by having a husband and a daughter with ADD/ADHD. 

What do I mean by chaos? Well…

My wonderful husband has ADD.  His mind is constantly in motion.  He is always eager to learn new things and he is always willing to start new things, but rarely is he able to finish them.  I have had to learn ways to cope with this for my own sanity as well as the health of our relationship.  A great example of this is our recent struggle over the ‘baseboards’.  We recently installed some beautiful new wood floors in a few rooms of our house.  My husband insisted that the store wanted to charge too much to ‘finish’ the job by installing baseboards.  He assured me that it would be easy to do.  He bought all the necessary supplies at Home Depot and got started on it right away.  He quickly finished most of one room, but decided that the closet had some tricky angles, so he stopped for awhile to think about how he could get those pesky corners done.  He was going to finish it later.  Later became tomorrow.  Tomorrow became next weekend.  Four months later I hired a handyman service to come and finish the job. 

Here is the important part – I can’t get mad at him for not finishing.  He really does mean well, and he wants to finish the job, but his ADD gets in the way.  This happens a lot at our house, and I have learned how to embrace my inner Elsa and simply “Let it go”.  Sometimes I do get frustrated, I rant and rave a bit about how messy our house is, and then we clean and organize and I feel better.  It is a give and take.  I know that he is not choosing to forget things.  When I am feeling overwhelmed with the chaos, I try to go have a glass of wine and read or relax for awhile.  There are so many incredible things about my husband, he really is perfect for me - so I have learned to take the good with the bad.  I know that if there are important documents (like our passports) that it is my responsibility to put those in a safe place, because if I leave it to him we might never find them again. He knows that I will not drop everything to help him find his wallet/glasses/keys or whatever he cannot find each day.  I have tried to help provide tools to help him stay organized, but it is up to him to make those tools work.  

My life is never boring - so even though ADD is a big part of my life, I have learned to laugh about it.  His ADD simply adds more fun to our lives.