My wife and I were plagued with the issues I guess, are typical to the ADHD partners. Both she and I though it was madness developing in the tightest coils in my mind. The poised intent of my undiagnosed, and ultimately insufficiently managed ADHD conspired to make our home terrifying and unpleasant. For months after our marriage I did not want to go home and she didn't particularly want to receive me. It wasn;t a lack of love, that poured over the windowsills, it was the pall of a pattern that hung over every task in the household. This undefined mist that seemed to permeate everything and convert all joys to absolute anger or disappointment. It was as oppressive as river bottom air and the creature had no name. Now we have found a name, and our working with it to yoke it and coerce it with the appropriate commands. It was my ADHD and her confusion.

My wife, in all her frustration and confusion tethered herself to one truth "He is a good man, with a good heart, he must not be doing this to hurt me intentionally." That was and is always true.

The terror of not knowing was the anger, the constant unfiltered anger that went with us into the kitchen and into the car. Every morning and each forgetful night. My anger, namely. My anger which barked contempt at the suggestions of inadequacy from her. I was perpetually angry because before we knew her statements were the same language as what I have heard since I was small "Why can't you do this?" "Why don't you try harder?" etc... What I call the language of othering. The sort of questions that makes a person feel alien, detached, and made a pariah in their own mind. You begin to have no society, no world, because each one you engage asks you the same things until you aggressively reject them and what they do. I realized my mind, with its natural distancing from appropriate contextual association in the sub-conscious, attached my wife's questions with the same motives as all those teachers and others that hurt me for so many years, and I thought she was just doing more of the same. I felt completely rejected and that she didn't know me at all, any better than anyone else. So I snapped at her with the same anger, anger designed over many years to jealously protect my own sense of value. You have a natural sense that you are ok, that you aren't broken, that God did not make a mistake, but you are constantly treated like an anomaly, and young humans are often unkind to anomalies.

I thought she was just another one of them. But she isn't, she never was. With the diagnosis she valiantly came forward and gleefully said 'Now I know what was going on, it is completely workable" And then so did I. First of all, and I digress, this made me realize more fruitfully again how similar we are, that there is nothing more comforting than truth and real information in our world. We thrive on it. But back to the point. It allowed me to accept fully who I am and that all that pain was the result of misunderstanding, it allowed me to forgive people she could have never known and namely myself as a confused and wandering child for being who I am. It is neurological and thus intentional. I was made this way and that is okay with me. I wasn't less. This started to release my anger towards those children that I never knew I had until now, but I am my happy self again, and she is smiling.