Living with my mom - my little ADHD, fuzzy-headed, monster.

An essay written with nothing but love for my mom, and a humorous account of what it is like to be an OCD person living with an ADHD person.

Woof! Last week’s essay sure was a doozy huh? I think we all need a break from my ‘Living with Long-haul’ series. Let’s do something lighter. Let’s do…… Living with my mom, instead! Buckle up!

Many of my readers are familiar with stories about my mother. If you aren’t, or need a refresher, here is a story about how she pees on the floor like an unhousebroken puppy all the damn time.

If you follow me on social media, then you know all kinds of stories. Especially from when she used to visit me up in Chicago. However, since I have moved home, I haven’t posted as much about her. I think it is because now the stuff she does is feeling so commonplace to me, that I forget it is still weird as hell.

So, here is a day in my life of me (an OCD person), living with my mom (an ADHD person), told with nothing but love and a dose of humor:

I wake-up, and I walk downstairs to get some breakfast. I walk into the kitchen and step over a pile of stuff she has left in the middle of the floor and I have to close 2 closet doors that she ALWAYS leaves wide open so that I can get to where I am going. Once I make it past these obstacles to get in the kitchen, I find my little momster hiding in the corner, looking up at me with a guilty face. As per usual, her hair looks like Gary Busey’s, and she is sans pants. That’s nothing new, and certainly not anything she feels guilty about. Why is she guilty?

The next thing I notice is that she is hunched over some dessert I brought home last night, and it guiltily eating it without asking me. She gives me a big smile and a big hug. Tucking her fuzzy, disheveled head under my chin like the shorty she is.

She believes she has been caught eating my leftover dessert without permission. However, she is in luck, I actually brought it home FOR her. So, I tell her this, and she happily tells me that everything is “all good in the hood” then. I am a bit miffed that she was eating it when she was under the impression it was mine. But she informs me that I am not allowed to be mad at her, because it was for her. She is an unbothered queen.

She then happily makes her way to the living room to get under her blanket, snuggle with her evil cat, and eat aforementioned dessert while she watches MSNBC. Or as she calls it when she is drunk, MSBCNCBNCB.

I proceed to start making my breakfast as she happily chats to me from the living room into the kitchen. Never mind that I have literally told her 3,412 times that I cannot hear her from the other room, and I hate having yelling conversations from the next room, and can she please talk to me when I am in the same room. Listen, she is a goldfish. She doesn’t remember that. It is my responsibility to remind her 30 times a day.

As I go around the kitchen to collect what I need to make breakfast, it is first essential for me to close all of the kitchen cabinets, because she has left every single one of them open. See, what she does is, she walks in the kitchen every hour on the hour, inexplicably opens every kitchen cabinet for no good God damn reason, and then just walks away. When I am in there, in order to avoid hitting my head on them, I must close them all.

As I close them, I find that her sticky little hands have left residue on all of the handles that I now have on my hands from closing them. So I must now wash my hands. I do so, and I think I am ready to make my breakfast. But I am wrong.

My breakfast will require the microwave, and she has left everything she owns in front of the microwave door. So, first, I must move all of that. Ok, now I can make breakfast.

As I walk into the living room, she looks up at me and smiles from ear to ear. She is in hog heaven. Her cat is curled on her lap, and she is almost finished enjoying her dessert that she thought she stole from me. She then proceeds to start talking to me a mile a minute about everything and nothing all at once. Just chatter, chatter, chatter. Since I am still not fully awake, I zone out and just let her chirp along.

Now, she is finished with her dessert, and it is time for her mid-afternoon nap. (Yes, I wake up late and eat breakfast when it is her nap time.) She gets up from her chair and walks 6 inches to her bed that she has created in the middle of the living room floor. All kinds of cushions and pillows and blankets. She gets down on her makeshift bed and her cat follows her and curls up with her. Within a few minutes, she is sawing logs.

If my mom is ever cranky, there are 3 sure fire things it could be: (1) she hasn’t had her afternoon baba (i.e. cocktail), (2) she hasn’t had her afternoon nap, (3) she needs a diaper change (i.e. she peed her pants again). Yes, I am referring to her as a baby. I do this to her face constantly. She draws the line at me swaddling her in a blanket and patting her bottom though.

I head back up to my room to go about my day. A couple of hours later, my cell phone rings. It is mom, she just woke up from her nap and she wants to ask me a dumb question. I answer the question, and get off the phone. Ten minutes later, my phone rings again. It is mom. Again. Another question. This continues this way for the next 3 hours. At the end of the day, if you check my call log, she has called me 83 times that day, and it was because she was downstairs and I was upstairs.

Around dinner time, I get the most calls. She wants to talk a lot about dinner, and ask lots of questions about it. She likes me to set timers for the things she is cooking and then call her when the timers go off. Now, I know what you’re thinking - why can’t she use the timer on the oven? Well, Karen, because she doesn’t know how! Ok?

When dinner is ready, I get a call and go downstairs. We gladly eat what she has made, and she talks my head off about what she has made the entire time we eat it. She then suggests that maybe tonight we watch a movie in my room.

After dinner, we head to my room, and she crawls in my bed with me. She hangs off of me like a koala hangs on to a tree. I look over at her, and she has used floss stuck in her hair, and crumbs all over her shirt. I turn a movie on, and she promptly falls asleep within 5 minutes. She snores very loudly in my ear, making it impossible to hear the movie. I turn the volume up. She wakes up and pretends like she never fell asleep. Then, we go through this routine over and over again for the entirety of the movie.

Once the movie (and her 2nd nap of the day) is over, she decides to go back downstairs to her floor bed. In order to get out of my bed, it requires 12 minutes and a lot of groaning and farting on her behalf to roll out and get up. I usually video tape this process on my phone and send it to my brother while I laugh at her and don’t help her. I can never post these videos online, because, as always, she is not wearing pants. Just ratty old granny panties.

Then she heads downstairs to watch more MSBNCBNMBC news with her cat on her floor bed while she falls asleep at 8:30pm. I then get my peace and quiet and can be productive from 8:30pm-3am.

Sometimes I go downstairs for late night peanut butter toast. I need to be quiet so as not to wake her. However, it is hard to be quiet because in order to make the toast, I have to shut several doors and cabinets to get into the kitchen. I then have to move a pile of her stuff out of the way of the toaster. This includes another piece of her used floss and her toothbrush, because she prefers to brush her teeth at the kitchen sink instead of the bathroom.

I go to put butter on my toast, and as usual, she has left 3 empty butter wrappers in the butter dish with tiny remnants of soft butter on them. She has not bothered to pull out a new stick to soften up. I scrape what’s left on the wrappers onto my toast, throw them away in the trash bag that loosely hangs from one of the open closet doors, and pull out a cold stick of butter to soften up. I silently hope that the next time I need butter, there will still be some of it left, and that it will be easier to get to than it was tonight. However, that’s a fool’s dream.

As I walk back upstairs, I see her fuzzy little head on her floor bed, half of her pantsless bottom hanging out from under the blanket, with her evil cat laying between her legs, her MSBNCBC is turned up at full volume, while she loudly snores. Knowing I won’t be expecting any more phone calls from her tonight,

I go upstairs with my toast and enjoy some peace and quiet in my clean and organized room. Then I sit there and think about how I will have to wake up tomorrow and live out this exact same day over and over and over again like some sort of fucked up Groundhog’s Day. Only the lead character isn’t Bill Murray, but instead a pantsless woman with sticky fingers who naps and flosses all day every day.