Ad copy

I got sick last year. Bad enough that I ended up in hospital for five days. I've never said this out loud to anyone, but it was the best week I'd had in six years. Nobody climbed on me. Nobody screamed. I slept through an entire night. A nurse brought me food I hadn't cooked and I ate it sitting down, while it was still hot, with both hands. On the third day I lay there and cried, because I understood that some part of me would rather be ill than be at home where it's a constant warzone. If you're reading that and thinking "God, same." You're not a bad mom. Stay with me for a minute. The last time my husband and I went out on our own, my daughter was three. She's seven now. We booked a sitter. Paid her upfront. Got as far as ordering starters. At 8:40 my phone lit up and I knew what had happened before I picked up. When we got back the living room looked like someone had been raided our home. My daughter was awake, red-faced, hoarse from screaming. The sitter had her coat on before we'd shut the front door. She wasn't cruel about it. She just said she didn't think she was the right fit for us. Which is the polite way of saying "please don't ever call me again." We never called anyone else. Four years. Not one dinner, not one film, not one hour where I was just a person instead of a dictator in my own home. I love my daughter. I'd do absolutely anything for her. But I am just exhausted. She follows me into every room. I can't shower without someone's fingers under the door. She sleeps in my bed most nights and I let her, because the alternative is an hour of sobbing at 1am and I don't have an hour of anything left in me. I looked in the mirror in that hospital bathroom and genuinely did not recognise the woman in it. I haven't been ME for the last 5 years. I've just been MOM. And I'm not even sure I'm good at that anymore. For years I assumed this was my fault. That I'd been too soft, or too sharp, or that I'd broken something in her early on and this was the bill arriving. But I learned that wasn't true at all. And she isn't a difficult child either. I've watched her face after a meltdown and I genuinely don't think she means to act that way. She's frightened of herself. She just doesn't have the words for it yet. Here's the part nobody explained to me. They discharged me on the Friday and I sat in the car in the hospital car park for twenty minutes before I could drive home. That's the part I'm most ashamed of. Not the crying in the bed. The car park. So I decided I was going to sort it. Properly, this time. Because the one thing I wasn't going to do was medicate her. She's seven. I know that works for some families and I'm not saying a word against them. I just couldn't bear to watch the side effects take over my kid. So I did what everyone does. I took the screens away. Two weeks of hell, no change. I cut the red dye, then the sugar, then dairy for a fortnight because someone in a Facebook group said it worked for them. I bought the OLLY gummies. I bought the fish oil that's still in my fridge. Melatonin. A weighted blanket that cost more than my coat. Bedtime stories. Some stupid brain exercises that charged me a monthly subscription. Reward charts on the fridge, then a sticker app on my phone, then a marble jar. I did the gentle parenting scripts until I was saying "I can see you're having big feelings" to a child who was throwing a shoe at my head. Eight months. Hundreds of dollars. Nothing held for more than a week. And I remember thinking: I'm not doing this wrong, am I? Because if I'm doing all of this and none of it works, then it isn't a behaviour thing. Something else is going on and nobody has told me what it is. That's what made me stop buying things and start reading. Eventually I got a private appointment with a specialist who works only with hyperactive kids and what's actually happening in their brains. It cost me a week's food budget and I nearly cancelled twice. He listened to all of it. The following me room to room. The 1am sobbing. The sitter with her coat on. And then he said something I've thought about nearly every day since. He said she isn't chasing me. Her brain is chasing a reward. He explained it like this. There's a chemical the brain makes that tells it "that was good, you can settle now." Dopamine. Most ADHD kids' brains don't produce enough of it. So the brain goes hunting. It needs noise, movement, a reaction, someone's full attention. Anything that produces a hit. And the fastest, most reliable source of that hit in any house is their mom. That's why she can't sit in a room on her own. That's why she gets louder when I'm on the phone. That's why the meltdown lands the second I sit down. She isn't punishing me for having a minute to myself. Her brain has just noticed the signal go quiet and is now looking for it. It's why the screens are so addicting. It gives her an instant boost of dopamine that nothing natural ever could. And that's why every single thing I'd bought had done nothing. He said a child's brain staying calm is really four jobs happening at once. Focus, calm, mood, sleep. Everything I'd tried had covered exactly one of them and left the other three sitting empty. I wasn't giving her the wrong things. I was giving her parts of a four-piece puzzle one at a time. Then he told me about a study I'd never heard of. 2019. Fifty-four children, six weeks. Half on ADHD medication, half on saffron extract. Not a wellness blog. A real clinical trial. And they found that the saffron saw the same benefits as the meds, but without any of the side effects. He said it's the only natural substance he knows of that works on the same 4 pathways the prescription meds works on. Then he recommended 4 specific ingredients that cover all the pathways. Each one supporting a different piece of the brain. So that we're not boosting one and ignoring the others. Saffron helps boost their dopamine naturally, so the brain stops hunting for it in other ways. Magnesium is the brake pedal. Most of these kids run low on it and it's the thing that lets a brain that's overwhelmed calm down naturally instead of forcing them to get angrier and more irritated. Vitamin D is the one nobody checks. He said that it helps the brain receptors soak up the chemicals they need to regulate their mood and focus. And 92% of kid's these days are low in Vitamin D. L-theanine is what's in green tea. It helps the brain wind down at the right time so they can actually relax at bedtime without throwing a tantrum when you tell them to brush their teeth. Four jobs. Four support systems. All at the same time. But he warned me. "Don't just buy any random supplements on amazon. Most of them lie about the dose. They don't contain anything but sugar so they're basically just candy." He recommended a specific gummy. The only one he's seen that has the correct dose of all 4 ingredients in it to actually be affective. He said it's been third party tested and validated by real doctors to make sure it actually has the dose they claim it does. So he can actually recommend it. I'll leave a link below to the exact one he recommended. I started her on it in March and I didn't tell my husband, because I was tired of being the mom who keeps trying things that don't work. Weeks one and two, the evenings got quieter. Not calm — quieter. Fewer explosions between dinner and bath. By week four she was falling asleep in her own bed. Not every night. Enough nights that I finally finished a book that took me over a year to read. Around week seven I did something I hadn't done since 2019. I booked a sitter. Different woman, obviously. I couldn't have looked the first one in the eye. I told her up front that my daughter can be a lot, because I wasn't going to let another person walk into that house unwarned. We went to the Italian place downtown, the one we used to go to before. I sat there with my phone face-up on the table next to my fork. Every time someone else's phone buzzed in that restaurant my stomach dropped. Mine never lit up. Somewhere around 9pm my husband said something about a guy at his work and I actually laughed. Not the noise you make to keep the peace. An actual laugh. And he stopped and looked at me. Neither of us said anything, because we both knew how long it had been since either of us had felt that feeling. We got home at eleven thirty. The sitter was on the couch with a book. Both kids asleep, upstairs, in their own beds. She said they'd been an absolute pleasure. And then she said, and I'm quoting her, that they were some of the easiest kids she'd sat for all year. I stood in my own hallway and I couldn't speak. My husband paid her. I couldn't do it. That was March. Here's what my house is like now. I wake up before they do, which I never used to, because I used to lie there dreading the first noise of the day. Now I get up, put the coffee on and I get about twenty minutes on my own before anyone comes down. That's it. Twenty minutes. It's the difference between me being a person and me being a machine that hands out cereal. She plays lego in her room. By herself. For almost an hour some days. I stood outside the door the first time it happened because I genuinely thought something was wrong. I've taken a shower with the door shut every day for four months. She sleeps in her own bed. Not all seven nights. But enough of them that I've got my bed back, and my husband's in it, and we talk in it. And other things haha. Things we haven't been able to do for years now. Last Thursday we were still talking at midnight about what our plans were for the weekend. Not who's doing pickup. An actual conversation about the future, like two people who plan things together. And the part I didn't expect at all. I like my daughter's presence. I always loved her. I want to be really clear about that. But sometimes I didn't like being near her, and I'd gotten so used to bracing every time she walked into a room that I'd stopped seeing her as my daughter. Last week she came and sat on the end of the couch and told me about a fox she saw on the way home from school, and she talked for about ten minutes. I listened to all of it. I wasn't waiting for it to go wrong. I was just listening to my kid. She's funny. I'd forgotten that. She's really, truly funny. And she has this spark that makes her so special. It's finally burning bright again. I've started running. I finished a book. Another mom in my book club said that I looked and sounded more like myself. She asked where I got my dress from and said it looked amazing on me. I choked up and had to pretend to go to the bathroom. Because that's what this actually was. It was never about a calmer child, or an easier bedtime, or a clean living room. It was that I'd disappeared, and my daughter had been getting blamed for it, and neither of those things were anybody's fault. And most importantly, my house feels like a home now. Not a warzone where everyday was a battlefield. If you're reading this and you've quietly worked out that you'd take another week in a hospital bed over another Tuesday night at home. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I just wish someone had put this in front of me four years ago instead of me finding it years later. [Edit: I got so emotional writing this message I completely forgot to add the link to what the specialist recommended. Here it is 👉 https://trysaphire.com/pages/gummies-kid-quiz They have a free quiz to see if it's the right fit for your kid. And I just had a look. They're currently 60% off for their back to school sale. Not sure how long this will last but I'd grab it while it's still running. Sending momma hugs to every one of you that feels like they've lost themselves. Somewhere between being a good mom and still feeling like a normal human being ❤️]