I Loved My Children and Hated My Life...My Story Part One | Supporting Tones Music Therapy | Vancouver, WA | Neurodivergent Mom | Depression | Women's Mental Health

My First Day Back to School

I loved my children. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and resentful. And I hated my life.

I know that’s a lot to admit. But if I’m going to do this, show up here and be honest with you, then that’s where we start. Not with the version of the story where I figured it all out. With the version where I was drowning and didn’t see a path out.

That’s the version that might actually matter to you.

The Life I Was Supposed to Want

I had been taught my entire life that motherhood was the greatest thing I would ever do. I believed it. I made it my dream. I stopped all other dreaming.

I left my career to stay home. I had three children, a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 4-year-old. I had the life I chose.

And I was so miserable.

I was just trying to convince myself to power through, put on a smiling face, and choose the life I had. But underneath the smiling face I was a woman who had lost herself completely, and had no idea how to find her way back, or if that was even allowed.

I had been seeing a therapist for years. I was on depression medication. We increased the dose. I still felt like I was slowly drowning. My emotions were so confusing and mixed up I didn’t really know how to express them. When I tried, I ended up hurting someone’s feelings, or I was met with dismissive comments.

So I stopped trying to express them. I buried them. I survived.

Going Numb Was the Only Thing That Worked

The constant feeling that something was wrong with me, that I should be able to change how I felt, that if I just thought differently or tried harder I could fix it, was overwhelming. It was its own kind of exhaustion on top of all the other exhaustion.

I remember making a decision. Not consciously, not out loud. But a decision.

Protect yourself, go numb, don’t feel anything.

For me that looked like checking out. Reading as an escape. Ignoring everything I could. Putting up a wall around any relationship that asked something real of me. Securing my mask, humor, fake smiles, the performance of fine. I was good at it. For the outside I had everyone fooled.

And here’s the part that might break your heart a little: I was doing everything right.

Therapy. Working out. Massages. Time away. Vacations. All of it. I was doing every single thing I was supposed to do to feel better. Every box checked. Every recommendation followed.

Nothing made me feel relaxed. Nothing made my nervous system stop.

Because here’s what I didn’t know yet: an ADHD brain in nervous system overload doesn’t get to rest just because the body goes on vacation. My brain didn’t stop. It never stopped. So a week at the beach looked like relief from the outside and felt like the same chaos, just in a prettier location.

My husband watched all of it. The therapy appointments, the gym sessions, the trips, the self-help books. He watched me try. And one day he said something that I have thought about hundreds of times since:

“You are doing all these things. But it doesn’t seem to help. You’re just always mad.”

He wasn’t wrong. That’s the thing. He was watching accurately. He just didn’t know what he was looking at.

And neither did I.

COVID Hit. And Everything Got Worse.

When COVID happened and school moved online, I was suddenly spending 4 to 6 hours every single day sitting next to a child, going through their work with them. Three children. Different needs. All day. Every day.

I was all touched out. I couldn’t wait until they all went to bed so I could have personal space, and then I felt guilty for feeling that way.

I lost myself in reading. I tuned out as much as I could. I locked myself in my room for mandatory time-outs. Anything I could do to give myself some peace. Some space. Some proof that I still existed as a person.

I wasn’t sure how we were going to survive this.

The Character Who Changed Everything

In one of the books I was reading, a character stood out.

She was a music therapist.

I had never heard of this before. I immediately looked it up to see if it was a real job.

It was.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost music in my life in any meaningful way. But music had always been a huge part of who I was, from the time I was little, music was how I regulated myself, how I processed the world, how I felt most like me. I hadn’t named it that way then. I just knew I’d lost it. And I missed it in a way I couldn’t quite articulate.

I found out there was a music therapy program 45 minutes from my house.

I decided I’d take a few music classes. Just for me. Just to get out of the house. Just to do something that felt like mine.

Then It Got Interesting

I reached out to the program. They told me I was wasting my time taking a class or two. They said: You either do this or you don’t.

So I auditioned.

Within one week, I submitted audition tapes, interviewed with the music therapy faculty, and got accepted into the program. I went from planning to take two casual classes to enrolling in seven. From ‘maybe I’ll just get out of the house a little’ to full-time student.

I thought: What’s the worst that happens? They say no. So I went for it.

It was terrifying. It was the first time in years I had done something just for myself, something that felt scary and alive at the same time.

And it changed everything.

What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Then

I know now that I wasn’t to blame. I wasn’t failing at life. I wasn’t a bad mother who needed to try harder.

Here’s what I actually was: an undiagnosed ADHD woman whose brain had been working triple overtime her entire life just to keep up, and nobody knew it, including me.

I had built up a whole architecture of coping skills over the years. Ways of managing myself. Strategies that kept me functional, kept me together, kept me looking like I had it handled. And then my hormones shifted, pregnancy, postpartum, and every single one of those strategies stopped working.

This is something researchers are starting to understand: undiagnosed ADHD women often hit significant walls during hormonal transitions. Pregnancy. Postpartum. Perimenopause. Menopause. The hormones that helped regulate dopamine drop, and suddenly the coping skills you’ve relied on your whole life just... don’t work. The thing that was holding you together quietly stops holding.

I loved being pregnant. I felt good. I felt like myself. And then the babies came, high-need, colicky babies, babies literally strapped to my body for the first year of their lives, and I fell apart. And I couldn’t figure out why.

That thought, if I just tried harder, might be the cruelest thing an undiagnosed ADHD woman tells herself. Because you are already trying so hard. You have always been trying so hard. The trying was never the problem.

The problem was that nobody gave you the right information about your own brain.

Next week, I’ll tell you what happened on the other side of that audition, what music therapy actually taught me, and what came back.

Something To Reflect On This Week

What’s one thing you used to love, before all the roles, before the responsibilities, before you started fitting yourself into everyone else’s needs, that you’ve let go of?

Just notice it. Give it a name. Let yourself remember it exists.

That noticing is the beginning of everything.

If this resonated, I’d love for you to share it with someone who needs it.

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This is the space where I tell the real version of the story, and where we figure out together what it looks like to actually take our lives back.

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