There’s a version of me that exists only in my head. He’s patient. He gets down on the floor and plays Lego with real interest for forty-five minutes. He speaks in a calm, low voice when the 3-year-old throws her cup across the room for the third time. He has snacks prepared. He remembers library day.

That version of me is a great dad.

The real version of me, the one who showed up today, forgot it was library day. Both kids’ books are still on the coffee table. I discovered this at 8:47am in the car park at school while my 5-year-old looked at me with that face. Not angry. Worse. Understanding. “It’s okay, Dad.” Like he’s already learned to expect it.

That’s the gap. The space between the parent you imagine yourself being and the one you actually are on any given afternoon. Everyone has it to some degree, I think. But with ADHD, the gap has teeth.

Before my diagnosis, I thought the gap was a character flaw. I thought I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Wasn’t organised enough. Wasn’t present enough. Didn’t care enough. That last one is the worst thought. Because I care so much it makes my chest hurt sometimes, and the caring doesn’t translate into remembering library day, and what kind of parent cares deeply but can’t manage a library book?

That’s the cruel trick of ADHD. The intention is there. The follow-through is somewhere else entirely, doing God knows what.

I remember sitting in the psychologist’s office during the assessment, and she asked me to describe what was hard about parenting. I started listing stuff. The mornings. The transitions. Remembering what goes in which bag. Keeping track of who needs what form signed. The mental load of it all. And she nodded and took notes and it all felt very clinical, very tick-box.

Then she asked me how it made me feel as a parent.

And I just sat there for a bit.

I told her I felt like I was constantly letting them down in ways they were too young to notice yet but wouldn’t always be. That one day they’d be old enough to see the pattern. That I was skating by on the fact that five-year-olds and three-year-olds are forgiving by nature, and I was running out of time before that forgiveness dried up.

She said that was a very common feeling for parents with ADHD. Which was comforting and devastating at the same time, because it meant I wasn’t alone but it also meant there wasn’t a simple fix. It’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a brain problem. And the brain is the thing doing the parenting.

A year and a half into this diagnosis, I think I’m starting to see it more clearly.

The gap doesn’t close. I don’t think it’s meant to. Every parent has a gap between who they want to be and who they are, ADHD or not. The difference is that with ADHD, the gap is visible in really specific, tangible ways. Forgotten library books. Late permission slips. The birthday party you RSVP’d to in your head but never actually replied to. The afternoon you promised you’d take them to the park and then couldn’t get off the couch, not because you didn’t want to, but because starting the process of shoes and sunscreen and water bottles and actually leaving the house felt like pushing a boulder uphill.

The version of me in my head doesn’t have those problems. He just does things. Smoothly. Automatically. Like those parents in the nappy ads who seem to find it all effortless and photogenic.

The real me has to build systems for everything. Visual checklists on the fridge. Alarms on my phone. The school bag packed the night before because morning-me cannot be trusted with decisions. It works, sometimes. It falls apart, sometimes. The systems themselves require executive function to maintain, which is a bit like needing to be fit before you can start exercising.

There’s a thing my partner said to me once that I think about a lot. She said, “The kids don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to come back.” She meant: when you lose your patience, when you forget something, when you have a bad afternoon, the thing that matters is what you do next. Not the mistake. The repair.

I’m trying to hold onto that. I’m not always good at it. Sometimes the guilt from the gap is so heavy that I overcorrect. I become the “fun parent” for an evening to compensate, which is exhausting and unsustainable and probably confusing for the kids. Other times I withdraw because I feel like I’ve already blown it for the day so what’s the point. Neither of those is great.

What seems to actually work, on the days I can manage it, is just being honest. With myself, mostly. Today I forgot library day. That happened because my brain doesn’t hold onto those things without help, and I didn’t set up the help I needed. That’s not a moral failing. It’s a Tuesday.

My 5-year-old, the one who said “it’s okay, Dad” in the car park, came home that afternoon and asked if we could read one of the library books tonight since they were still here anyway. We read two. He sat in my lap and pointed at the pictures and told me what he thought was going to happen next, and I was there for it. Actually there. Not in my head calculating what I’d forgotten or planning tomorrow’s recovery.

That’s not the version of parent I imagined I’d be. It’s messier. Less composed. Definitely less photogenic. But it was real and he was happy and the books were overdue and it was fine.

The gap was still there. It’s always there. But for an hour or so I stopped staring across it, and just sat down where I was.

I think that might be the whole thing, actually. Not closing the gap. Just learning to sit with it. To stop measuring yourself against the imaginary parent and start noticing the one who’s actually here, on the floor, reading a library book that should’ve been returned this morning.

That parent’s alright. Doing okay.

I think.