Last Saturday I took my 5-year-old to a birthday party at one of those indoor play centre places. You know the ones. Primary colours everywhere, foam mats that smell like feet, a ball pit that hasn’t been properly cleaned since the Howard government.

We walked in and it hit me like a wall. The noise. I don’t mean it was loud, although it was. I mean the specific quality of the noise. Thirty kids screaming at slightly different pitches, all of them reverberating off hard surfaces. A top-40 playlist competing with the screaming and losing. Some kind of air compressor running in the background. A dad near the door laughing at something on his phone with that speaker-phone laugh.

Every sound equally loud. Every sound equally important. My brain couldn’t sort them. It just took them all in at once, like trying to drink from a fire hose.

Most people know ADHD as the focus stuff, the forgetting stuff. The sensory processing thing is less well-known. For me, it means my brain doesn’t filter background noise the way it apparently should. Everything comes in at the same volume. A kid screaming across the room registers with the same urgency as someone talking directly to me. It’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it.

So. The party.

My son ran off immediately, which was great, because that’s the whole point, but also meant I was now standing alone in the parent zone. The parent zone is a cluster of plastic chairs near a table covered in chip bowls and those tiny bottles of water that no one can open without a engineering degree. This is where the small talk happens.

Small talk at kids’ parties is exhausting in ways people don’t expect. It’s half-shouted over the noise, interrupted every ninety seconds by a child needing something, and it follows a predictable script. Which school does your kid go to. Oh nice. How old are they. Oh same. Are they liking it. Oh good.

I can do this. I can perform this. But it costs me something. Each conversation requires me to maintain focus while my brain is simultaneously processing every sound in the building, tracking where my kid is (he’s fine, he’s in the ball pit, no wait he’s climbing something, okay he’s fine), and trying to remember this other parent’s name which I was definitely told five minutes ago.

By the time the fairy bread came out I was running on empty.

There’s a moment at every kids’ party where the sugar hits and the volume goes up another 20% and someone starts crying and someone else is having the time of their life and the two sounds are almost identical. That’s usually when I excuse myself to the bathroom, not because I need to go but because the bathroom is the only room with a door.

I stood in there for about three minutes, just breathing. Hands on the sink. Staring at a poster about hand hygiene. Recalibrating.

I used to feel embarrassed about this. A parent hiding in the bathroom at a kids’ party. But I’ve made peace with it (mostly). My brain needs a reset. The bathroom is the reset room. No shame in that.

My partner and I have an unspoken system now. At parties, we take turns being “on.” One of us does the social bit while the other hangs back. I’m usually better in short bursts. She’s better at the sustained conversation. We swap. It works. When I go alone, like last Saturday, I just accept that I’ll be tired afterwards and plan accordingly. Plan accordingly meaning: the drive home is quiet, dinner is something simple, and I’m on the couch by 7:30.

But my son had an incredible time. He came out of that play centre absolutely buzzing, face covered in icing, one sock missing, telling me about some kid called Max who could do a backflip off the foam wedge. He talked the entire drive home. Every detail. He was so happy.

And I was there for that. Worn out, a bit overstimulated, vaguely smelling of ball pit. But there.

I’ve started thinking of these things as a cost, not a problem. Birthday parties cost me more energy than they cost some other parents. That’s just the price of admission. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t go. It means I need to plan for the recovery, and I need to stop pretending I’m fine when I’m not, and I need to accept that three minutes in the bathroom is a perfectly valid parenting strategy.

Next weekend there’s another party. This one’s at a park, which is better. Open air, room to move, natural light. I’ll still get tired. I’ll still lose someone’s name thirty seconds after hearing it. But there’ll be trees and sky and space, and my son will come home happy, and I’ll be on the couch by 7:30, and that’s alright.

That’s the deal.