That Sinking Feeling

Elizabeth has made a heartfelt, informative, and very well-produced podcast about not just her family’s struggles, but the journeys and perspectives of many other people dealing with ADHD. She’s a good storyteller and I totally get how her dad’s ship salvage career became a metaphor for salvaging her son’s life. Highly recommend.

After my friend recommended this podcast, I binged every episode and wanted more. It mirrors my life as a parent of a neurodivergent child so perfectly that I wanted to continue on this journey with someone who truly understands. As a mom who has also had to become an expert in raising a brilliant child who experiences the world differently, I connected with everything - the shame, others' judgment, the fear, and the heartbreak. Elizabeth’s honest portrayal of both victories and defeats along this path is refreshingly real. What makes this podcast special is how it weaves the host's parenting experiences with stories of her father's ship salvaging career. These parallel narratives create a listening experience that's both comforting and enlightening for anyone navigating similarly waters.

I have ADHD, as do all three of my kids, and I’m sitting here trying to find the right words to describe this podcast. Simply put, it’s phenomenal—like, mind-flowingly good—but It’s also compassionate and wise and informed and funny and full of bold, surprising leaps and connections I never imagined possible, but which totally make sense—between complex, high-stakes ship salvage operations and the complex, high-stakes, high-intensity work of raising a neurodivergent child. It’s all here: the worry, the shame, the chaos, the challenge of figuring out the problem and what to do about it—and also the small miracles and the larger rewards of raising a child who struggles. There’s a disclaimer at the end of every episode that Elizabeth is not an expert in ADHD (which her son has) or ship salvage operations (which was her octogenarian father’s work for many years), but this podcast does something so much more important: it puts a deeply human, utterly specific face on parenting in general—how we get to know ourselves and the people we brought into the world, and how we navigate both supporting and letting go.

Someone shared this with me, and I shared it with my husband. And here’s what he said about it, “It is a truly wonderful listen. A mother talks of her son who has ADHD and makes connections along the way with her father’s ship-salvaging experiences. It’s at once enlightening and heartbreaking, and I’m so grateful it exists. I can’t recommend it enough.” I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Thank you for creating this! As a mom with a son who has ADHD, it felt like being seen.