The children who changed everything

My eldest is gifted and intense. He can lose himself for hours in something he loves, then come apart completely over something that looks small from the outside but never is. My youngest lives with selective mutism and deep anxiety. He feels everything. The faintest shift in tone. The smallest hint of disapproval. He carries it in his body long after the moment has passed.

Parenting them has broken open every assumption I ever had about what children need, what “good parenting” looks like, and who I thought I was. It’s also the reason I eventually recognised my own neurodivergence. I went looking for answers for them and found myself in every page I read.

What I carry with me

Before I became a mother, I was an occupational therapist. I didn’t work with children. I worked in oncology and palliative care. For close to a decade, I sat with people at the end of their lives.

I mention this not because it makes me an expert in neurodivergence. It doesn’t. But it shaped me in ways I can’t untangle from the kind of mother and writer I am now. It taught me to pay attention to what people need when they can’t always say it. It taught me that the small, tender moments are usually the ones that matter most. And it left me with a quiet, persistent awareness that time is not something we get to keep.

That awareness lives underneath everything I write here. When I write about parenting, I’m not writing from a place of wanting to optimise my children or fix what’s hard. I’m writing from a place of knowing in my bones that this is the part that matters. The kitchen floor conversations. The bedtime questions about death. The mornings where nothing goes to plan but we got through it together.

What this space is

Grow with Their Flow is where I write about what I’m learning. About my children, about myself, and about what it means to keep showing up for the people you love when you’re still figuring out your own story.

I write about neurodivergent parenting, late diagnosis, twice-exceptionality, giftedness, selective mutism, sensory needs, and the quiet emotional weight of caregiving. I also write about grief, purpose, identity, and the ache of trying to become someone you can recognise.

This is not a place where I have answers. It’s a place where I’m honest about the questions. If you’re looking for polished advice from someone who has it figured out, I’m probably not your person. But if you want to sit with someone who is still in the middle of it, still learning, still stumbling, still trying, then I’m glad you’re here.

You belong here if…

You’re raising a child whose wiring the world doesn’t always make room for. Or you’ve received a late diagnosis. Autism, giftedness, twice exceptionality. And you’re rereading your entire life from the beginning. Or you’re starting to suspect the way you’ve moved through the world isn’t the way most people do, and you’re trying to make sense of that.

Whatever brought you here, you don’t have to be further along than you are. You don’t have to have the words for what you’re feeling. You just have to be willing to keep going. That’s all any of us are doing.

Stay connected

I write under my initial to protect my family’s privacy, particularly my children, who are still young and whose stories are not mine alone to tell. Everything here was written because it needed to be, not because I had it figured out first.

If you’d rather read before deciding, start with this essay →

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