Introducing Hatty McHatface

April 25, 2026

We all wear many hats, some of us more than others. When I need to switch tasks, which can be a challenge due to my ADHD brain, I will sometimes think to myself OK, time to put on your mom hat or time for mom’s taxi hat or time to put on your chef hat or time to wear the caregiver hat or time to put on your teacher hat or time to don the girlfriend hat or… well, you get the idea. I’ve always had a thing for hats, I love love love them, but unfortunately I have a really big head so often, they don’t love me back. 

Due to the aforementioned considerable coconut, I have purchased or been given many hats that I simply can’t wear because they are too small. I’ve actually bought hats that I knew I couldn’t wear simply because I thought they were gorgeous pieces of art, or just so strange and weird that I needed to have them in my life. Sometimes I have held on to them until I found the perfect person to give them to, and sometimes I have just donated them after I started to feel foolish for hanging on to them. It’s easy for me to cross the line from collecting pieces that I find quirky or visually pleasing into hoarder-esque territory. I try very hard not to hoard things that I will never make use of, whether that use be the intended purpose of the item in question or not. 

I try not to hoard, but I still have many unpacked boxes in the basement from a move four years ago. These boxes are housed in the glitter room, so named because the previous owners had let their children decorate the door using glitter paint, so the real estate agent who showed me the house was calling it the glitter room and the name stuck. That door had to be replaced so the glitter is gone and I’ve been meaning to paint the doorframe with glitter paint in honour of the nickname, but that is one of many ridiculous things on my to do list that hasn’t happened yet. 

While unpacking a box in the glitter room recently, I was very excited to find the foam head that lived on our coffee table, and then on the djembe near the bookcase, in my previous home. Every now and then I would put a hat on it, because my child and I have an extensive collection and I would find one lying around on the floor and that seemed like the perfect place for a wayward headpiece. I’ve wondered whatever happened to that foam head, and worried that I had donated it in the big pre-move purge. I missed having it around, and now that I have found it I decided that it should live near the hat rack that I recently purchased and filled up with the wayward chapeaux that were cluttering up closets and baskets around the “new” house. 

The other day it was a lovely sunny sixteen degrees outside, which was a big change from the dump of snow we had gotten a couple of days prior, so I put an old sun visor on Hatty McHatface and snapped a photo of it to send to the person who had gifted it to my child nearly two decades ago. Her mother had brought it back from Australia for her children but they never wore it, and my friend Julia had noticed that I always had different hats on my kiddo, so she decided that we ought to have it. She laughed when I sent her the photo, and I started thinking about how many of the items that I keep are visual reminders of people and places past. Again, due to ADHD, I have massive difficulty with object permanence, so the old adage “out of sight, out of mind” is a very real (and incredibly stressful) part of my life. I will forget that people, places, and things exist if I don’t have visual reminders of them out and about in my space. I honestly believe that part of the reason that people with ADHD have so many random piles around in their spaces is to remind them that people, places, and things exist. Nothing stresses me out like a cleared off table, or a room that is perfectly clean with nothing out and about. It causes a very real malaise in me that I am forgetting about something important that I have to do, or someone I was meaning to connect with. This makes cohabitation with compulsively tidy people very challenging for me. 

Today it is snowing again, so I decided that Hatty McHatface should wear a toque. That reminded me that I need to reorganize our winter gear as part of my spring cleaning, so I went to the front hall closet in search of a toque and found one that melted my heart. I will never get rid of this one, it is a toque that I bought for my child when she was threeish and she wore it regularly until she was at least six. It was too big for her when I first got it, and due to some serious health issues she was always slow to grow, so it was part of our lives for a long time. It was also the only one she never lost, so the fact that it is still with us is a big deal. Every time I see it, I am reminded of that little face that makes my heart ache with love, which has now become the face of a lovely young woman. A lovely young woman who also has ADHD, and who harshly berates herself for her inability to keep a clean and functional space. I’m trying to get unpacked and organized so that I can help her with this struggle.

To begin this seemingly monumental task, I am spring cleaning the house as much as I can, which is actually not very much because I am constantly in significant physical pain. I was on a two year waitlist for admission to the chronic pain centre which has finally come through, and due to the psychological effects of chronic pain I will also have to deal with the significant emotional pain that I carry. Some of that is the emotional pain that I still carry from trying my best to parent my chronically ill child. 

Ruby was born with some extensive health issues and I spent much of her childhood having to restrain her during invasive medical procedures that she couldn’t be sedated for, taking her to psychology appointments because her biggest medical issues were GI related and thankfully they have child psychologists to support the patients and their parents in the GI clinic at the children’s hospital. Watching your baby slowly decline and nearly die in the first few days of her life, and then spending weeks in the NICU followed by all of the other things that happened, well, it stays with you. I know that the high levels of stress and hypervigilance I still live with contribute to my levels of chronic pain. This is just one of several instances of emotional trauma that I will have to unpack over the next year or two in my time with the chronic pain centre. I am NOT looking forward to it, but it is time for me to spring clean my house, my body, and my mind. 

Something as silly as a foam head has become an unexpected anchor for my thoughts and emotions. I have been off work since having shoulder surgery six months ago and the chronic pain centre wants me to be off work for at least another year. This is extremely difficult for me because I am a confirmed workaholic, which is also a trauma response, but that is a story for another day. I wonder if there is a hat to fit that tale? I’m sure there is, and I am looking forward to exploring my life through the hats I wear, both literally and figuratively, with the help of Hatty McHatface.