Tag: autism

Over the past few months, I’ve been talking with many parents raising highly sensitive, fiery, and/or neurodiverse children. What breaks my heart again and again is the isolation, shame, guilt, fear, and deep burnout I hear from the mothers I meet.

Like many of these moms, I have felt—and continue to feel—this way in my own parenting. While this experience seems almost normalized among neurodiverse moms raising neurodiverse children, I don’t believe it has to be this way.

This is a blog post that moves beyond the individual mom and looks at the system she is living inside.

Most days, as I drive my children to their many activities, I listen to podcasts. It probably won’t surprise you that they’re usually focused on self-growth or neurodiversity. And while I genuinely enjoy them, I can’t help but notice what’s missing: the voices of neurodiverse mothers raising neurodiverse children.

We hear from men and dads. We hear from women without children. But we rarely hear from women who are living this reality every single day—navigating school systems, therapies, emotional regulation, executive functioning challenges, and their own nervous systems at the same time.

This matters because the message mothers receive, over and over again, is that we are not doing enough.

Not doing enough for our kids.
Not advocating enough.
Not providing enough structure.
Not staying calm enough.
Not spending enough time with our children.
Not playing enough.
Not taking care of ourselves enough.

That last one is especially important. I absolutely believe that moms need time and space for themselves. But when self-care is presented without acknowledging the system surrounding mothers—particularly neurodiverse mothers—it often creates more guilt and shame. Not because they don’t value self-care, but because the system they are parenting within doesn’t allow for it.

Just this week alone, I’ve had to cancel my own “self-care” plans because of a combination of normal parenting things and ADHD-related chaos: keys locked in the car, a broken phone, last-minute hockey sessions, schedule changes, emergency dance choreography bookings, a sick child, a snow day—and it’s only Thursday.

Any one of these things could happen to anyone. But for a neurodiverse mom raising neurodiverse children (and often partnered with someone who is also neurodiverse), these moments require a huge amount of executive functioning—much of which is already being borrowed by everyone else in the family.

That looks like searching for the spare key (never found), arranging rides with only one car, tracking down the CAA card, taking photos of the card and number, managing last-minute logistics, and keeping everything moving forward. On their own, these tasks may not seem like a big deal. But when a mother who already has her own executive functioning challenges has her executive functioning borrowed all day long by others—planning, organizing, paying bills, remembering passwords, finding lost items, tracking appointments, filling out forms—it adds up quickly.

Then there are the unexpected emotional needs: a child who refuses school, a meltdown that causes you to miss an appointment, the aftermath that still needs tending to once the crisis has passed.

And then there are the self-help gurus—often men—talking about morning routines.

Now, I’m not saying morning routines aren’t helpful. They can be. But when the advice is “just wake up at 5 or 6 a.m.,” I have questions.

Who was up with the baby in the middle of the night?
Who got up for the nightmares?
Who lay with a child until they fell asleep?
Who had a child crawl into their bed because they were scared?

Maybe it was their partner—but then I ask this: who is with the kids while you meditate, journal, work out, shower, and get ready for work?

Someone stays home to make that routine possible.

And more often than not, it’s the mom.

So when exactly is a mother supposed to have her uninterrupted morning routine? Where is the conversation about shared responsibility, or modifications, or how partners can support this? The lack of perspective—and frankly, the lack of curiosity—around this is astounding to me. It’s rarely even acknowledged.

On top of all of this, I hear women talk about going to healthcare providers and not being taken seriously. When they do receive help from family or friends, they worry about how their child will behave, the judgment they’ll receive, or having to explain their child’s needs, preferences, and differences.

Often, it feels easier not to ask for help at all.

Friends don’t get it. Family members suggest stricter discipline. Schools call multiple times a day because your child forgot something, got in trouble, is overwhelmed, is panicking, or has a tummy ache.

So while self-care is a meaningful and necessary concept—and one that moms of neurodiverse kids need more than most—the system around them makes it incredibly hard to access. Worse, it often leaves them feeling ashamed for not being able to do it “properly.”

This isn’t a failure of mothers.

It’s a failure of the systems we expect them to survive within.

If you’re a mom reading this and quietly thinking, “This is me,” I want you to know you’re not alone—and you’re not failing.

Nothing is wrong with you for feeling exhausted, resentful, overwhelmed, or stuck. Your nervous system is responding exactly as it should to the amount of load you’re carrying.

My hope is that we begin talking more openly about this—not just at the level of individual coping strategies, but at the level of systems, expectations, and shared responsibility. That we make space for the voices of neurodiverse mothers raising neurodiverse children, and that we stop measuring ourselves against advice that was never designed with our realities in mind.

If this resonated, I invite you to share it with another parent who might feel alone, or to simply let yourself pause and offer compassion to the version of you doing the best she can today.

You don’t need to fix yourself.

You deserve support.

Looking back, I remember constantly feeling like everyone else had received some kind of manual for life—and I’d somehow missed it. It was as if teachers, parents, and coaches had whispered instructions to everyone but me. I’d blame it on my daydreaming, which I did constantly. I’d sit through lessons lost in thought, choreographing dances in my head, creating stories, planning projects. On the outside, I appeared to be listening. But inside, I was in another world—bored, disconnected, and silently struggling.

I didn’t talk about it. Somehow, I knew not to. I couldn’t quite explain it anyway.

Years later, in graduate school, I discovered the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote about the “performance of everyday life.” Finally—an explanation. Everyone, Goffman said, is performing: as children, friends, teammates, students. Life is a stage, and we’re all playing roles. But even as I absorbed this insight, something still didn’t sit right. If everyone was performing, how did they know their lines?

It wasn’t until my late 30s—after being diagnosed with ADHD-Combined type—that things really began to click. I dove headfirst into everything ADHD. That’s when I found others describing the exact feeling I’d had for decades: like there was a script everyone else had been handed, and we just… hadn’t.

I imagine it like this: a woman walks into an audition, and everyone expects her to recite lines from a script. Only—she was never given one.

That image explained so much. When I got to university, it seemed like everyone already knew about academic journal articles. I figured it was because I was the first in my family to attend university. But then I met others with similar backgrounds who did know. Was it socio-economic? Was it ADHD? I still can’t say for sure. But I know one thing: I didn’t have the script, so I faked it until I figured it out.

I have dozens of stories like this—moments where I masked confusion or mimicked others, just trying to fit in.

Through my work, research, and especially parenting neurodivergent children, I’ve come to understand that much of what I experienced wasn’t a personal failure—it was a disabling environment. The systems I moved through were designed for neurotypical brains and nervous systems. That’s not to say neurotypicals don’t perform or fake it, too. But the key difference? They’re performing from a script written with them in mind.

Take our school system. It expects children to sit still, absorb information passively, and produce it on demand—through worksheets, tests, and timed exams. For many neurodiverse learners, that’s a recipe for struggle. They often thrive with hands-on, multisensory learning—by moving, creating, experimenting, and processing on their own timeline. But instead of embracing these strengths, many schools label them as distracted, defiant, or disorganized.

It was in high school that I began to uncover an approach that worked for me. I chose projects that aligned with my interests to stay engaged. I avoided classes based heavily on memorization, knowing my working memory wouldn’t serve me well there. Without realizing it, I was accommodating my neurodiversity. I was leaning into my strengths—curiosity, creativity, and a deep love for learning.

And that’s the shift I want to emphasize.

When neurodivergent people understand how they think, feel, and learn best, they stop trying to cram themselves into someone else’s mold. They start building their own toolkit, their own pace, and yes—even their own script.

So if you’ve ever felt like you missed the instructions, like you’re always one step behind, like you’re pretending to “get it”—know that you’re not broken. You’re navigating a world that wasn’t built with you in mind.

But the beautiful part? You don’t have to keep faking it. You can start writing your own lines.