In the spring, my husband legally and morally abandoned us - a fact that would later be thoroughly documented in court records. While my four daughters and I remained in our home with no income, he moved back to his hometown of Springfield, MA, never sending a single dollar despite knowing our desperate circumstances. Yet somehow, he managed to convince both sides of our family that I was the one who had left him.

The isolation deepened when I was involved in a head-on collision while driving my Dodge Durango with all four daughters in the car. The other driver had experienced a medical episode, but the result was the same - our vehicle was totaled. With no income or savings, I couldn’t finance a new car or buy one with cash. For the next two years, we lived without transportation in an area with no public transportation.

During this period, neighbors would occasionally check on us, offering small kindnesses that felt like lifelines. But my many nearby family members never visited, never called, never asked if we needed help. The silence was deafening.

My mother visited exactly once, just before the school year started, bringing a $500 check. That night, the power went out due to a storm. When I called the electric company to report the outage, I spoke loudly and abruptly to the automated system that wasn’t recognizing my voice prompts. Despite it clearly being 3 AM and obviously an automated system, my mother somehow believed I was speaking to a live person. She launched into a tirade about what a horrible person and mother I was.

Furious, I walked away to retrieve her $500 check so I could tear it up in front of her. But as I walked away, she demanded the check back, claiming my ‘angry behavior while speaking to a person (although it was a computer)’ didn’t deserve her help. I told her to leave - immediately, in the middle of the night.

She later made sure to tell every family member how I had ‘put her out on the street’ and placed her in a ‘very compromising position.’ This from a woman who had a car, multiple places to stay within 3 miles, and the financial means to continue her comfortable life.

What I didn’t see at the time was how my neurodivergent brain, shaped by a childhood of unmet needs and critical emotional judgment, was completely missing the social dynamics at play. As an ADHD woman who had learned early that survival meant hypervigilance around rejection, I was so focused on the immediate crisis - getting the power restored for my children - that I couldn’t read the deeper social cues of the moment.

My childhood trauma had taught me that expressing frustration or need was dangerous, yet here I was, stressed and overwhelmed, speaking forcefully to an automated system out of sheer necessity. What my mother heard wasn’t a desperate woman trying to get electricity restored for her grandchildren - she heard the same ‘difficult’ behavior she had always criticized in me as a child.

My neurodivergent brain, already overwhelmed by the constant state of crisis I was living in, couldn’t process that this visit wasn’t actually about helping us. I couldn’t see that the $500 was likely never meant as genuine support, but rather as a way to maintain the family narrative that she was the generous mother trying to help her ungrateful daughter. When I reacted authentically to her criticism - with the same directness that had been labeled ‘wrong’ my entire life - I was playing directly into a script I didn’t even know existed.

The social chess game being played around me was invisible to my trauma conditioned, neurodivergent mind, which was simply trying to survive each day and protect my children.