My Father Was An Epic Piddler And In His Absence I've Found I Am, Too

When I was a kid, nobody could really figure out what my dad did with the majority of his time. He seemed to move around the house looking somewhat laboriously engaged but at the end of the day he often had nothing to show for it and yet somehow appearing as though he desperately needed a nap. My mom, in a tone that left none of her agitation to the imagination, would call this, “piddling.” 

“Where’s Dad?” 

“Oh, he’s piddling, as usual.”

None of us had any idea all those years of sharing a house with the man that he had off-the-charts ADHD. 

In his fifties, he finally got diagnosed and with loads of education and a healthy dose of stimulant medication, a lot of my dad’s barriers to success removed themselves. 

But the piddling never did.

This many years later, in my own middle-aged life, I am beginning to view it through a more generous lens than my mom did. I choose to see piddling’s power instead of its imperfection. 

You see, while I soared through my adolescence and college years with unstoppable albeit procrastination-saturate academic and personal successes, I had no idea that I was paddling twice as hard as my contemporaries. It wasn’t until a dose of out-of-nowhere impairing anxiety at the onset of parenting small children that I began to frame myself as my father’s child. My Inattentive Type ADHD hadn’t been dormant underneath all that childhood and young adult success, it just had been unknowingly coped with by a decent IQ , sizeable protective factors like the safety nets of my loved ones filling in, and low-enough stressors not to overcome me. 

Until it did… and therapy and a neuro-psych evaluation tapped me into my root struggle: ADHD. 

Want to hear the bummer of my mid-life diagnoses? 

My dad passed away before I learned of this big thing about myself. 

So here I am close to his age when all those growing up in our house were so bamboozled by Dad’s perpetual lateness, alarming inefficiencies, and loveable incompetence – and I’m a female replica. And the one thing I want to do since my diagnoses, I can’t do: heal the annoyances I’d had with my sometimes-unreliable and always-offbeat ADHD dad in person.

Instead, I’ve healed them in his absence by treating myself with the kind of compassion and patience that I know he would have benefited from. And one of the ways I do this is to allow myself the freedom of unashamedly piddling. 

In a season when productivity is a requirement to survive busy family and parenting life, it definitely can be seen as irresponsible. After all, who has the time to walk around aimlessly in a bunch of different directions starting and stopping a bunch of different stuff and getting nothing truly worthwhile done? 

I’m jumping up and down saying, “Me. Me!” 

What I mean to say, to clarify, is that I make the time to piddle.

This carved-out time I call the “piddle block.” If I’ve planned well enough, I reward my efforts of staying on track 92.5% of the time with a free-form 7%. (The unaccounted for 0.5% is, obviously, when I take showers with cocktails J).  This sevenish percent is deliberately inefficiently spent and knowingly without purpose. And, best of all, I give myself permission to abandon whatever I start, if I start anything, guilt-free. Leaving a small devastating mess in my path of unfinished tasks is a small price to pay for the liberation and joy earned from allowing myself to engage in said tasks without so much pressure. 

I’ve noticed that sustained discipline to a structure, an organizational system, a routine, a locked-down regiment (all super recommendations for ADHDers)… well, that type of persistent  responsibility, when there are no breaks, can make my ADHD side sort of rascal-like. She (my ADHD) doesn’t love being suppressed and stomped out for lots of days in a row and when she is, this makes the other parts of me both a little less amazing and a lot more cranky. If I’m trying too hard to squelch Her, She becomes like a dieter who won’t allow herself any sugar: sad and mean and eventually apt to hide in the pantry inhaling an entire package of Oreos. I find that if I toss a cookie Her way from time to time, she’ll more successfully stay on track for the long haul.

That cookie is piddling. Piddling means that I design an allotment of time to let my brain go on an irresponsible little vacation, to let the sister off the strict diet, to let the puppy off the leash, and to just be. To be Really. Really. Irresponsible. With time, with resources, with space, with efficiency, with it all. 

My microwave is usually in the background doing its little reminder beep about the coffee warm up I’ve done in there as I’m pouring myself a new cup, and I don’t care. I start a decorating project and abandon it with nails and frames and hammers littering the floor like confetti beneath the half-done wall collage, and I don’t care. I get out five books I want to read and impulsively go back and forth between them reading just the sensational tidbits that interest me like a 1st grader would do, and I don’t care. I waste time and run up and down the steps forgotten things on every floor a million times and I don’t care. I doodle excessively while talking on the phone in my robe, and I don’t care. I pull off when I see a yard sale sign even though I don’t have cash and end up having to apologize and put everything back, and I don’t care. I walk past the dishwasher a zillion times knowing the right thing to do is unload it but I don’t, and I don’t care. 

All the other minutes of all the other days, I follow my rules… I care. But when I set out to piddle, I set out to break all the rules… and I don’t care. My husband and my family and my house may not say thank you, but ADHD does. We decide we love each other more after the Piddle Block. It’s like a pressure release valve that brings me back to center.

My dad spent a lot of his time bringing himself back to center. His piddling may have driven us all a little crazy and I’m sure mine has the potential to drive my current housemates crazy, too, but grace abounds. It abounds me now and for my dad, even after he’s gone. It is now that I realize: without a doubt, piddling is a worthwhile alternative to us ADHDers driving ourselves crazy.