That ended with me finally explaining to him how the way he and my mother treated me as a child, with undiagnosed (and really not even conceptually understood at the time) ADHD caused me lasting trauma that persists to this day. I’m a 45 year old man, and I cried.
Imagine there being no ND diagnosis at all, no concept between normal and short-bus, and the parents mostly taking advice from fellow Christians because there were no other authorities to look to beyond the family doctor.
You missed that wonder by about a decade.
Also, those previous gens were obvs not diagnosed themselves, and had their own traumas they were masking.
If you’re up to it, think about where those parents came from.
The 20th century was toxic, we’re just starting to climb out.
Yes, and the intergenerational trauma goes back to time immemorial. Healing my own trauma has made me recognize how absolutely ubiquitous it is. I feel called to do what I can to help shift things for others, seems to me to be the thing this world needs most.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Larkin
That is a wild choice to put in a collection of poems for Mother’s Day lmao