Note: This topic pertains to ADHD-related issues
My (m38) wife (f36) have been married for nearly three years, together for four, and have one son (2). In the years prior to us meeting, she received an ADHD diagnosis regarding difficulties she was dealing with relating to graduate school work and overall difficulty managing her life. She told me this very soon into our dating, and while I have an overall negative view of the validity of ADD and medication as treatment, I was more than happy to put my own feelings on the matter aside, and to work with her and take her diagnosis seriously.
We moved in together during Covid, and to say our co-habitation allowed me an insight into her difficulties relating to her work and daily routines would be an understatement. She constantly struggled with basic task management, and was frequently overwhelmed, and even the part-time remote work (basic admin-type jobs) she had would eat up every bit of her free time. Simple tasks, like writing basic correspondence emails, would take her hours, if not days, and she’d be an anxious mess the whole time over her difficulty finishing.
When she became pregnant, she eased up her workload a bit, and this allowed something of a sense of normalcy to return. She still worked part-time, but only one job. Mostly, she focused on her pregnancy and (in my opinion, most importantly) didn’t put any undue pressure on herself to work work work.
The real problem began a year ago. I do freelance work, which provides an OK income, but not enough to really move our life to where we want it to be. My wife’s part-time work was a similar issue. We both needed to move to different careers, and the decision became which of us would go first. We decided on her, as my work was full-time. She’d find a new career, and once settled into that, I would do the same.
Flash forward to now. An entire year has gone by and her progress on the job front has been a disaster. She’s turned in a grand total of three applications so far. My work doesn’t pay enough to cover all of our expenses, so we’ve been bit by bit eating into the money I saved during 2020-21, money that I’d hoped would form the foundation of a down payment on a home. Now, it’s nearly all gone, and she’s come no closer to finding a job.
The way she works is strange. She’ll spend hours and hours writing and editing and rewriting cover letters, printing them out and making notes, stressing over specific word choice or grammar, but never actually finishing. She takes Adderall for her ADHD, but as time goes on, I’m starting to believe her meds are making the problem worse, causing her to obsess over her applications in a way that doesn’t actually result in her \*finishing\* them.
I work from home, so I’m more than happy to take our son to give her time to work or do anything else, but every bit of free time she gets she either spends on the couch watching TV or throws it into what I consider the black hole of her job applications. I’ve discussed this matter with her time and time again, and the conversations, without fail, regardless of how calmly or empathetically I bring up the issues, devolve into her crying and having an emotional breakdown.
I understand that full-time child care is an incredible amount of work, and that I shouldn’t expect her to be extremely productive while looking after our son. However, I don’t understand why she can’t do something like work after when he’s put down (we alternate nights putting him to bed) for an hour or so and have applications in on, say a one-a-week basis. I even began cutting into my own work time to watch our son in order to give her 2-3 hour sessions at a coffee shop to work, but the lack of progress remained the same. Furthermore, the fact that these productivity issues were there before our son was even conceived leads me to believe that there’s something deeper at work.
Eventually, she talked her parents into covering full-time day care. I have my issues with day care, but saw it as a good chance for her to have a little more free time and for our son to have some socialization. However, one month into daycare and her progress on applications is just as slow. Not to mention that, while I’m grateful for her parents’ generosity in helping us, I don’t like having to live off of other people’s money.
I’m at my wit’s end, and our situation is getting dire. We’re running out of money, and her progress is moving just as slowly. I’m getting to the point where I want to put my foot down and tell her that her career aspirations are officially on hold, and that I’m taking over the matter of work from here on out and that I’ll be the one to find a new job for myself. However, being this autocratic isn’t how I want our marriage to work. All the same, while I love my wife like crazy and would do anything for her, this situation puts me in a state of near-constant frustration and stress, with resentment building more and more by the day.
Thanks sincerely in advance for any advice
tl;dr: I’m struggling to deal with my wife’s potentially-ADHD-related difficulties in finding a job. We decided she would find a new career while I worked full-time, but a year later, she’s made little progress and we’re running out of money. I believe her medication may be making the problem worse and she spends hours on job applications without finishing them. We have a young child, and I’ve tried to help by taking care of him and giving her time to work, but her progress remains slow. I’m considering taking over the job search myself, but I don’t want to be too controlling in out marriage.
7 comments
>> I’m taking over the matter of work from here on out and that I’ll be the one to find a new job for myself.
That conversation will be rough, but it needs to happen. You’re not being autocratic…you’re being decisive. She needs to speak with a mental health professional as it’s clear as day her ADHD has colleagues that complicate things for her. You taking the role of provider while she gets her mental wellness under control is the path forward here.
>with resentment building more and more by the day.
I fully get why this is happening, but it’s also a relationship killer. What it usually means is that communication isn’t where it should be and/or a couple is taking too long to address a very fundamental problem.
You have every right to be frustrated, but my initial reaction was surprise that she hasn’t gotten a 2nd opinion on her diagnosis, and also a change of meds. To me this would be the obvious next step. On both sides of my extended fam, there’s about 4 people with ADHD, but with a variety of meds (and one misdiagnosis). Everyone involved is living their lives and taking care of business.
If you haven’t done this, I’d say you’re overdue.
Has she tried any alternatives to Adderall? She should be telling her psychiatrist that it’s not working well, because clearly it’s not. A good psychiatrist would be asking about her focus and following up to see if Adderall actually works for her.
I have pretty bad ADHD as well and Adderall specifically made it worse. It made me really obsessive over small details and I got tunnel-vision working on something stupid for over an hour. I told my psychiatrist I didn’t think Adderall was working for me and she switched me to a different med that’s worked amazingly for years.
It honestly sounds like she might need to be reassessed for OCD. I can’t diagnose, but the whole spending hours trying to perfect emails or cover letters reeks of OCD. I used to have it and it made finishing essays in school nearly impossible. One of my OCD obsessions was the fear of unintentional plagiarism. I was terrified of turning assignments in without checking and re-checking everything.
“while I have an overall negative view of the validity of ADD and medication as treatment, I was more than happy to put my own feelings on the matter aside”
Do you mind if I ask for you to elaborate on this a little? How do you feel about the validity of ADHD and medication right now?
You mention her being in grad school struggling with her life despite being in her 30s. And her parents paying for daycare which is expensive. Do you know if she has ever actually been independent and self supportive?
Self directed jobs are usually too much for lower functioning people. Consider arm twisting her into a job with more focus and external control. For example home based call center type work. Or out of the home job with regular hours and straight forward expectations.
Is she seeing a therapist or ADHD coach? Medication helps (and I *really* don’t like your attitude against it), but it’s also pretty important for her to figure out the strategies that do and don’t work for her in regards to productivity. For example, it’s probably a huge and exciting and life-changing deal to her that with meds, she *can* work on her application for hours at a time. But she needs to figure out how she can purposefully direct that focus, and what’s blocking her from doing the other stuff she needs to do? Also, if most of her job-search time is after you come home from work, there’s a decent chance that her meds *have worn off* by then unless she takes them relatively late (or an afternoon booster). She might also do better on a different medication.
You’ve mentioned that you’ve tried to talk to her and they end in her breaking down, but like…what is actually said in those conversations? What is she saying about her progress and mindset? I think it would be controlling to say “I’m taking over”, but it’s reasonable to say “It’s been a while, and I’d really like to work on my own job search. Could we switch for a bit? Or if you feel close to making progress, can we set a deadline?” I think you should frame it as not a failure on her part, but as a potential win-win. You get a better job and can make more money – she gets a break from the endless stress of job hunting – and then she can continue with fresh eyes and less pressure (I think you’re correct in that her putting pressure on herself makes it harder to get stuff done – it’s a terrible catch-22). But you have to see yourselves as partners rather than adversaries.
I think you should also work with her to figure out what kind of help actually works for her. Are certain kinds of reminders from you helpful or not? Ask her how you can communicate about this to her (because you need to be able to) in a way that doesn’t cause her to break down. She should be trying out new strategies and seeing how they go for her. If she’s just “trying” the same stuff for so long and not getting anything done, she’s spinning her wheels and draining her energy needlessly.
But a word of warning – I think you show enough communication and care for her in this post that you can be really supportive and help her break the cycle she’s in. But if you “have an overall negative view of the validity of ADD and medication as treatment” there’s a *very* good chance that she will feel like she won’t be able to trust you enough for that. Even if you’re as good at hiding your judgment as you think you are, if you ever said anything like that in the past, she will remember it. Like, how can she open up to you about things she’s struggling with or brainstorm ideas with you if she thinks you might try to convince her not to take her medication, or that you might not believe what she says about her own mind?