My wife was supposed to have her first meeting with a therapist who specializes in ADHD. During out couples session, however, she said that she had to reschedule it because she forgot to do the paperwork!
There was also a lot of stress last night while I was trying to work on an important (potential life saving) project. The 12 year old kept interrupting me as I was responding to edits suggested by an attorney. Part of their complaint was that my wife kept failing to take them to a thrift store as promised. My wife justified this by saying she has so much to do and can't be expected to remember everything, so she made these promises and then had to reschedule repeatedly because she forgot about other commitments. The 12 year old said that Mom keeps lying to them about this. I told my wife that she needs to think carefully about whether or not she can do something before she promises to do it. She became really upset later because our 18 year old had also said he can't trust her because of all the broken promises (such as repeated promises of trips to Disney.)
This why treating her ADHD is so important. She doesn't want the kids to distrust her, but she has yet to work on building that trust by making only promises she can keeo.
Perfectly outlined
Submitted by 1Melody1 on
You have so perfectly outlined one of the many situations where ADHD impacts the entire family and there is nothing you can do about it. You can explain ADHD to the children. You can talk to your wife about why making and keeping promises judiciously is important, and why keeping a critical therapist appointment is important--but none of it matters if the person with the ADHD continues to do nothing on their end. The situation you described is the kind of thing drove me insane in my marriage because I tried so desperately to protect our daughter from experiencing the fallout of these kind of events. Because my husband would not address the ADHD, our daughter was constantly hurt, confused angry, and she ultimately withdrew from him. Sure... I tried swooping in and keeping his commitments for him and making me her point of contact to prevent issues like this (to prevent the permanent erosion of their relationship and permanent damage to her), but ultimately that's impossible to do and I had to accept that my husband's ADHD was going to F with our child's wellbeing in some way. And it really has. The (emotional) damage is permanent and will be lifelong. And that REALLY sucks.
Impact on kids
Submitted by bowlofpetunias on
As I posted in a separate thread, it is looking more and more likely that our 12 year old has Borderline Personality Disorder.
Both kids routinely lie without any remorse, even about things that they know we are going to discover.