I was recently diagnosed with ADHD.
Turns out, having a marching band in your head every waking moment is not a universal experience. My mother spent most of my childhood telling me I could never finish anything, so I spent most of my adult life trying to prove her wrong. After 44 years of swimming against the tide, I was over it.
I started to wonder who else in my family might have had it. My father could spend all day writing a sonnet but can't focus long enough to fry an egg without burning it. My mother rarely gets more than four hours of sleep and is on the move all day. My grandfather was notorious for lasting no more than three months in a job. Nobody in their generation was ever going to be diagnosed with anything, of course. They were just called spirited, difficult, restless, and then they got on with their lives.
What I've discovered is that I know almost nothing about the people I come from. A few names, countries and a couple of stories that have been told so many times they've worn smooth. But the texture of who they were? The reasons they left the place they were born? What made them laugh? Whether their heads sounded like mine? Almost none of it survived.
I ponder this while I make the finishing touches to Shirley's legacy book.
Shirley (not her real name) spent the last decade tracing the four branches of her family tree. She travelled to her home town, sat with distant relatives she'd never met, and searched through local records for names that were sometimes spelled one way and sometimes another. She built a picture of her ancestry the way people used to build houses, slowly, from what was available, with everyone in the family passing her different tools.
Sometimes she'd hear two different versions of the same story and have no way of knowing which was true. That's the frustration and the strange gift of the work. You have to accept that some things will never be settled, that history has gaps, and they are part of the story too. Luckily, she was rewarded with the occasional juicy scandal.
Her book is more than a collection of names and dates. It's the record of a woman who decided that not knowing wasn't good enough. She dedicated it to her grandchildren, who will grow up with something most of us never had: a first-hand account of who they come from, written by someone who went looking.
I still don't know if my grandfather would have been diagnosed with ADHD if he'd lived long enough to be asked. I probably never will. Some of these questions arrive too late.
But that's exactly why I do this work. Shirley's grandchildren won't have to wonder about her.