Being a Woman With ADHD and the Expectation of the Household Load

I run a company. I carry out academic work. I can think for weeks about how a brand should move from which data to which channel.

And sometimes I do not know what has run out in the fridge.

When these two sentences stand side by side, a strange shame forms inside you. As if the first does not excuse the second, but on the contrary makes it more visible: "You do all this and you can't do this?"

Nobody asked me this question out loud. I asked it of myself. And for a long time I did not notice that something was missing inside the question: would a man ask himself this question so often?

One thing I want to separate first

There is an article on the site about mental load; there I described the exhaustion of the things held in mind and ways of getting that load out. In the article on household chores in ADHD we also talked about why housework is so hard to start.

This article looks at another layer: from whom this load is expected. Because the same difficulty carries a different weight depending on who it is expected from.

The invisible part of the work

When we say housework, most of us think of the part that is done: dishes, laundry, cleaning. But before these jobs there is a job of thinking.

A sociological study based on seventy detailed interviews with thirty-five couples defines household management as a separate dimension of labor: cognitive labor. This labor consists of four parts: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding, and monitoring the progress of the work. According to the study, this labor is largely invisible both to the person doing it and to their partner, and is therefore a frequent source of conflict between couples. Among the couples in the research, it was seen that this work, especially the noticing and monitoring part, stayed more on the women (Daminger, 2019).

Looking again at the four parts, as someone with ADHD, I felt a pang.

Anticipating: prospective memory. Identifying options and deciding: planning. Monitoring: working memory and sustained attention. This is almost a complete list of the executive functions that ADHD strains most.

Did the description of the invisible work expected of women have to overlap so much with the description of the skills that are hard in ADHD?

The collision of expectation and symptom

An international expert consensus text written on ADHD in women has these sentences: most household, parenting and care work is often taken on by women, reflecting social and cultural constraints and expectations. The consensus group notes that what is expected of mothers is often different from what is expected of fathers, and that low self-esteem in women with ADHD may be related to the perception of having failed to meet social expectations (Young et al., 2020).

The same text also explains that girls and women with ADHD can mask their difficulties with compensation strategies, and that this can lead to their problems being underestimated.

In an interview study with five women diagnosed in adulthood, one of the themes is devoted directly to this: the conflict between ADHD symptoms and gender norms and expectations. The researchers stress that difficulties related to motherhood in particular need to be examined more. Another striking side of the study is that all the participants were highly educated, working women (Holthe & Langvik, 2017).

This last detail made me think a great deal. Women who are "successful" from the outside. On the inside, women living a conflict between the expected female role and the way their own brains work.

Here I think success itself can also be a trap. A woman who is good at her work is expected to build the same order at home too, because "she handles everything." Yet what makes someone good at work is often the structure that comes from outside: a deadline, a client, a meeting. The home has no such scaffolding. Nobody reminds you of a bill's last day with a meeting invitation. That the same person looks so different in two areas should therefore not be counted as a contradiction; it shows the difference between the place with a scaffolding and the place without one.

Why it is noticed so late

There is a cycle here, and I think it needs to be talked about.

ADHD research for a long time proceeded through boys. In clinical samples the male-to-female ratio comes out much higher than in community samples, and this difference is explained by girls being noticed less (Quinn & Madhoo, 2014). I described the details in the article on ADHD in women; its counterpart in the glossary is being overlooked in women.

One way of being overlooked is this: a difficulty at home is read not as a symptom but as a failure of womanhood. "Messy," "scatterbrained," "not a housewife." These words do not come from a clinician; they come from the surroundings. And when a woman hears them enough, she does not think that what she struggles with could have a name. She works harder. She feels more shame. She masks more.

Part of the shame is not mine

In one of my diaries I wrote that some shames do not belong to us, that they are an inheritance someone left us. In the matter of the home I see this much more clearly.

Part of the feeling an unstraightened kitchen gives me is really mine: I think better in an orderly place. But part of it is not mine at all. That part is the voice of a culture that has heard for years the sentence "a good woman keeps her house in order."

Separating these, I think, is the first step in changing the relationship of a woman with ADHD to her home.

A sorting I have found worth trying

Write down your standards. Put on paper the things about the home you say "it should be like this" about. The kitchen should be tidied every evening. The house should be wiped before guests come. Laundry should not pile up. The more the better.

Write each one's source next to it. Does this standard really do me good, or is it someone else's expectation? From family, from the surroundings, from a magazine photo? There will be items whose source you do not know; mark those too.

Shrink the ones that are not mine. You do not have to delete a standard that is not yours entirely. But you can bring it down to a good enough level. Instead of "every evening," "three evenings a week." Instead of "the house should be wiped," "the living room should be tidied."

Make the thinking part visible. If a division of responsibility at home is going to be discussed, next to the tasks also write on the list the noticing, planning and tracking of them. "Cooking" is one job. "Thinking about what will be cooked during the week and noticing what is missing" is another job. This second job is often on nobody's list.

Do not make outside support a moral matter. Cleaning help, ready meals, grocery delivery. Using these is not a defeat of womanhood but a distribution of resources. Of course not everyone's budget allows it; but if it does, a feeling of guilt should not stand in the way of this decision.

Talk about the division again at regular intervals. When the household load is divided once and left, it tends over time to return to how it was, because invisible work is the work that slides back most easily. Looking again every few months at who notices what and who tracks what keeps the load from silently piling up on one side. Having this conversation like a maintenance check instead of a settling of accounts makes it easier.

Do not carry it all alone. Carrying alone both all the work that ADHD strains and the shame of being unable to do it is one of the shortest roads to burnout. If the tiredness has become permanent, or if your sleep, appetite or the pleasure you take in life has changed noticeably, it would be good to talk to a specialist about it. In a moment when you feel very bad, you can call the ALO 183 Social Support Line, and in an emergency 112.

I do not expect this sorting to finish in a day. Some standards have settled so deeply inside us that even noticing them takes time. When I notice the unease rising inside me as I look at a messy counter, I only ask myself this: does this feeling belong to me, or is it someone else's voice? I do not always know the answer. But even asking the question makes that unease a little smaller.

The question I ask myself

I had written that in recent months I was exhausted from trying to keep up with everything. The home was in that list of keeping up, and perhaps it was the part I spoke of least, because it was not written in the column of success. Only in the column of lack.

Now I ask myself this: why does the order of this house ask so much of me? And how much of this demand did I choose?

I do not know all of the answer. But even the question is a relief. Because in the place where I begin to ask the question, the shame draws back a little.