EP. 405: Anita Robertson on ADHD and Motherhood: Being a Mom with ADHD

Tracy Otsuka (0:00)

Hey, before we dive in, I want to tell you about something that I'm doing for the first time, and it's free.

It's a workshop called How to Get Productive Without Relying on Motivation in 90 Minutes. This isn't my usual thousand-plus-women webinar. It's a small group where you actually get to work through this, not just watch. Look, if you've ever known exactly what you needed to do and you still couldn't make yourself start, that's not a willpower problem. It's not a motivation problem either. It's a brain state problem. Once you understand that, everything changes. In this workshop, I am going to walk you through the neuroscience of why your ADHD brain gets stuck, and I mean the actual science, not another tip about time blocking. We're talking dopamine, predictive processing, and why the same task that felt impossible on Monday has you completely absorbed by Wednesday. You are going to leave with your own personal productivity formula. Not mine, yours, built around the signals that actually get your brain online. Because the answer was never more motivation. What you need is to understand what gets your specific brain moving. Find the details and grab your spot at tracyotsuka.com. I will see you there.

Richard Branson, Michael Phelps, Justin Timberlake, James Carville. Wait a minute.

Where are the women?

Greta Gerwig, Lisa Ling, Audra McDonald, Simone Biles. That sounds like a list of highly successful Titans in a variety of industries. They all have ADHD, but you don't hear much about that now, do you? You know what else you don't hear about? Are the 43 percent of people with ADHD who are in excellent mental health. Why aren't we talking about them and what they're doing right? I'm your host Tracy Otsuka and that's exactly what we do here. I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, a lifelong student, and now the author of my new book, ADHD for Smart Ass Women. I'm also a certified ADHD coach and the creator of Your ADHD Brain is A-OK, a patented system that helps ADHD women just like you, get unstuck and fall in love with their brilliant brains. Here, we embrace our too-muchness and we focus on our strengths. My guests and I credit our ADHD for some of our greatest gifts.

To those who still think they're too much, too impulsive, too scattered, too disorganized, I say no one ever made a difference by being too little.

Hi there, I am your host Tracy Otsuka. Thank you so much for joining me here for another episode of ADHD for Smart Ass Women. You know that my purpose is always to show you who you are and then inspire you to be it. In the thousands of ADHD women that I've had the privilege of meeting, I've never met one, not one, that wasn't truly brilliant at something. So of course, I am just delighted to reintroduce you today to Anita Robertson, licensed clinical social worker. She is one of my favorites and she's back on the show again. Anita, if you will remember, is a mental health therapist, an ADHD mom, an author of ADHD and Us, her book on building strong relationships when ADHD is in the mix.

Today, however, she's here with her newest book, Being a Mom with ADHD. It's out October 1st. I was so honored to write the forward. What else can I tell you about Anita? Well, she leads clinical trainings on ADHD and mental health throughout the country. She presents at ADHD conferences and teaches online courses for the general public. Outside of work, she spends her time with her friends and family, eating good food and getting outside in nature as often as she can. Welcome, Anita. How are you?

Anita Robertson (4:30)

I'm good. I'm so glad to be back.

Tracy Otsuka (4:32)

Yeah, I'm so glad to have you and, you know, we normally start with the guest diagnosis story, but Anita, since you've been on the show several times already, we're going to just skip that today. Look, if our listeners want to know more about you, they can go back to episode 229 or episode 272

So Anita, you've already given us the book on ADHD relationships. What made you decide that this next book about ADHD and moms and parenting was the next book that you needed to write?

Anita Robertson (5:07)

In true ADHD fashion, it's because I struggled with ADHD when I became a mom, and I now understand a lot more of all the reasons why.

And I think that's really what drove the book of understanding how, especially when you're the one who's pregnant, how all of these things impact ADHD, your sensory processing systems, your estrogen, which impacts your dopamine. And so it's just all in all these hormone changes and all of these things. Like it is parenting for everybody is kind of just like a big leap, like huge developmental leap, you know, into like you, you have a baby inside you and then all of a sudden they're outside and crying and all these things. And it's just a big learning experience that's like all the things all at once. And then you throw ADHD in the mix of that, and then it can feel even more confusing. So I think like in and of itself, the ADHD moms that I work with, like I see them struggle so many ways because of the messages that they have and because of their own fears and how that mixes in. And then also just not understanding kind of what is going on. Because it's easy to feel like you're losing your mind at times. And so I think that's sort of where it was. I think, you know, overall, I learned a lot. I've learned a lot of being a mom and having a neurodivergent child, which is beautiful and challenging and growing in all the right ways. But I think that's where it came from of like, you know, this doesn't need to be this hard, right? I think it's like I have this story that I tell all the time of like my kid not sleeping through the night for three years.