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I'm going to admit to something I'm deeply ashamed of. I've gone back and forth on whether to write this post because I'm afraid of how people will perceive me after reading it. I suspect they'll jump to all sorts of conclusions about who I am and what I believe, based on what I'm about to tell you. Am I shooting up crack cocaine or selling drugs to teenagers on street corners? No. I have just become a parent for the first time, and I love it.

That was hard to write. But now that I've gotten it out of the way, let me explain why I was so loath to admit it.

Certain beliefs tend to cluster together and frame a person in a particular light. If I told you I believed the moon landing was faked, that climate change wasn't real, and that vaccinations cause autism, there's a good chance you'd clock me as being a certain type of person. Now, for better or worse, saying you want children and are enjoying the experience is one of those things that hints at placing me in a camp I don't identify with and would loathe to be associated with: a sort of Jordan Peterson, manosphere, tradwife category.

And yet, a recent article in The Atlantic by Jean Twenge gives me pause. Twenge is a widely published professor of psychology at San Diego State University. In her September 2025 piece, "The Marriage Effect," she presents findings from a nationally representative survey of 3,000 American women that challenges some of the cultural narratives around motherhood and happiness that have dominated the last two decades.

Twenge writes candidly about her own experience before deciding to have children: "When I was deciding whether to have children, in the early 2000s, most of what I read about the prospect was negative. Articles detailed the sleep deprivation, the physical challenges of pregnancy, the sheer overwhelmingness of motherhood. If you want to be happy, these writers warned, don't have children. You might not want to get married, either — after all, marriage, research suggested, mostly benefits men."

That cultural shift—the framing of children as the death knell of a woman's life and independence—may well be why I left it until the age of 39 before having my first child. Everywhere I looked I was bombarded with the message that having children would be the end of my life as I knew it: I would be exhausted, regretful, and possibly incontinent for the rest of my life, my body permanently altered beyond recognition. It didn't help that I grew up in Ireland in the 1990s, where getting pregnant outside of wedlock was genuinely framed as the worst crime a woman could commit. The fear and paranoia I had around getting pregnant is something only another Irish woman of that generation could fully understand.

Even while I was pregnant, I'd open TikTok and be regaled by The Girl with the List — an account dedicated to cataloguing every possible horrific outcome of childbirth and pregnancy in meticulous detail. That's where I learned you could not only tear from back to front, giving you one giant opening, but also tear upward toward your stomach. That particular fact gave me third-trimester nightmares. (I should note: I have since delivered, and I have nothing to add to The Girl with the List.) Then there are the Facebook groups for Regretful Parents, where people share in gory detail how having children ruined their lives for good. It's no wonder so many women recoil at the very idea.

Which is exactly why I hesitated so much before writing this. But I decided that the whole point of this blog is to share the truth of what it's like to live as a woman with ADHD — and that includes the emotional, hormonal rollercoaster of pregnancy and the postpartum period, the wave of which I am riding right now.

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As I write this, my baby girl is finally asleep in the basket beside me. I have a breast pump on one side and an ice pack on the other. There's no point pretending the postpartum trenches are anything other than the wildest hormonal ride you will ever experience. If they had a ride at Disneyland called "Postpartum," it would be scarier than the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.

And yet, even though I have never been more exhausted in my life, I have never felt peace like this.

That might sound strange — peace, in the middle of all this chaos. But peace is one of the simplest and hardest things to come by when you have ADHD. One of the worst things about having ADHD is the constant sense of unease inside yourself: You're never in the right place, never doing the right thing, never where you feel you should be. Things should be bigger, better, faster. Nothing moves quickly enough and you're never quite good enough. Low self-esteem is the trait that comes up again and again in the women I interview in my ADHD research.

This might only make sense to another ADHDer who lives with that constant internal static — but the moment I looked into my daughter's perfect little face, I felt something I had been chasing my whole life: Purpose. I almost hate that I've written that, because I was childless for nearly 40 years and would never suggest for a second that a child-free life lacks purpose; it absolutely doesn't. I am always on the side of my sisters, whatever life they choose. Perhaps I'll find a better word once I've had more than two hours of consecutive sleep. Forgive me, I'm three weeks in and deep in the newborn trenches.

But to borrow a phrase from another Irish woman, Jessie Buckley: I am now, for the first time, experiencing "the beautiful chaos of a mother's heart."

Which reminds me: I really should ring my own mother and apologise for everything I've put her through.

I had absolutely no idea.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/marriage-motherhood-happiness-children/684064/

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