The name has outlasted everything I built around it.
It outlasted the burnout, the relocation, the depression that followed my diagnosis. It is still here — quieter now, and truer — which perhaps tells you something about the kind of name it is.
I came up with it when we were living overseas, homeschooling both boys away from home.
I was homeschooling alone, without the familiar rhythms of home or the support of people who knew us. It was one of the hardest periods of my life — though I didn’t fully understand that at the time, because when you are in survival mode you don’t always have the clarity to name it. You just keep going.
The name came to me slowly during that period. Not in a single moment of clarity, but the way most true things arrive — quietly accumulating until one day it simply settled.
Grow with their flow.
What I meant by it then was something practical. I was learning, in real time and often the hard way, that I could not teach my boys the way I had been taught. My eldest moved through the world in his own particular way — hyperfocused on what captivated him, resistant to everything else, intensity arriving without warning over things that seemed small but never were. The conventional approach did not work. What worked was watching him. Following his lead. Growing alongside him rather than ahead of him.
I couldn’t force them into the mold I wanted. I was learning to grow with their flow instead.
Homeschooling two children alone, with no help and nothing spare, eventually left me with nothing left to give. We moved back home. I carried the name with me, still not quite sure what to do with it.
Then came the kitchen floor.
My younger son was in the middle of a meltdown. I don’t remember now what started it — something small, as it often is, because for him the small things carry the weight of everything accumulated before them.
What I remember is that I stopped trying to fix it.
And I sat down on the kitchen floor next to him and I cried.
Not the controlled, composed tears of a mother who has it together. Real crying — the kind that comes from overwhelm and helplessness and the particular grief of feeling like you are failing the person you love most. We sat there together, both of us undone, on the kitchen floor. Him in his storm. Me in mine.
I don’t know how long we were there.
What I know is that something shifted in that moment. Not dramatically. Quietly, the way a door opens.
I had been fighting his flow. Trying to redirect it, contain it, bring it to an orderly end. And the fighting had been exhausting both of us. It was only when I stopped — when I had nothing left with which to fight — that I finally just sat beside him. Not as the mother who knew what to do. As a person who was also overwhelmed, also lost, also just trying to get through.
That day, without intending to, I stopped trying to mold him into something easier to manage.
And I started, for the first time, to simply be with him as he was.
When I stopped trying to force them into a shape they were never meant to take, what I felt first was relief.
And then, almost immediately, guilt.
Relief because the constant recalibrating was over. The measuring of my children against a standard that was never made for them. Relief because I could finally see them properly, without the distortion of who I needed them to become.
Guilt because of how long it had taken. Because of all the times I had communicated — however gently, however well-intentioned — that who they were was not quite enough. That their way of moving through the world was the problem to be solved.
I am still sitting with that guilt. I suspect I will be for some time.
Then I received a report.
It told me something I had half-suspected and spent even longer not quite believing: that I am autistic. Gifted, and autistic. Twice exceptional — the same profile as my eldest, which perhaps explains why I have always understood him so completely, even in the moments I was failing him.
I read it and felt the floor shift.
Not because it told me something new about who I was. But because it gave a name to everything I had always been — the child who cried before school every morning, who rehearsed food orders before placing them, who sat with dying patients for a decade and felt everything they felt and brought it home in her body every night. All of it, finally, made sense.
I had spent the better part of my life trying to grow into a shape that was never mine.
The same way I had been asking my sons to.
The name I had chosen years earlier, in a foreign country, exhausted and barely holding things together — I had thought it was about them.
I understand now that it was always about me too.
This is what grow with their flow means to me now, standing on the other side of that diagnosis.
It means I cannot force my children into the mold I imagined for them — not because I failed as a mother, but because the mold was wrong. They are not broken versions of who they should be. They are exactly who they are, moving at the pace and in the direction that belongs to them. My job is not to redirect that. My job is to walk alongside it. To learn from it. To let it show me things I would not have seen from any other vantage point.
And I am not a broken version of who I should have been, either.
We are all three of us on this path together. None of us ahead of the others. All of us, still, growing.
This blog is not a place where I tell you what I have figured out. It is a place where I show you what I am still figuring out — in real time, without the pretense that I have arrived anywhere yet.
I am an occupational therapist by training. I spent a decade in oncology and palliative care, in rooms where the question of what matters most was never abstract. I am a late-diagnosed autistic woman. I am the mother of two neurodivergent boys who are teaching me, daily, that the most important kind of growing is not the kind that moves you forward.
It is the kind that moves you inward.
The name outlasted everything I built around it. Maybe now, finally, it has found the right home.
Come grow with me.
If this is the first time you’ve found this space, you might also want to read The Threads of Life — Growing Up Sensitive, Gifted and Different, where I trace the childhood that this diagnosis finally helped me understand.
If you are parenting a child whose wiring the world doesn’t always make room for — or if you have received your own late diagnosis and are trying to make sense of a life reread from the beginning — you are in the right place. I am glad you found your way here.
To read more as this journey unfolds, you can subscribe below. No noise — just new posts, when I have something worth saying.
Grow with their Flow 
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