When Everyone’s Talking and No One’s Listening: Life in My Neurodivergent House

 

Some days, our house sounds like a podcast with six overlapping hosts, no commercial breaks, and absolutely no volume control.

Being a neurodivergent mom raising four neurodivergent kids with a neurodivergent partner is kind of like building a sandcastle in a windstorm. You can do it, but you’re going to get sand in your eyes, your mouth, and possibly your soul.

The thing is, we’re all wired differently — and yet somehow, exactly the same. We speak in tangents, feel things at full volume, and process the world sideways. And for reasons I will never understand, everyone always seems to need to say their Very Important Thought right now. At the exact same time. Preferably over dinner. Or in the car. Or the moment I sit down to pee.

Conversations in our house don’t flow — they collide. Someone’s talking about the science of tornadoes while another is deep into a monologue about Minecraft mods. Someone else is asking me if cats dream, and meanwhile, I’m still trying to answer the first question that was asked five minutes ago.

And me? I’m usually overstimulated before 10am, trying to keep up with the mental traffic jam while quietly whispering to myself, “You’re not outnumbered, you’re just…seasoned.”

We have color-coded chore lists taped to the freezer that no one acknowledges, let alone follows. We had house rules tacked to the wall — but someone ripped them down, and now they’re just…gone. Which honestly feels fitting for this household. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because none of my carefully crafted systems could ever prepare me for the real moments: when all four kids suddenly need me at the exact same time, or when they start fighting each other just to get a word in edgewise. When the room fills with overlapping monologues because they’ve each thought of four completely unrelated things at once — and they have to say it right now or risk forgetting forever. Or when someone screams because they’re overstimulated and everything just feels “emotionally wrong.”

But there’s magic in this madness, too.

We get each other. We understand the need to leave the room without explaining. We support mid-sentence topic changes like it’s an Olympic sport. We know how it feels when the world gets too loud, or when words don’t line up in our heads the way we want them to. And then the wrong words just fly out of our mouths—usually at the worst possible times.

We’re not dysfunctional. We’re just…neurodivergently synchronized. A little offbeat, but in rhythm with each other.

Oh, who am I kidding… maybe we’re a bit dysfunctional 😆 but there’s mutual understanding in the dysfunction, somehow. 

So yeah — some days feel impossible.🙈  Some days I wonder if I’ll ever hear myself think again. Or if I will actually burst out of my skin. But then one of my kids will say something wildly insightful, or weirdly profound, or hilariously random — and I’ll realize that in all the noise, we’re building something beautiful.

It’s messy. It’s loud. It’s a little broken. But it’s ours. ❤️

And honestly? I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.