“Mom, I have ADHD, that means I can be bad…..”

“No, buddy, that just means we have to work harder to be better at life.”

Subliminal messages are everywhere in life. We must be willing to look, listen, and pay attention. I suffer from co occurring mental h.ealth disorders and substance abuse, and it’s taken me many years to truly grasp and understand what that means and how to live a functional life. I had just started to think I was figuring things out when I unexpectedly got pregnant!! If you’ve read any of my other blogs you might know that being a mom was something I had always dreamed of, I just never actually saw it happening, so at that time in my life, I felt like it was a sign that God felt that it was time, both for me and for this child. My perspective looking back was that, god knew I needed a reason, greater than myself, to motivate me to continue fighting for this life, and he knew that I would fight for my child. And my son has and continue to save my life, over and over still today.

I used to be that person that used my mental health and addiction as the reason and excuse for everything that went right and wrong in life. When you have mental health issues, you are already blocked to a degree from receiving the gifts of life naturally, as the way you feel and perceive things is skewed. I tend to feel things on such an intense level that isn’t realistic I have to put myself in check 95% of the time.

Being a mom with as much experience in life as I have, I knew I would need to use it, I didn’t imagine it would be one of the first big things I would have to tackle with my son and his own mental health, or having to walk through, teach and advocate for my sons mental health starting at 4 years old.

My pregnancy was challenging, and my son was born premature. This is just one indicatior for mental health issues in young children, but I could see almost immediately that there were cognitive differences in him from others his age. Don’t get me wrong, he is extremely intelligent, and always has been, but he has never slept through the night, he always needed to be held, or he would cry, ad he got older he would easily become overstimulated. The term “climbing the walls” was the literal day to day life we lived. Sometimes night time would roll around and he would be exhausted from being in full gear during the day but his brain just wouldn’t shut off so it would take hours on top of a regular night time routine to get him calm and to the point where he could lay still. It was exhausting.

This was only the beginning of his mental health struggle and fight. I knew as his mother that he had ADHD. It was as if I was watching myself as a young girl, feeling helpless, and wanting so badly to help him, but knowing that in todays world, there is such a stigma around childhood mental health. But I was desprate for both him and I, that we had to do something, as it was only progressively getting worse and he was getting older. 

When my son turned 4, we were able to get a formal diganosis of ADHD. For many people that may seem young, but the reality is, mental health does exsist in young child even at that age. It is extremely frustrating as a parent to hear from others, “this is just a phase, he will grow out of it,” or “this is a kid with a lot of enery, let him run it out,” or even the thousand other comments I would hear, when its far more complex then that. There is the OCD, anxiety, depression, and sleep issues that are combined with extreme energy that needed to be addressed, and it was something that I could not fix on my own. My child was struggling, and I was suffering watching him. As a single mom, thats such an awful feeling.

We began medication for him when he was diagnosed, but we struggled to find a psychiatrist due to a lack of resources in our area for children his age. It wasn’t until he was almost five that we finally found the doctor he has today. The journey to get him to this point has been challenging, involving many medication changes and my advocacy for his needs.

There was a period when my son went months without sleep because he was experiencing manic episodes, obsession, anger, sadness, and an inability to focus on anything for more than five minutes. This led to multiple hospital stays lasting weeks at a time. At that point, I realized we had overlooked family history, and he was showing signs of bipolar disorder. Although I am not a doctor, I do have bipolar disorder and ADHD, and I could see that he was exhibiting symptoms similar to mine. As a result, we changed our course of action and adjusted his medication again. Today, he is doing much better.

Advocating for my son, has been such a huge part of this journey. Being a broken crayon, has also, helped to heal the little human I am raising.

Im still trying to teaching him that just because he has mental health issues that its not an excuse to act out. It takes 1000x longer for him to grasp a concept, and we have to practice things more then normal, despite how smart he is.

Our journey is far from perfect, and there are still days when it feels impossibly hard. But there is also so much beauty woven into the chaos — the moments of laughter, the breakthroughs, the quiet nights when we finally rest easy. My son and I are growing together, learning together, healing together.

I have learned that broken crayons still color beautifully, and so do broken people. We are not defined by our diagnoses, but by our willingness to show up, fight, and love anyway.

I hope that when my son looks back one day, he will see not just the struggles, but the strength. Not just the hard moments, but the incredible love that carried us through them.

And maybe, just maybe, he’ll believe — as I do — that he was never broken to begin with. He was always a masterpiece in progress