Picking Up the Loose Pieces of Inattentive ADHD

Today I ran into a friend of mine with whom I volunteer at my kid's school.    Two years ago, she and I ran the school lunch program.  This lunch program is huge.  The kid's school has no cafeteria and with this program we serve, using local restaurant vendors, almost 2000 lunches a week.  In two years we transformed lunch from a volunteer program which required hours and hours of volunteer effort and hardly made any money to a streamlined volunteer program that requires a fraction of the volunteer time and makes over $50,000 a year for the school.

She and I did not know each other when we started to co-chair the lunch program but we immediately 'clicked'.  From the get go, we worked together seamlessly.  If I had forgotten something, she had it covered.   If she had missed something,  I was already on it.   Neither of us really understood how it was that the ball never got dropped.   We 'rescued' each other on so many occasions that we came to not even think of it as rescuing anymore.  This was just the nature of our symbiotic working relationship and it worked effortlessly.

Each of us had designated responsibilities but there was never an attitude that this was my job and that was her job.  We went about our days just doing what needed to be done.  As I was talking to her today, she mentioned how she was organizing an event for her church and that she was really busy trying to not miss any of the details.  She asked if I remembered how scattered her ADD made her at times.

I laughed and asked her how she thought that the two of us had managed to get as much done as we had given that both of us were totally 'ADD'.  Her response was, I think, right on the mark.  She said, "We were both always on the lookout for the 'loose pieces'.  Those of us with ADD, she said,  have a lifetime of experience picking up the loose pieces.  We know that we will leave many loose ends so get really good at finding them."

When I think of all the adaptations and modifications that I have made to make my life with ADHD manageable, I think that expecting, finding, and fixing the loose ends is the most important.  I would never have been able to articulate this as well as my friend.  Once again, she came to my rescue.