Invisible Disaster

Once, after dealing with a major crisis at work, someone looked at me and said "You don't panic for anything!"
Nope, I don't.  I don't waste my time.  Not at work.  It's the personal stuff that gets me.

See, as the slightly less neurologically atypical person in the house, I have an entire second career.  My other job is dealing with disaster.  It's a secret.  Nobody knows I do it.  I'm on call 24/7/365.  And sometimes, I really resent that second career.  I wonder how much it's held me back in my first career.  I wonder which one really is first.

Here's an example.

This morning, my husband nearly walked out the door with my car keys.  He used my car to run the trash down because he lost his own car keys and hasn't recovered them yet.  He realized I need my car today and took my spare set of keys to his car to go to work, and stopped himself just before walking out the door with my car keys in his hand as well.  He was in a hurry (ADHD people in a hurry are very dangerous, avoid them) and left my car keys on a window sill.  A low one.  That the two year old could reach.  He also left the gate to the basement open.  Which gave me a whole extra house level to search.

I spent over an hour madly searching the entire cluttered house for my keys, thinking about all the awful places my 2yo could have put them.  When I tried to ask my speech-delayed toddler, he just pointed out the window at my car.

I went through a whole gamut of emotions.  Frustration.  Rage.  Despair.  Why do I have to deal with the mess my husband leaves?  Why can't I call him and make him come home from work and deal with the consequences himself?  Oh, right, keeping his job and salary.
Now if my husband were doing this search, he would be dumping every container on the floor and leaving the mess.  Then there would be some reason why he couldn't clean it up (probably to do with going to work) and I would have to do it all.

Sometimes it feels like I'm dealing with an extra large extremely careless child.
 
So how much do I hold him accountable?  How much is he to blame?  He can't help having ADHD.  It makes him miserable too.  He doesn't LIKE losing his keys and forgetting his laptop on a bus in Boston and running out of gas in the middle of the toll road.

So I swallow down the rage and soldier on.  But sometimes I wonder, how much are both our lights hidden under his disability?  The enormous drain of time, energy, stress, and money is completely invisible to everyone else.  What would it look like if I could measure it?  We might both be working at the top of our fields.  We might have PhDs. We might be taking annual multi-week vacations to exotic places.  We've spent at least in the tens of thousands of dollars on ADHD and its associated conditions, between coaching, organizational consulting, lost time from work, and new experimental treatments for our son not covered under insurance.

Because my biggest fear, the thing that really does make me panic, is seeing my children living with this monster leech sucking on their talents.