Taivert
Hings ither fowk kin dae (thit I cannae)
Ken which way to gaun oot ae a hotel room or cafe cludgie
Git hame wi’ a week’s worth o’ messages we’ awhing they wantit.
Ken which joabs are maist important, an’ jist dae thum.
Go fur daunders thit dinnae hae them staunin’ greetin’ at a braw sky
or hert wrenchin heidphone tunes.
Daily hooverin an’ pit foldit washin’ awa’.
Onyhing afore a mid efternin tryst, nae fear they cannae mind it.
Pit their socks on the richt way oot, kin thole a seam bumfle
Tell theirsells, “I’ll mind that” and ken they’re richt
Jist yaise hauf their erse.
It is a Friday morning. On the table: a plate of crepes, still warm (and naturally three days late for Shrove Tuesday). Fresh orange juice in glasses and lemon juice (the actual kind, with the little glass juicer) because Pancake Day pancakes are supposed to be served with lemon and sugar. Strawberries in a bowl. Nutella, because – of course. My daughter across from me, unhurried.
I made this. On a Friday. Without chaos, without apology, without the low hum of shame that used to accompany every ordinary thing I couldn’t quite manage to do the way everyone else seemed to manage it.
I took a photograph because I wanted to remember. Not for social media, not for anyone else. Just so that some future version of me, on a harder day, could look at it and remember that this is also true.
Taivert
The Scots word taivert means confused, flustered, worn out by too much. It is the most precise word I know for what undiagnosed ADHD felt like from the inside. Not dramatic, not chaotic in any way you could easily point to, just permanently, exhaustingly taivert. Scrambled. Behind. Trying.
For most of my adult life I moved through the world like someone attempting a race they hadn’t been told the rules of. Other people seemed to know things I didn’t…which direction to turn out of a hotel room, how to hold a week’s worth of tasks in their head without losing half of them, how to simply decide what needed doing first and do it. I watched them and took notes and tried to reverse-engineer a kind of normality that never quite fit.
The mornings were the sharpest edge of it. Mornings require sequencing, and sequencing was the thing my brain resisted most. The sock inside out, the appointment forgotten, children to two different places before starting my work day, the thing I absolutely had to do this morning that vanished the moment I tried to hold it. I developed workarounds without knowing that’s what I was doing. Systems that looked eccentric from the outside but were quietly holding my life together from within.
I didn’t know then that I was doing something remarkable. I thought I was just barely keeping up.
The morning she didn’t cry
About eight years ago, my daughter was going through her own diagnosis journey. She was struggling in ways that were painfully familiar to me (though I didn’t yet have the language to understand why they were familiar, or what they meant about both of us).
I remember the morning so clearly. We were in the car on the way to school. She turned to me the way children do when they want you to witness something important; holding it up carefully, like something fragile. “Mummy look, I’m not crying today.” As if she knew. As if she’d been keeping track. And I noticed, in the same moment, that she was right. That sounds like a small thing. It wasn’t. It had been a long time since a school morning hadn’t carried that particular weight. The dread, the overwhelm, the grief of a child who couldn’t explain why everything felt so hard.
Something in me cracked open.
Not with relief, though there was relief. With grief, first, for all the mornings before it. For her, yes, but also for something I was only beginning to see. For the child I had been, who also couldn’t explain it. For the woman I had become, still carrying all that unexplained weight, having built an entire life on coping strategies assembled in the dark.
The lack of understanding of ADHD in women, particularly in my generation, meant that so many of us struggled for so long without ever knowing why. We were told we were too much, or not enough, or both at once. We learned to mask and manage and make do. And we got very, very good at it, in ways that were invisible even to ourselves.
There had to be more to her life than this. More to my life than this.
What I built without knowing I was building
I have spent years learning, slowly and mostly alone, what works for a brain like mine. The routines that create enough structure to function without feeling like a cage. The way mornings need to be soft before they can be productive. The importance of beauty in small things…a sunrise, good mug, a plant on the table, light through a window…as anchors against the scatter.
I learned that I work better with sound than silence, with movement than stillness, with gentle transitions than abrupt starts. I learned that my capacity is not fixed; that it expands with rest and contracts with overwhelm, and that managing it is not weakness but craft. I learned that the things I once apologised for, the walking, the needing music, the absolute inability to simply sit still and concentrate, were not character flaws. They were my brain asking for what it needed.
None of this came with a manual. No one handed me a diagnosis in childhood and explained what it meant and what might help. I assembled it piece by piece, from instinct and trial and error and the kind of stubborn self-preservation that looks, from the outside, like coping.
It was more than coping. I just couldn’t see that yet.
Pancakes
“Mummy look!
I’m not crying on the way to school today.”
Her pride tore at my heart,
There it was, still
My best lacking what I knew she needed.
The first pancake is always wonky
Sacrificed willingly without shame.
I knew the ingredients but not the method,
But we all know they improve as you go.
I adjusted the heat,
Continually trying for a softer morning.
Now she speaks to me in songs played on the kitchen speaker.
Our shared language deeper than her early years tears.
I served up that first wobbly pancake proudly today
She won’t eat it with lemon juice and sugar –
Because everything tastes better with Nutella
The photograph
I look at that breakfast photograph and I see all of it. The years of mornings that didn’t look like this. The slow accumulation of understanding — of myself, of my daughter, of what we both needed to not just survive but begin, tentatively, to flourish. The diagnosis that finally came and named what had always been true. The medication that helped not by changing who I am but by giving me a little more access to who I already was.
And I see the pancakes. Warm. Made on a school day, with capacity to spare.
There is grief in it – I won’t pretend otherwise. Grief for the years when this felt impossible. Grief for the women of my generation who are still out there, taivert, building systems in the dark without ever knowing why they need them. Grief that it took so long.
But there is something else too. Something that took me a long time to allow myself to feel without immediately undermining it.
Pride. Quiet, bittersweet, completely earned pride.
I built something, without a map, without the right support, without even knowing what I was building or why I needed it. And some of it worked. And here we are, my daughter and I, on a Friday morning, with pancakes and fresh orange juice and a spider plant on the table that I haven’t killed with neglect or hyperfocus overwatering, and nowhere to be yet.
That is not a small thing.
There is a poem I wrote ages ago, called Embrace, that sits at the heart of all of this. I wrote it for myself. For the child I had been, the one who was too much, who fought every day to prove she was worthy of loving, who needed someone to say: I see you. You don’t have to hold all of this alone. I wrote it before I fully understood why I needed to. And then I had a daughter who showed me the same child in a different face. Who needed the same things I had needed. Whose tears on the way to school were a mirror I hadn’t known I was looking into.
That is what I understand reparenting to mean. You cannot unknow the first pancake. But you can learn the method – slowly, stubbornly, without a recipe, and in learning it for yourself, find that you are able to offer something different to the people you love. The healing runs in both directions. You mother yourself back to wholeness, and in doing so, you mother her differently too. Not perfectly. But with so much more of yourself available than before.
What have you built, quietly and alone, that you haven’t yet given yourself credit for?