The call, when it comes, surprises me – despite the fact I’ve been waiting for it for four long, painful years.
On holiday with my mother and 19-year-old twin daughters in Norfolk, surrounded by exquisite forests and woodpeckers, I’m driving to get provisions when my solicitor phones.
She’s calling to tell me my long-awaited divorce is finally through: my 22-year marriage, which ended in acrimony, mutual contempt and much sadness, is officially over.
As she speaks, my shoulders drop with relief, a smile breaks out on my face – and then, fleetingly, I wonder if my marriage could ever have been saved.
So many divorced women will identify with these mixed feelings. But the reason for my own tumult of emotions is quite specific.
Earlier that day, I had another life-changing phone call. This time with a mental health nurse and psychiatric assessor who diagnosed me, at the age of 53, with ADHD.
After a 90-minute assessment via Zoom, he told me I have combined ADHD, meaning I have both inattentive and hyperactive symptoms. It explains my boundless energy and racing mind – as well as my struggles with organisation, boundaries and budgeting.
So were the two phone calls connected? If I’d had my ADHD diagnosis 20 or 30 years before, would my marriage have survived?
Tracey Davies was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 53 after the breakdown of her marriage
Of course, divorces are sometimes complex. But while both parties are often to blame for the breakdown of a relationship, on some level my erratic moods, impulsivity, forgetfulness, emotional sensitivity, general chaos and disorganisation – all symptoms of ADHD – must have played a part.
The number of women being diagnosed with ADHD later in life is rising, after decades of navigating relationships and careers with an invisible challenge.
Between 2020 and 2022, ADHD diagnoses among women aged 30–49 nearly doubled, and women are frequently diagnosed later in life compared to men, according to a report by Epic Research.
Meanwhile, research by ADHD magazine ADDitude showed a staggering 94 per cent of ADHD women felt their symptoms were exacerbated by perimenopause, and some studies suggest divorce rates are higher when one partner has ADHD, sometimes twice as high as neurotypical relationships.
Could I have been one of those statistics?
That said, on that day back in August, my overwhelming emotion after both phone calls was relief – not least because I felt that at last my life might start to make sense.
I wasn’t just a person who had failed. There was a real neurological reason for much of my behaviour.
But I wish I’d known this sooner. I recalled the struggles I’d had at school – the work I couldn’t focus on, the missed classes, late homework. My teenage low self-esteem and feelings of being unlovable brought tears to my eyes. Even as an adult, I still struggled with life.
I’ve always been a loud, excitable extrovert. I have always had zero boundaries when it comes to having fun and spending money.
However, when you’re young, free and travelling the world – my husband Rob* and I met in Hong Kong when we were both 23 – these traits are exciting.
But, as we discovered, these same characteristics can quickly lose their shine when you hit your 30s and beyond. Being mercurial and impulsive is no longer attractive when you have a mortgage to pay and children to raise.
Thirty years ago, Hong Kong was the first stop on my round-the-world trip after university. I was working as a waitress in an American-themed restaurant when we met.
Some 94 per cent of ADHD women felt their symptoms were exacerbated by perimenopause
intense focus is one almost paradoxical trait of ADHD, driven by seeking release of dopamine through immersing oneself in an enjoyable activity over other responsibilities
We quickly became friends, and I fancied him immediately, but felt he was out of my league. I was surprised when we got together one drunken night five months later.
For all our attraction, even then our characters were different. While he was fun and easygoing, he was more sensible and certainly not as impulsive or excessive as me.
One Christmas in Hong Kong, for example, I flew to Goa on a whim, returning nine weeks later. On another occasion, at the end of a raucous night, I hopped over the counter at a McDonalds in Hong Kong, borrowed an apron and started serving people.
After nearly three years away, we returned to London, engaged. As we planned our wedding and navigated getting ‘proper’ jobs, I struggled with adult responsibilities.
I often still behaved like I was a student or backpacker, indulging in silly spending – like a MG Midget sportscar I bought on my credit card – and partying into the early hours, even if I had to get up for work in the morning.
While I ran through life at triple speed and found his apparent lack of urgency almost painful, he found my impulsivity frustrating.
The unconsidered furniture I’d buy from Facebook Marketplace, the impromptu parties he’d walk into after work, the cat we adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home (although that was one such whim he became fond of). But my poor timekeeping and lack of organisation would spark arguments.
While never really angry, he would become frustrated with me and put me down, asking: ‘Why can’t you do it, what’s wrong with you?’
Before children, Rob and I both had full-time jobs in recruitment. It soon became apparent I wasn’t cut out for a desk job. I flitted through several jobs. He was more consistent and thought hard about leaving recruitment for a more lucrative role as an estate agent.
While we argued occasionally about money, we always factored in plenty of fun and holidays.
Our son was born in 2002 when I was 30 and I decided to become an entrepreneur, setting up several online businesses – one selling football kits and fashion for dogs; another called PlanetReunited, a pre-Facebook site to find people you had once been travelling with.
Self-employment suited me. I became hyper focused on my businesses, often working into the small hours while Rob and my son slept.
I know now that this intense focus is another, almost paradoxical, trait of ADHD, driven by seeking release of the brain’s reward hormone, dopamine, through immersing oneself in an enjoyable activity to the exclusion of other responsibilities.
Arguably, this trait wasn’t easy to live with, either.
People with ADHD feel emotions more strongly and are sensitive to perceived criticism, as well as having difficulty controlling emotions, resulting in dramatic mood swings and meltdowns
I eventually did another career pivot into travel writing in 2004. After looking after my son all day, I’d spend evenings working on commissions and pitching stories, trying to secure trips to the Caribbean or skiing.
Rob would flop in front of the TV. In hindsight, I can see I lost sight of us. I felt Rob resented my work; the trips I went on without him. Our retired parents would look after the children when I went away and he was at work.
Our relationship was put under even more strain when our twin girls were born in 2005. They were delivered nine weeks early by emergency caesarean after I suffered Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), a complication in identical twins sharing one placenta.
When I was discharged after a week – the girls remained in hospital for several weeks after me – the disconnect between us was all too apparent. His devotion to his job continued, as he worked up to 12 hours a day, six days a week and I was left with the children.
For a disorganised, messy and impulsive person, organising routines for meals and nap times for three children under four was particularly tricky.
So I followed Gina Ford’s Contented Little Baby book for the first year of the twins’ life – imposing feeding and sleeping routines. It was the only way I could get my son to nursery and keep the babies fed and happy – as well as clinging to the threads of my career.
But I felt unheard, unloved, undesired.
My sorry state came to a head one Saturday evening when my son was five and the twins were two. Rob arrived home after work to me still in my dressing gown bawling my eyes out. I announced, dramatically: ‘I’m working out how I can leave you.’ Come Monday, I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed antidepressants, which helped.
Now, though, I wonder if my emotional turmoil was caused by my ADHD. Thanks to a hyperactive amygdala – the part of the brain that processes emotions – people with ADHD suffer from something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.
This means we feel emotions more strongly, and are incredibly sensitive to perceived criticism, as well as having difficulty in controlling our emotions, resulting in dramatic mood swings and meltdowns.
Rob was often infuriated and embarrassed by my chaos. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be on time for anything or why I’d forget to pay bills or book the MOT. But I just didn’t know how to be better.
When the girls started school in 2009, we were regularly late for class and I’d often lose book bags, jumpers and coats. I once sent one of the twins into school without her skirt, which was revealed when she took her coat off.
My marriage trundled on for another decade, but even the weekends away we had together were peppered with arguments.
Before long, contempt set in. Over the years, I’ve looked at my friends’ relationships. The happiest ones always spoke to each other with warmth, respect, maybe some gentle teasing, but were never derogatory. Rob once dressed up as me for Halloween – which perhaps reveals a lot about the way he felt about me.
Indeed, throughout our marriage, my erratic moods would be blamed on my hormones, PMT and my depression, rather than being greeted with sympathy. Any gripe was dismissed by him as being ‘the time of the month’.
I can’t help but wonder if ADHD medication would have made me more stable – or if an official diagnosis would have made Rob more understanding of my quirks.
I would sometimes look at him and try to find the man I met and fell in love with all those years ago. But he was no longer there.
We separated in April 2021. Covid lockdowns were the final nail in the coffin.
Two years later, a close friend who had been through the ADHD assessment process with her child suggested I might have it too. She was prompted by a particularly chaotic chat in which I confessed to being threatened with court after forgetting to pay another speeding ticket.
The more I read of ADHD, the more it made sense. Add to this that it’s been proven perimenopause – which I was firmly in the throes of in the dog days of our marriage – makes ADHD symptoms worse, and I was convinced.
Fluctuating and depleting oestrogen levels affect the production of dopamine, and this worsens ADHD symptom. Experts say it’s often when ADHD symptoms are exposed during perimenopause that women finally seek diagnosis.
However, in true ADHD style, it took me another 18 months, until February 2025, before I eventually asked my GP if he could refer me for an assessment.
Six months later and I was on the phone to the psychiatrist on that dramatic day in Norfolk. The assessment, during which we unpicked 50 years of struggle, was an incredibly emotional one.
When the psychiatrist confirmed I had ADHD, I couldn’t help but wonder what my ex would have made of it – not that I’ve asked him. Today, we rarely speak, unless it’s about financial matters or the children.
The reality is that, with approximately two in every five marriages in the UK ending in divorce, I can’t say if ours would’ve survived if I had known I had ADHD.
Perhaps he would have understood me more. But with so little information about older women with ADHD out there, I’m not sure he would have believed my behaviour was caused by a neurological disorder.
Today, I have a new partner who I met two years ago. We started as friends so it felt easier to bring up that I might have ADHD. He supported me in the run-up to the diagnosis. He understands my behaviour, likes the fact I’m spontaneous and fun to be around and doesn’t judge my forgetfulness or lack of structure.
It took six months for me to be prescribed ADHD medication. I’ve only been taking it for a few weeks, but I’ve already noticed it making a big difference.
I’m also trying to be kinder to myself and understand my brain more. As the dust settles on my divorce and diagnosis, I have adopted a new mantra: ‘I’m not too much, I am enough.’
I’ve always been enough. Just with a sprinkle of chaos.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
Wayward Women: Sex, Friendship, And The Midlife Reset by Tracey Davies and Rhonda Carrier is out now.
