The View From Halfway Across

 One week ago I was screaming at my phone.

Not screaming *into* it – this wasn’t some sort of 911 moment, nor was I having a particularly violent verbal argument.

I was screaming at my phone because I didn’t know how to answer it.

This is the sort of story that, minus the screaming part, would make my kids laugh. Can’t you just hear the incredulity in my middle-schooler’s voice? “You don’t know how to ANSWER your phone?” OMG! Awk-ward!

I might have seen it that way, too, before the whole ADD business (OMG, I’m ADD!) entered my life. My middle-aged life.

I wonder how many people get diagnosed – as I did – in middle age?

Even if you allow that Totally ADD’s targeted audience is adults, it seems like there are a lot of us in the fortyish age bracket posting in the forum, and lot of those same folks are there because we’re new to this whole the-way-I-am-has-a-name business, we’re just now suspecting we are ADD, or we’re newly diagnosed.

Back when we Gen-Xers were kids, procrastinating with the help of Happy Days, waiting impatiently in line to see Star Wars, and hyperfocusing on video games only as long as we had a supply of quarters, people didn’t know so much about ADD. That’s probably the biggest of a whole bunch of reasons people my age didn’t get diagnosed sooner…..

But I’m not really interested in the reasons people don’t get diagnosed, or why they fly under the rADDar. Har-dee-har-har.

What I’m really interested in is, why DO they get diagnosed now? What strange and mysterious forces got us to pencil ADD Evaluation in between Dishwasher repairman and Soccer game and PTA meeting and Root Canal?

Why now?

Answer: Hormones! End of blog entry!

You only wish. I’m just getting started….

OK, it’s true, if you’re a woman, there’s a hormonal component to your ADD symptoms. As there is to everything else, right? We are constantly under the influence, at least until menopause, but for now we mid-lifers have “perimenopause,” some sort of hormonal dress rehearsal for the Change, complete with a costume parade of weird symptoms, one after another coming out of the wings. Preeeee-senting: breast tenderness! fatigue! decreased sex drive! irregular periods! vaginal problems! bladder problems! difficulty sleeping! And don’t forget the thrills and chills of the Mood Swing, as it soars to astonishing heights and plummets with dizzying drops….

OK, so what does this have to do with ADD? It turns out estrogen helps your brain messages get through, so when it drops during such times as 1) the last few days before your period or 2) with perimenopause, things can get noticably more muddled. Which is lots of fun if you’re already wrestling with a major case of PMS. I! LOST! MY! FUCKING! KEYS!!!  I didn’t notice the muddleheadedness at first, because it was completely overshadowed by the bad moods, and it became a chicken-or-egg question: Did I get lost because I was so pissed off, or did I get lost and THEN get pissed off?….

But after several months of these sorts of events, I began to notice that I just couldn’t trust my brain after about the 24th of every month. Whether this was new, I can’t say, but noticing it, that was new.

The next thing I noticed was that some of the symptom lists for perimenopause included  “confusion” or “cognitive difficulties.”

Thank God, I would say, it’s not Alzheimer’s!

I was actually really worried about this, that it could be Alzheimer’s. OK, sure, early forties is a bit young, I would tell myself as I fumbled through my purse in a daze, but what if I had one of those TV-movie versions, the tragically early-onset Alzheimer’s, mercilessly swift? Didn’t a lot of my goof-ups have a sort of “senior moment” quality to them? “Do you know you have two pairs of reading glasses on your head?” No, and thanks for telling me where they were; I’ve been looking all over!

So I was worried, yes, but in the end we fortysomethings are pretty rational, it’s not like we go to the doctor asking to be screened for Alzheimer’s and the test comes out ADD instead. It’s more a worry about the the condition everyone has, from birth: Mortality.

When you hit forty the lapses you are having, and the coping mechanisms required, take on an ominous significance – Wow, does this note on my steering wheel make me look old? You start tuning in to things, you’re suddenly on the alert for things that detract from that young, hip, vital image you’re struggling to maintain, and when you’re on the alert, boy, do you start seeing stuff.

Image via Wikipedia

Or you would, except that your vision’s going. This was actually another factor pointing me to diagnosis. Suddenly I needed glasses, and because I wasn’t wearing glasses for most of my life, I didn’t have a good glasses strategy going on. It’s all the worse since right now I only need them for reading. Which would be fine if I was just talking about reading in a cozy chair by the window, but it turns out I’m reading when I’m cooking, taking medicine, or sorting the kids’ underpants. Who knew? Does this tag say small or medium?…And where the hell are my glasses?

Do my glasses make me look old? No, dear, because you never actually wear them….

In a way, an ADD diagnosis was a reprieve, a little hit from the fountain of youth. You don’t have an old-people disease, you have a kids’ disease! Not really, of course, but the fact remains that the bread-and-butter of the ADD specialists is still kids. When I visit my ADD doctor, there are Disney movies playing in the waiting room. Probably the most well-traveled mid-life road to diagnosis is via the diagnosis of one of the children in the family. Not so for me, but it may yet happen in reverse, as there’s there’s one of our kids we’ve got our eye on …

For me, the biggest factor in my diagnosis at age 46 is the good old classic midlife crisis.

I’m not talking about the red-sports-car and trophy-wife version. That’s a guy thing. See, women get mood swings and bladder problems, and guys get sex and fun cars. Where is the justice?

What I’m talking about goes across the gender board: That dead-of-night when you’re lying in bed asking yourself What have I accomplished? If you don’t have a good answer for that one, you’ve got a midlife crisis on your hands.

Me, I don’t even need to be lying in bed. I can have a midlife crisis — I kid you not — driving over a bridge. Not because I want to jump off it, but because midway across this thought will suddenly pop into my head: Somebody designed this bridge.

Or I’ll be shopping in Target and I realize Somebody’s in charge of all these employees, in this one store. And somebody’s in charge of all those people who are in charge. Or I’ll use some stupid innocuous little thing, like a can opener, and think Somebody makes these all day long, and Somebody else invented can openers….

That used to be, I don’t know, just sorta cool and interesting, but now it’s a source of total awe and angst. Because these people are grown-ups, and….

Well, damn. So am I. How’d that happen? Answer: over a shockingly long period of time, you old dinosaur, but the truth is, I didn’t really see myself as a grown-up until very recently, and so the fact that normal human people did all this stuff didn’t blow my mind because I just figured some day I’d grow up and grasp what it’s like to be comptent at stuff that was actually important. Sure, I was an adult, if you checked my ID, but as a grown-up I was pretty much faking it (like when I had to sign mortgage papers) or secretly rejecting it (I am so above the conversation at this party; are we going to talk about anything besides the names of good electricians and which route is the fastest downtown?).

And as I began to realize I was being left in life-accomplishement dust, my immature way of looking at the world began to be sort of like wearing my hair long. Can I still work this look? Because after a certain point, it just starts getting…a little pathetic.

Kind of like my own career, or lack thereof. Jobs, yes, I had those, but I never landed with certainty on That One Thing I Really Wanted to Do, and thus I never had anything that went above entry level, and I beat a hasty retreat to at-home motherhood as soon as I could. These days I do a couple of things very part-time. In the rest of my time I marvel that folks my age are surgeons and executives and professors and pilots and engineers and inventors. And here I sit, lucky if I can figure out how to simply use the things they invent…..

Such as my smart phone, which is clearly rejecting me, its incompatible host.