A late ADHD or AuDHD diagnosis rarely arrives as pure relief, and motherhood is often the moment it finally surfaces. On why women are diagnosed so much later than men, what decades of masking actually cost, and the grief nobody warns you about when the answer finally comes.

There was a point in early motherhood when I genuinely thought I was falling apart. Not in the ways people warn you about. What I hadn't expected was the feeling that my entire nervous system was shorting out — and it took years, and a diagnosis, to understand why.