An ADHD Recovering People-Pleaser Negotiates Chores With Her Teens

It is 6 a.m. I have stumbled out into the kitchen to make the tea that will help get my brain in gear. Greeting me is a sinkful of dirty dishes. I sigh. My younger teen promised to do them, but sometime in the night, instead, he and his brother made more.

Chores have been challenging to negotiate throughout their lives. I’m a career, work-from-home writer. Even when I was married, I took on most chores simply because they helped ground me. They got me up out of my chair and out of my head when the words wouldn’t come or came out jumbled.

These factors all became more profound during the process of separation and divorce from my sons’ father.

Undiagnosed with ADHD for most of my life, I’ve been judged ‘scatterbrained’ for as long as I can recall. Yet suddenly, I was managing an entire household — plus my career and (to a lesser extent) my sons’ lives — on my own for the first time ever.

Thus, I was even more motivated to prove, as I’d learned over time, that I could figure this out for myself as if the act of asking itself was audacious because other people have better things to do.

Besides, chores helped me work out frustrations and gave me something to accomplish when everything else felt like it was falling apart. They were practice for some not-too-distant future point when (assuming we’re all still alive) the boys move out, and I’d be on my own.

I think of it this way: the lawn will still be the same square footage, the dust will still collect at the same rate, and the light bulbs will remain at the same height. Being in the habit of doing things on my own seems to make logical sense.

I open the dishwasher, aware I’m enabling my sons, but also aware of the simple fact that we’ll need dishes for the day ahead. I again run through the conversation I’ve been meaning to have with them about the life skills they need to live on their own. This essay begins to form in my mind.

Asking for help should be straightforward, except it isn’t.

First: I do ask. And they do help (mostly) without question. I don’t even have to nag them.

The problems start when I don’t remember to ask, or I think of asking and then promptly forget, either because there’s no convenient break in the flow of conversation or because they aren’t in the room or the car with me when I think of it.

Other times I remember to ask at, say, the tail end of a conversation. “Not right now, this very second” is an agreement we all have. Often, they make requests when I’m mentally engaged in, say, writing an article or an email. It’s hard for me to switch mental gears, so I ask them to be patient while I finish. How, then, can I expect something different from them?

To a neurodivergent brain, memory is tricky. You blank on things you just said. (The number of times I’ve gone back over a transcript and realized I have no recollection of that part of the interview…) You can remind yourself to do something half a dozen times and still forget just moments later (until hours pass and you realize you forgot).

Sometimes, I don’t ask for help because I myself don’t remember or realize the need.

It’s for that reason that I don’t want to have to ask. I want to be raising the kinds of roommates or partners who will, like me, look at a sink full of dirty dishes and think, “They won’t wash themselves,” and then go forth and wash. Who will compensate for their own ADHD by setting their own reminders on their own phones.

Which they first have to remember to do.

Memory is part of a suite of executive functioning, the way the brain organizes and tracks tasks. Assuming you remember what needs to be done or how to do it, you still have to work out how it is to be done: how to integrate a single action into the flow of other actions or in a multi-step process like writing an article, which step to start with first.(Hint: it’s not always outlining.)

In other words, you know things need to get done. Assuming you know how to do them, you want to be able to do them in a certain order. Which step to start with is often the missing piece. That can lead to overwhelm as your brain endlessly cycles between steps, trying to tease out which one makes the most sense to start with.

If you don’t know how then learning or figuring it out is an additional step you have to make time and room for. For teens, ‘learning to load the dishwasher’ doesn’t quite deliver the same dopamine hit as learning, say, how to compose music or a photograph or a text message that will impress that cute friend of theirs.

After many years, I’ve learned to ‘stack’ errands or chores to create sort of a snowball of productivity. But my way may simply not work the same way for my sons.

Thus for me, trying to get them to make room for chores in their heads becomes an extra step. It becomes part of a well-worn pattern of my own excuses:it’s easier to just do it myself. Less pushback to negotiate. Less mess to incur a secondary cleanup.

Where is the line between self-discipline and self-sabotage?

For many years, the executive dysfunction kept me from completing any chores at all. Part of the problem was, I believe, the knowledge that there was a ‘right’ way to clean and the resistance to that knowledge — not by doing things halfway, but by not doing them at all.

In Neurodivergent Land, this is known as ‘pathological demand avoidance.’ When my sons tell me I “have a different standard of clean,” though, I hear it another way: fearing they can’t possibly live up to that standard.

This, too, I understand.

After all, another way to say ‘less mess’ — or more accurately, its underlying truth — is ‘less making the kids feel bad for making mistakes.’ It doesn’t matter if your mind knows that mistakes are essential to learning. When you grew up feeling like delivering anything short of perfection made you less than, that’s all you have. There is no magic script rewrite that happens when you decide you don’t want your own children to feel less than.

Thus I know my sons’ ‘standards’ negotiation is, fundamentally, a deflection — one that compounds my own set of excuses. This strikes at the nature of my people-pleasing: I tend to back down when it becomes clear that something I’m asking for inconveniences others. Instead of holding others to high standards, I lower mine. That’s how my sons wash their bedsheets and vacuum their bedrooms less often than I do or would if they weren’t in charge of their own rooms.

Other mothers might counter their excuses with a snappy comeback: “What standard of clean would you apply? Is it possible that by the time it gets to that point, you’ll think it’s too gross to clean?” or “You live here, therefore the things I ask you to do come first.”

Except I don’t say these things. I don’t even think of them at the moment. I think of them an hour or more later, when banging on their bedroom doors to speak my point of view will be terribly random — like it “came out of nowhere” — and harder for them to implement.

I am still conditioned to believe it isn’t safe to make a snappy comeback; not worth the momentary sense of satisfaction. I am practiced at putting up and shutting up.

That’s how, in my drive not to sound “unreasonable” or “nagging,” I’ve learned to make the best of a situation: to enjoy the chores, and build them into my daily routine.

For me, it’s huge that I’m not stuck in silent, simmering resentment, cutting my sons down with nasty, passive-aggressive side comments, or blowing up at them for failing to abide by my personal standards.

Codependency also has consequences.

I am all too aware of the phenomenon of ‘weaponized incompetence’— that subtle form of control people use to get out of doing things they don’t feel like. It’s most effective against people pleasers like me, who will do just about anything to stay in others’ good graces.

I’m further well aware that my whole job is to encourage my sons to be competent. That they deserve the chance to learn to notice for themselves when things need to be done, like they already do with their laundry, and to raise their own standards, like cleaning the bathrooms at least weekly.

Because at which point can you ‘let go’ of small things like, say, the breadcrumbs left behind when they make their own sandwiches before you realize you’ve collectively invited a colony of ants (or worse pests) into your living space?

Taking care of a home is thus an act of healthy interdependency, so it follows that asking for help is, too.

I tell myself that next time they’re both in the same room, I’ll have the conversation. The next time comes, and I forget. I’m engaged in a work issue, and the ‘chores’ part of my brain isn’t working at the moment.

Or there’s something more pressing to talk to them about.

Or they’re making plans with friends, and they’re thinking about fun, not drudgery.

Or I opt to join in the fun because I want to build a connection with them.

I should ask them for more help in one-to-one conversations, but getting them both together feels more impactful. I should set family meetings, but their schedules are variable.

“I should” is part of the self-talk my therapist wants me to abolish because I’m judging myself. She tells me the fact that I’m noticing any of this at all is part of healthy healing. I feel like the longer this goes on, the more I continue to enable dysfunction.

Or perhaps I’m still judging myself. Boundary-setting is also part of healthy healing, not just on its own merits, but also — as the poet Robert Frost observed — in the act of engaging others to help set and mend them.

Thus as my sons start their adult lives, perhaps the most important lesson I can teach them is not the cleaning standards I think they should abide by or even how to manage their own schedules or life rhythms or tasks.

Instead, it may just be that I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t have to have all the answers, and neither do they — but if we can all figure out how to communicate with clarity and love, we can all find the answers together.