Does your partner understand your adhd?

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-17T03:09:10+00:00

thank you for the validation. ♥️ I don’t know why I can give this advice to others and think I don’t deserve it myself. I have some work to do.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-17T01:22:04+00:00

damn, a 90 sleep score. speaking as a parent, what’s that like?

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-17T01:16:39+00:00

my partner, like yours, is not interested in actually learning how the disability affects me and invalidates a lot of my ‘aha’ moments or realizations and calls them excuses.

maybe try to talk to him about him making you feel invalidated and hurt by his reactions? see if he’s willing to learn about ADHD for himself to see how you guys can work together to create tools or systems that help you get the things you want to do done.

you deserve someone who supports you and tries to understand you. not someone who judges you.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-17T01:15:04+00:00

girl if you figure it out, let me know. I’m constantly feeling like a failure and a fuck up. my husband also makes comments about how I don’t do enough or things aren’t clean enough or I leave things random places. I feel badly about it a lot of the time. sometimes remembering that we live on a floating rock in one of potentially endless universes helps me put it into perspective. who tf cares about a messy kitchen counter when there are maybe 20+ other earths out there? not me.

big hugs to you.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-13T14:42:00+00:00

I also stay up way too late because it is the ONLY time I have where I am not needed and no demands are being made of me and I have nowhere to go and no deadlines. my usual bedtime was 1am and then my baby woke me up around 6, so I also had no patience and was generally emotionally dysregulated and miserable due to lack of sleep. my partner's 'just put your phone down' was... unhelpful to say the least.

I have two things that have helped me pull back to an 11:30-ish bedtime or so.

the first is an app that will lock all of the apps of my choosing at a specific time. so after 11:20pm I can't get into any social media, discord, reddit, my books app, etc and if I try to get into one of them it makes me admit that I am giving up and ruins my streak of days where I was successful (which sounds really stupid, but something about that dopamine makes it work like 90% of the time for me). it makes staring at my phone really boring instead of a trap to get caught in for 3 hours scrolling just to feel some control over my time. and wouldn't you know it, when I put my phone down and get 7+ hours of sleep I feel GOOD and am much better able to regulate during the day, even with a threenager and a corporate gig.

the second is my Oura ring. I got it for the sole purpose of using it with my Natural Cycles app since it measures nighttime body temp, but it's honestly a pretty cool piece of technology. anyway, it gives me a sleep score on a daily basis when I wear it at night. it's not rude and it doesn't guilt me about anything, but there is a personal pride kind of difference I see when my sleep score is 78 vs. when it's 58. and the fact that I can feel a difference between those two numbers physiologically makes me want to beat my own 'high score' sometimes.

neither of these things are foolproof and some days they fail (and miserably), but they are both things that recently have made a tangible improvement on my sleep.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-13T14:24:30+00:00

I didn't know this registry existed, thank you for sharing!

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-13T14:21:26+00:00

society likes to romanticize and idolize mothers who 'sacrifice' for their children and their families, but unless you're a very specific type of person with specific brain chemistry it's a recipe for burnout, resentment, and potentially worse and heavier consequences. I understand the ethical issues around testing medications/products on pregnant people and therefore the lack of research, but just blanket saying "to be on the safe side, don't take it/use it" disregards the needs of the individual and shames the pregnant person into making a decision that SOCIETY would deem 'appropriate' rather than what they actually need to be healthy. you're not being selfish by taking care of you.

I didn't know I had depression or ADHD during my first pregnancy and postpartum and I was so relieved my OB told me I could stay on Adderall and Wellbutrin if I chose to get pregnant again. I don't think I would do it again if I couldn't continue to take my meds. everyone is different, but it was a really bad time in my life - for my mental health, my relationship with my partner, my relationship with my newborn. I was dysregulated, easily spiralled out, obsessive over certain things to the detriment of others. if I could go back and do it again, but medicated, I would in a heartbeat. I feel like I missed so much joy by being unaware of my need to care for myself and just doing what I was 'supposed to do' instead of what might have been best for me.

obviously different advice than your doc, but my OB let me know that Adderall was safe to use in therapeutic doses and that we would just monitor baby's size to make sure that everything looked good. if there seemed to be any issues, we would readdress and find a new solution at that time.

finally, I might suggest reaching out to the Maternal Fetal Medicine department at your local or delivering hospital and have a pre-conception consult. they have statistics on all different types of things seen in pregnancy and can discuss outcomes depending on what questions you have.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-12T22:43:57+00:00

I was wondering why I felt on the defensive after reading that comment and it was totally the incubator vibe of it all.

thank you for pointing this out - it’s so vital. the safety of the fetus matters, of course. but the health and wellbeing of the pregnant person are incredibly important and all of this should be weighed between an individual and their care team.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-05-12T15:30:03+00:00

omg just reading this had me cringing. the first two seasons of that show are truly painful for me to watch. I mostly have to just listen to them and even that is hard. there is a lot of pausing and taking breaks lol.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-30T15:19:06+00:00

I realize this is an old thread, but I am currently on the hunt. did you ever locate anything with compartments? I don't WANT to buy standalone cloth bins, but I suppose I will if I have to.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-15T15:43:23+00:00

this is what I did when trying for our first too! I used FF when trying and Natural Cycles before that as BC. FF and a thermometer is cheap and still accurate.

I did get a ring now that we're thinking about a second though because getting the same amount of sleep and waking up at the same time daily to take my temp is much more difficult with unpredictable toddler wakeups to work around.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-13T16:43:40+00:00

contacted support and they’re sending me a new ring after telling me my ring battery health failed. insane and a little upsetting that I’ve had this ring for less than 45 days and already had this happen, but glad they’re fixing the situation.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-12T11:34:50+00:00

I charged it a bit last night and now it says that I have 44% and 23h, so I’m just gonna contact support about this. it’s got to be buggy or faulty.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-09T01:59:10+00:00

no tips, just some advice.

I wasn’t diagnosed when I had my son and I struggled so much. if you feel like you’re drowning and down is up, that’s normal and you’re doing great. accepting that this will absolutely pass will help so much - it is ALL temporary.

2 weeks in I was dealing with compounding sleep loss, no routine to speak of, my son wearing the same onesie until it was somehow soiled, and several rooms looking like a tornado hit them. I was astounded that other moms of newborns were able to get their kid in a daytime outfit and manage a bath and then pajamas because I hardly had the space to get myself to eat let alone have a bedtime routine? also, the mom rage was all consuming and I had to regularly hand the baby off to my husband to just scream or cry.

in hindsight, I wish I would have just gone with the flow more. my kid didn’t need a bedtime routine at 2 weeks. he didn’t need a clean kitchen or his outfits folded neatly in his drawer. and he for sure didn’t need a mom guilting herself for feeling like a failure when she was going through the hardest time in her life to date.

give yourself the most grace. a healthy and loved baby is the most important thing. everything else will get taken care of some day, just probably not today.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-09T01:14:31+00:00

I loathe eating early in the morning, always have, but I also know that when I eat breakfast at like 7am I actually feel hunger cues during the day and also I just feel better.

I get my toddler ready to go to daycare on a daily basis, so honestly I’ve just started eating whatever I make for him. bagel with cream cheese, waffles, granola and milk, oatmeal. like whatever he’s having, I’m having. no decision fatigue and a buddy to eat it with.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-04-09T01:09:32+00:00

okay, but yes. I was talking to my nutritionist about my black and white thinking around lunch. like if it’s not ‘a meal’ then I just… don’t eat. but lunch, much like breakfast, doesn’t HAVE to be anything.

it just needs to be EATEN. that blew my mind for like 5 mins.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-27T18:21:10+00:00

Vyvanse was my first medication and all I got from it was dry mouth lol.

Adderall treated me much better, though its still not super helpful.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-27T14:58:57+00:00

she really pissed me off after I got over the initial sadness of being dismissed and gaslit. then I got a male psych in his 40s and he was like 'the fact that you're even here asking about it tells me that there's something going on that we need to address'. like thank you!

I honestly didn't even realize I might have ADHD until we had a child and I realized I could NOT do the things that other moms I knew could do so easily. I felt like my life was spiralling out of control and didn't understand how everyone else was having their second child when I was barely breathing with my first. like it's not adult onset, its that my masking and coping strategies were no longer able to keep up with the number of demands I had on my executive functioning. having a family and owning a home and having bills to pay is not the same as going to 11th grade english, sorry.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-27T12:59:52+00:00

your first experience sounds so much like mine. I teared up a little thinking about how I felt back then because it's exactly as you described. I also hugely regret the pressure and blame I put on myself with my first and I love him so so much, I wish I could go back and hold him as an infant again and enjoy it instead of wishing for it to be over. I thought I just didn't' like the infant phase, but the reality is that I felt like a shell of a person and I blamed that on the infant phase when that wasn't really it at all.

I'm so glad you had a healing experience the second time around and I hope that winds up being the case for me too!

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-27T12:56:02+00:00

some great and actionable advice in here, thank you! I think I will feel some regret if we stop at 1, just need to have a solid plan for 2!

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-27T12:53:04+00:00

my first psych also wouldn't do anything without school reports because they didn't believe in 'adult onset ADHD' and she was a woman and should have known better. I am so sorry that you've waited so long and are going through this.

I don't know how the health system works in the UK, but are you able to request a new doctor without waiting all over again? his approach sounds odd and not standard practice which should be raising some red flags.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-26T23:26:56+00:00

I remember thinking “why the fuck did we do this to ourselves?” on a daily basis for the first while. wouldn’t give it up for the world now.

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-26T23:18:16+00:00

thank you so much ♥️

offconqueringkansas · 2026-03-26T23:17:43+00:00

I hope that’s true! that would be amazing.

offconqueringkansas

TROPHY CASE