Autism, ADHD and me

I realised some years ago that I probably have ADHD. The waters had long been muddied by trauma-related dissociation, but even as the years passed and the fallout from my marriage started to fade, my distractibility persisted, familiar from earliest childhood and embedded in a mind with no idea how to stay in the moment and be still.  

Eventually I got my act together and earlier this year, I went to see one of our local GPs. At the end of our ten-minute appointment, she looked me in the eye and said 'Well, I'm pretty sure you do have ADHD, but I also think you have autism'. 

I was dumbfounded. Two of my four children had been diagnosed with autism at the ages of four and three in the early 1990s, and I thought I knew all about the condition and the diagnostic process. 

'But I don't tick any of the boxes of the Triad of Impairments,' I protested.

She laughed. 'That's very old school!' she said. 'We diagnose it differently these days, and the hyperfocus and sensory overload you just described definitely indicate autism. I'd refer you for assessments for both if I could work out how to do it.'

Intellectually it made sense. I was aware of what's informally known as AuDHD, of course - it's hard to be on social media, in my sort of bubble, and miss it. And I had to agree that a lot of the tricky contradictions a combination of autism and ADHD might throw up (and hurl around your head like roof tiles in a high wind) felt all too familiar.

But emotionally it was another matter altogether. My little family had been considered an anomaly back in the day, with not one, but two small, non-verbal children a considerable way along the autistic spectrum at a time when autism wasn't thought to be hereditary.  As a result, we'd been invited to participate in several medical studies over the years, and I always said yes, thinking the research might help other families in my position. 

But in all that time, not one of the many medical personnel we encountered ever suggested that I too might be autistic. The only finding that was ever remarked upon was my score in the word recognition section of one of the tests we underwent: the highest they'd recorded to date. (I did rather less well on the spatial reasoning test.)

In the event, my GP referred me for just an ADHD assessment, as that seemed to me to be the condition most relevant to my daily experience, but sure enough, when my assessment came around months later, my eventual diagnosis was combined ADHD (hyperactive and attention deficit) with autistic traits.  

Again, there's lots of processing to be done, and it's going to take a long time. In the immediate aftermath, I feel I need to reframe my whole life, to pick through everything that happened to me, and perhaps view myself and the decisions I made a little less harshly than I have up until now. In that respect, this diagnosis will, I think, turn out to be a relief. 

But at the same time, I grieve that it's taken me 64 years to get to the point where I might start to understand myself, and allow myself the same compassion I extend to others. And I grieve for earlier me: for the avid six-year-old reader, who, once her books had fewer pictures and longer blocks of text, found herself reading the same page over and over without taking any of the content in, and convinced herself she'd somehow forgotten how to read, but was too ashamed to tell anyone; for the teen who loved her friends but found their company and the shifting of group dynamics draining (and still does); for the exhausted young mother with no emotional support and no ability to self-care, who gave up any chance of a career to look after her children on a promise from her husband he had no intention of keeping; for the woman entering middle age, who felt she had no choice but to keep her head down and put up with it all and who completely lost what sense of self she had in the process.  I've always known those years were hard, but I never realised quite how hard until now. 

At the same time, I can celebrate the leaps that allow me to write poems that seem to come from nowhere, and an ability to hyperfocus that makes even essay-writing exhilarating and infuses the most mundane of dog walks with an intensity that's addictive. 

I'm grateful to those who have stuck by me regardless - my lovely, long-suffering partner, three of my children, successive dogs who have loved me unconditionally, my longtime friends and wider family, my friends in poetry, and my publishers, who've enabled me to realise the one dream I held onto through all those years not once but seven times. I love them all, with every bit of my distractible, avoidant, oh-look-squirrels heart.

Travels with My Cousin

The last time my cousin, Sandra, came over from her home in New Jersey to visit was a staggering fourteen years ago, and we had a fantastic time. I think it was the Easter holidays, so I wasn't working fixed days, and we went on a road trip to Leeds, which included visits to Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire, Mr Straw's House in Worksop and Eyam in Derbyshire. And then a volcano in Iceland called Eyjafjallajökull erupted and all the planes between the UK and the US were grounded and we squeezed two extra jaunts out of her forced stay, visiting Isle Abbots and Shepton Beauchamp in Somerset, where our uncle lived, before walking from Langport to Muchelney and back, followed by a third trip to Kilve and East Quantoxhead. It was great. 

And funnily enough - although not for the poor folk of Grindavik - another Icelandic volcano erupted during this visit, but not causing enough air pollution to ground her flight this time. So she had just a week here, at a much less pleasant time of year, and during term time. Nevertheless, we still managed to meet up a couple of times, for which I'm grateful, and who knows, hopefully I'll get over to visit her in America sometime too. 

The photo below was taken by her at Easter Compton farm shop, where we had breakfast before my Auntie Mollie's 90th birthday party, the main reason for the timing of the visit. There are few photos of the Northerner and me together, so I'm really pleased to have this one.

With my cousin Joy, Sandra's sister, and her family

My late mother's six surviving brothers and sisters (from a total of eleven)

With as many of my cousins as could get to the party - we number 24 in all

my boys

Thursday was the day I had Sandra to myself, except of course there were still people who wanted to see her before she went back, so it was largely a matter of balancing everyone's needs, coupled with a truly gruesome weather forecast. In the end we booked a table at the Little Harp in Clevedon, where for a few years at the end of their lives, I took my parents on my mother's birthday. First, though, Son the Younger drove us to Portishead, where we spent a couple of hours with my friend, Liz, who knows Sandra well, and her husband, Paul. 

Clevedon was drizzly, as promised, but when we emerged from the pub, fortified by our lunch and the company of our cousin, Sarah, who lives in Clevedon, her dog Foxy, and the friend formerly known as 'Er-over-the-Road (who's really called Cathy and who knows Sandra well from previous visits), there was a window of drier weather so we made our way along the front to the pier. 

Looking in the opposite direction, we could see an interesting little coronet of cloud over Flat Holm, which is probably impossible to make out in this photo and which dissipated very quickly.

Of course, there had to be a photo call. Here's Cathy and Sandra ... 

... me and Sandra ... 

... Cwtch, Son the Younger, me and Sandra ... 

... me, Sandra, Cwtch and Cathy ... 

... and Cathy, Sandra, Cwtch, me, Sarah and Foxy.

Sarah pointed out the house where our grandfather, Jack Hill, lived before his family moved to Bristol, property prices being comparatively much cheaper in those days.

Clevedon Pier

Me, Cathy, Cwtch doing dressage, Sarah and Foxy

Mist on the Severn estuary at Sand Point, Flat Holm and Worlebury Hill 

And then the week, and Sandra's visit, was over. Thank goodness for keeping in touch on social media. 

Spring comes to Badock's Wood

One of the things I've really enjoyed this spring is walking in nearby Badock's Wood.  Since my late winter walk there in mid-February, I've been back several times and watched the trees and mud turn green and the stream of stones that was the Trym fill into something almost deserving the name river. 

This is what it looked like in early March. I was there trying to persuade our collie, Cwtch, that it's nice splashing in water, but she wasn't having it. It was only when she was chasing crows that she'd get even a toe wet. 

Here and there were hints of a change of season...

wood anemone

... but the predominant colour was mud. 

Above the gorge, I explored the badgers' sett ...

... and found an impressive display of jelly ear fungi.

It was a bit more cheerful up there, with early-flowering cherry plum putting on an impressive show of blossom and a promise of spring to come.

And then, a few days later, we had more snow, and continuing low temperatures that seemed to stall everything for several weeks. It was early April before the blackthorn at the edges of the woodland above the Trym took centre stage. 

Down by a rather more fulsome Trym there were many more wood anemones on show, plus one or two early bluebells ...

... and a distinct smell of garlic, courtesy of the ramson leaves sprouting through the soil. 

Also in the wood I spotted some rather elderly looking - well, I think they're Velvet Shanks ...

... and the trees rang with squabbling jackdaws and crows.

Best of all, on the edge of what was, pre-Covid, a playing field but now appears unused, except by dogs and their walkers, a bumble bee on a dandelion. Getting there. 

It would be a stretch to call Badock's Wood a bluebell wood - its specialist subject is garlic - but by the end of April, there were as many in flower as anyone who knows the place has a right to expect. 

By the round barrow it was looking lush at last and there were intimations of cow parsley ... 

... which, less than a fortnight later, looks like this:

There are one or two hawthorns out now too ... 

... fallen petals from horse chestnut blossom ... 

... an an early elderflower blossom ... 

... and even some Chicken of the Woods fungus, but the (literal) stars of the show are the ramsons: 

Badock's Wood has sustained me for years, especially during my divorce when I didn't know how I was going to keep myself or my children going. And there are reminders there of what's been lost, but each year all that new growth and renewal recharges the spirit, reminds me to keep passing the open windows.