THE HILARY HENINGER

I love my daughter and am beyond appreciative of my relationship with her.

From the very beginning she was a humbling teacher. She taught me things my boys didn’t. In part because I have found a stark contrast in raising my sons and daughter, and in another, because they all have such vastly different temperaments. She was feisty and strong from the get go and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I adore her – even if it feels like her instruction manual came in a language I don’t understand.

From early on, she brought with her an intensity that my sons didn’t have. Not in a negative way. I would simply describe it as an intensity of emotion, discipline, and opinion. She was the baby who put herself to sleep and potty trained without much direction. She was also my only child to have temper tantrums. She taught herself calligraphy and demanded endless hours of spelling bee’s while we made dinner requesting new words every 20 seconds with the authority of an army marshall. Her demanding ‘another word’ at our kitchen island while my eyes scanned the counter for something (anything!) to give her, desperately yelling ‘doritos’ by what felt like word #200 about forty minutes into our ‘relaxing evening’ of no scheduled activities. She wore two different shoes to school for at least half of elementary school and insisted on spelling her name differently each year simply because she wanted to. She has also been a consistent perfectionist. Once she set her sights on something – there was no question that she would achieve it. From gymnastics to hand lettering to her creativity, if it wasn’t perfect she would work at it, throw it away or do it again until it was “right”.

She famously once told me after I asked her to hurry up with her ponytail as we were late for school, that I wouldn’t understand what it meant to make the perfect ponytail as she pointed out ‘look at your hair”. The gull of me to have a messy top knot at 7 in the morning after getting up early to work, readying everyone for school and packing lunches apparently pushed her over the edge.

As the parent of many teenagers can relate, I walk a tightrope of nostalgia between the simplicity and adoration of our relationship from the elementary years with the amazement and hope of their metamorphosis into young adulthood.

From endless I love you’s, macaroni necklaces and finger painting to teenage candour of their thoughts on your parenting and appearance, the sharpness of their words can cut like a knife through your heart. While it’s all part of the agreement of growing up, it can be equal parts hard and fascinating to watch their habits, interests and temperament evolve over time.

As a teenager she is not much different. She is funny, sassy, strong, intelligent, capable, artistic, athletic and resilient.

She is also a tornado.

Her room generally resides in the space between chaos and anarchy. We allocate about 30 minutes a day to searching for her airpods. She is still a perfectionist but its reserved exclusively for the things that she enjoys, rather than for the external benefit of others. An improvement for certain.

Much like a tornado, the wake of her activities can be easily tracked. The aftermath of her extracurriculars, constant snacking and outfit changes is like a treasure map of ‘X’ marks the spot. While I don’t recall it being so much like this when she was little, it’s hard to sift through the memories to determine wether she was and I forgot or wether she just didn’t have the autonomy of opportunity to showcase it. The best and worst part of kids getting older is that they are independent in many ways. One benefit, is they can make a lot of their own food, snacks, etc leaving ‘I cleaned up the kitchen’ open to interpretation and simultaneously release all of the triggers you didn’t think you had about controlling your space.

In the last couple of years though, it has become harder. As an observer, I have watched her struggle with aspects of school and daily life. Forgetting things, losing things, intense emotions, feeling overwhelmed and unclear about how to get started on tasks and persistent distraction. Oddly enough observing it and acting on it as something to be addresses are two different things and I think I chalked it up to ‘being a teenager’ not putting much more stock into it than that. Sadly, I think I missed the boat.

About a year ago she started asking for an assessment. Having one brother with ADHD and another with ASD she was more than familiar with the concept and to be fair, one aspect of social media that our kids are constantly exposed to is the barrage of (self) diagnosis and labeling. While I won’t go down that rabbit hole of wether it serves them or not to exist in this awareness, I think a part of me worried that she had been ‘influenced’ to think she needed to be diagnosed and passed it off as such. I looked into it – barely.

I think it was the combination of the cost (I didn’t have benefits at the time and don’t even get me started on the education system’s lack of funding for kids when it comes to much needed supports like educational assessments) and the perceived mountain of getting consent from her dad. For anyone who has had a challenging co parenting relationship at times, the conversation and negotiation of that request felt overwhelming to me and avoidance seeped in to try and rescue me from my reality.

Her dad and I have recently gotten her an assessment and to noone’s surprise – she was diagnosed ADHD. I think it’s provided both her and I with an odd sense of relief. Like finding the word that’s on the tip of your tongue after using every other substitute you can think of.

ADHD can look very different for girls and I regret to say that I hadn’t done my part in learning more about it or understanding whether it was a fit or not. I also think I ignored how hard it is to be a teenager and then a teenager who can’t make sense of how she experiences her world with the pressure of being told to ‘do better’ without recognizing this might be the best she’s got with the tools she has. Turns out much like our adult selves, our teenagers are also doing the best they can. It’s odd to think we often expect more from our children than they are capable of and yet we frame our adult selves as ‘doing the best we can’ as if we’re all so very different.

While I struggle not to lose my mind daily in the wake of the ADHD tornado – wether it’s the physical or emotional toll – I also know that it’s my job, and more importantly, my responsibility to show up for her. To consciously parent.

My job is to raise her according to who she is and not based on who I want or wish her to be. To trust that she is not so different from me in learning to figure it all out as she goes but with fewer tools and strategies. It takes humility, empathy, kindness and courage. To recognize what I don’t know, can’t relate to, and don’t understand. To teach her tools and strategies for how she learns, processes and experiences her world. To show her how to turn her weaknesses into strengths and offer herself grace for the rest.

She’s a tornado. My tornado. Which makes me the storm chaser.