Do I have ADHD or am I just a mom?

Claude had one answer for why I keep forgetting things. I had a different one.

May 24, 2026

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Yesterday morning, I opened up my Substack & saw, once again, the same flavor of popular articles recommended to me as usual…the effects of high cortisol on women…the life-changing magic of micro-dosing peptides...A piece on Botox & face-lifting…And another on eating out of habit versus eating when you are actually hungry.

So I switched over to Instagram for a second & the algorithm fed me its version of the same content—reels about healthy 15-min. recipes, being in the best shape of your life, even one about a book called Am I Autistic Or Am I Just German?

Which—okay. I laughed. It’s a funny title. And honestly it poignantly hit on something I’d been trying to work through that was eerily similar. (More on that in a minute.)

But every single thing in that scroll was a way of asking the same question—is there something wrong with me, & if so, what is it & what should I buy or do or take or screen for to fix it?

We have just grown so accustomed to pathologizing everything.

Just the day before, I’d had my own moment of reckoning. I’d recently gotten an email from my son’s English teacher that they were going to have a party celebrating their final writing project of the year. So I signed up to bring a snack, let Jason know about it & made sure to keep it top of mind.

The morning of the party, I dropped my son off at school, ran to Target to pick up the brownies I had ordered, met Jason for our usual coffee, lingered longer than we normally do because we had time to kill & then drove the fifteen minutes back over to the school for the party.

We rang the bell & the woman at the front desk asked what we were there for. I told her. She looked confused. She called over to her colleagues to see if they knew what we were talking about. Clearly I had the wrong date. I was so embarrassed.

There definitely wasn’t a party that day. There wasn’t even a party that week. The party was the following Tuesday.

Jason just looked at me, smiled, rolled his eyes & held the door open for me. He was generous about it. But the truth is, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened & I was not as generous with myself.

Later that day, I was at my desk & I typed something about the experience into an AI chatbot. I keep forgetting things. What is going on with me?

Its one & only response was to suggest I drop $1.5k for an ADHD evaluation.

At first I was caught off guard. It wasn’t something I’d considered. But then again, ADHD is something often under-diagnosed in girls, especially in the 90’s. So…maybe?

But then, I was frustrated.

Because the more I thought about it the more I was certain that no, my concern is not one of life-long, undiagnosed neurodivergence.

Mine, in particular, is most certainly a matter of unprecedented societal expectations of women to perform on all cylinders.

And surely, SURELY, at some point cracks will show in the foundation under these circumstances. Because how much is one human expected to be able to do? And why is it that when they struggle to keep up that it means something about them rather than the system they're trying to operate under?

And the speed at which AI defaulted to the assumption that my human experience needed to be pathologized is the perfect encapsulation of exactly how engrained this pattern is in our culture.

We know AI is, at its core, a machine that operates on pattern recognition. And its mimicry of our cultural reflex—that the solution to the human response to inhuman conditions is always a protocol—is the tell.

If my forgetfulness is ADHD, the solution is medication & systems. If my forgetfulness is the predictable result of unprecedented cognitive & logistical load placed on one person, the solution is structural—redistribution, reduced load, changed expectations. One solution is mine to manage. The other implicates everyone around me & the culture that arranged this. The medical label is, among other things, a way of keeping the problem personal.

When a person is operating at unsustainable load, the cracks that appear are not symptoms of disorder. They’re evidence of a functional nervous system correctly signaling that the conditions are wrong. Misremembering the party date & time when you’re holding seventeen other things isn’t always ADHD. Sometimes it’s capacity math.

The container is full. Something gets dropped.

That’s physics, not psychiatry.

The woman is not the problem. The system imposing inhuman conditions on her and then diagnosing her response is the problem.