Category: Parenting Neurodivergent Children

• The Disclosure Dilemma — When Telling a School Your Child Is Gifted Feels Like Boasting

  I asked my son what he had learnt at coding class.

  He told me he had finished early, so he spent the rest of the hour playing a game on the laptop. The teacher had not given him anything else to do. She had been busy with the other children.

  To the teacher, he was probably a child who picked things up quickly, completed the task, and was doing fine.

  At home, my son is not a straightforward high-performing pupil.

  At home, he is a child who can read three chapters of an algebra text and still forget to write his name on the front of his homework. He is a child who brings his music recorder to school every single day because he is afraid he will forget it on the days he actually has music class. He is a child whose meltdowns I have written about elsewhere.

  The clinical name for this is twice-exceptional.

  The giftedness can mask the struggle. The struggle can mask the giftedness. In a child like mine, both are happening all the time. They take turns being visible. No one, other than the parents, really sees the whole child.

  I have come to think of him as an ordinary car with a race-car engine.

  From the outside, the car looks unremarkable. The engine is not. But unless someone is told, they will not know the car is capable of racing. They will drive him in the slow lane, like every other car on the road.

  The engine never runs. It idles for hours every day.

  And a race-car engine left idling for hours every day does not remain quietly underused. The body absorbs the stress of an engine with nowhere to put its capacity.

  The meltdowns. The executive-functioning failures. The sensory anxieties he carries through each school day.

  They are not separate problems. They are what happens when a body the world reads as ordinary is kept in the slow lane while the engine waits.

  This is not a niche pattern. This asynchronicity, this tendency for one part of the child to mask another, is central to how a twice-exceptional child moves through the world.

  It is the reason a child can appear high-performing and still be drifting in a chair while the lesson continues around him.

  The engine idles. The school sees only the ordinary car.

  When we first enrolled him in coding school, we made what felt like the careful choice.

  We did not tell them he was gifted. We did not send the assessment. We did not drop the word into conversation.

  We thought, like good Asian parents, and in line with much of the advice we had read, that telling them would sound boastful. We worried it would set him up to be treated differently in ways we could not predict. We assumed that if the school was good, they would notice on their own.

  I have since gone back and read the parenting articles on this. The mainstream advice tends to run in one direction: do not use the word gifted with your child’s teacher. Share concrete observations instead. Let the teacher draw their own conclusions. Build a partnership. Approach with humility.

  I understand the intention behind that advice.

  For my son, it was the wrong advice.

  The school did not notice on their own. They had no reason to take him out of the slow lane. The instructors were not trained to identify giftedness. The metric in that classroom was task completion.

  He completed the task.

  So he moved into the file marked fine.

  What we had taken to be modesty, I came to see, was an information failure.

  The school could not work with what they did not know. Withholding the assessment was not protecting him. It was leaving him in a chair while the adults responsible for teaching him attended to the children with louder needs.

  He was not a louder need.

  He was a quiet one.

  And quiet needs are easily missed.

  Modesty had a cost. The cost was his time. The cost was the slow narrowing of what he expected school to be.

  When we moved him to a different coding school, we did not arrive with the assessment in hand. We did not declare him gifted from the start. We did not stage a formal conversation.

  But we changed our approach.

  Before the first lesson, we spoke to the centre manager.

  We said he picked things up quickly. We said he might be ahead of where the class was. We said we thought he had potential in this area.

  That was the disclosure.

  Three sentences. No specialist language. No scores. No diagnosis.

  Just enough information for a teacher to know what to look for.

  During the assessment, the assessor saw what we had told her was there. She used the word gifted herself, in reference to his strengths in coding.

  Nothing about it was planned. The assessor had simply known where to look because we had pointed her in the right direction. The information gave her something to work with.

  I have thought a lot about the difference between those two schools since.

  The difference was not simply the schools.

  The difference was that one of them knew the car was capable of racing, and one of them did not.

  He is still at the second school. The conversation has expanded since.

  The first time I offered that information, I felt as if I was doing something untoward. As though naming what he could do was asking for special treatment. As though it marked him out from his classmates, or broke some unspoken contract of equal expectation.

  I felt the way I had been raised to feel about a parent who praised her own child to a teacher.

  Boastful. Pushy. Extra.

  I do not feel that anymore.

  I have come to understand that what looked like modesty was actually a way of asking the world to do for my child what only I could do.

  Teachers, coaches, relatives. They often see only one part of him. None of them can know the whole child without help. None of them is trying to fail him. They are working with the information they have been given.

  I am the one who has to give them what they need.

  Not everyone is invested enough, or trained enough, or astute enough to notice his strengths and struggles on their own.

  The car looks ordinary.

  The engine is not.

  If I do not tell them, they drive him in the slow lane.

  If I do not tell them, they do not know.

  This is not boasting.

  This is advocacy.

  If this is the texture of your child too, you might also want to read Meltdowns vs Tantrums: What I Got Wrong for Years where I write about the home half that the school does not see. Or The Wrong Operating System where I write about being gifted and autistic and the slow cost of having no one know.

  May 21, 2026

  ---

• The Weight I Cannot Put Down — Mothering from Inside the Same Neurotype

  The print was supposed to be white. It came out purple.

  He had sent a design to the 3D printer earlier, and I noticed that it was in the wrong colour. I stopped the print and reminded him to change the colour. He said he would do it right away. I went off to help his brother brush his teeth, and when I returned to check on the print, it was restarted and it was printing purple.

  In the few minutes I had been gone, he had looked at the print in the wrong colour, forgotten that he was meant to change the colour, and sent the same thing to print again.

  I asked him, defeatedly, what had happened. He looked up from the screen, where another design was already half-rendered in the Tinkercad workspace. He looked puzzled, and told me he didn’t know.

  I knew before he answered.

  His attention had moved on. He hadn’t truly heard me. My voice went into his ears and out, and his brain did not process it.

  ---

  It is not, in any case, only about the print. The print is one of many small things that fail if I am not the one tracking them. Those small things have accumulated. In different spaces. On different afternoons.

  I plan his day, I write the lists of what he needs to remember, I cross things off when they are done and add things back when they have been forgotten. When I lapse, he lapses, immediately and entirely, as if my attention were the structural support that held the day upright.

  Day in, day out, me as his second brain.

  The clinical name for this is hypervigilance, and I know the term from training I no longer practise, and I know it from inside my body now in a way no textbook taught me. The manuals describe it as a maladaptive nervous system pattern, a body braced for threat where there is no threat. The autonomic system is burning fuel on something that should not require fuel. In our home, it is the only way the homework gets finished.

  There are days I wish he would just grow up. I wish he would grow out of this. I wish the work of being his external brain would taper off, the way it does, I am told, for other children at his age.

  Then I remember what I have learnt and unlearnt and learnt again, which is that kids do well when they can. He is not refusing to do it; he does not yet have the skills. The work of growing his skills is the work that I have committed to.

  ---

  Being his second brain is taxing on my own brain, and the brain that is doing this work is itself autistic. It was something I did not yet know in the years when this began, and I was burning out from the immense mental load of managing everyone and everything on top of it.

  He is loud. He is in three rooms at once. He calls for me from one of them while screeching from another, and he needs answers and snacks and attention and witnesses. I cannot finish a sentence in my own head. I cannot finish a thought. The conditions I need to think, plan, regulate, hold are the conditions he prevents from existing in the room by virtue of being himself in it.

  I need quiet. I need solitude. I need to go inside my own head, slowly, with all the doors closed behind me.

  Everything he is not.

  I used to be soft-spoken. I used to be mild-tempered. I was collected and intentional.

  What happened to me?

  I do not answer the question, because the answer keeps changing. Some days the answer is that he happened. Some days the answer is that motherhood happened. Some days the answer is that living a whole life inside a nervous system that nobody, including me, knew was autistic, happened.

  The question stays. The answer shifts.

  ---

  Before I had a name for what I am, I had a different name. The name was failing.

  Every day I asked myself variations of the same questions. Was I being firm enough? Was I being soft enough? Was I being too soft? Was I being too firm? Was the firmness teaching him cruelty? Was the softness teaching him that nothing held? Was I loving him correctly? Was I loving him wrong?

  I was worried that I was not good enough.

  Year after year of those questions, and underneath them the feeling that the variable in his struggle was me. Perhaps the way I parented him was the cause. I wished that I could find the right combination of tone and book and technique to undo what my mothering had done.

  Then, my diagnosis arrived.

  The diagnosis answered one of the questions. It said the variable was not what I had thought it was. It was not my parenting.

  He inherited this neurotype from me. He is struggling because of me, not because of how I parented him, but because of what I gave him even before I parented him at all.

  The diagnosis did not lift the guilt that perhaps my inadequate parenting caused him his struggles. The guilt changed its shape. I gave him the neurotype that caused all of this.

  ---

  He is working on a math paper. He sings and screeches and yelps. One moment he is on the chair, another he is on the floor, and on the monkey bar the next.

  It is taking him longer than it should. He is bright at math, the kind of bright that reads algebra textbooks for fun. The paper in front of him, in any honest assessment of his ability, is something he should be able to finish in twenty minutes. He has been at it for over an hour. I am sitting nearby, not pressing, not pacing, letting him work through it because I learnt through experience that interference makes it worse.

  When he is done, I take the paper from him to check. The calculation has one careless mistake. He has not written the statement. He has not added the dollar sign. Every single time we do math, we go through the same thing. The same forgotten statement. The same forgotten unit. The same thing that has been told and told and told to him, and the telling has not, evidently, taken.

  The diagnostic question is already running in my head, the way it has run for years now, in different rooms, over different homework. Is it that he does not care what I think? Is it the lack of skill because of his neurodivergence? The clinician in me is doing the assessment even now, even mid-eruption, even as the eruption is gathering itself into the room.

  He spent such a long time on this paper. Surely, this cannot be his actual standard? I know it is not, because I have seen his potential. In school, in exams, he scores full marks. At home, the standard is sub-par, and the asymmetry has been there for years.

  It is too loud. It is too chaotic. It is getting too much.

  I am holding it. I am holding it. I am holding it.

  And then a missing dollar sign tips me, and I explode.

  I startle myself at how loud I sound. The voice in the room is not the voice I think of as mine. It is not soft, and it is not mild, and it is not the voice of the woman I had thought I was. It is loud and sharp and frightening, and it is coming out of my mouth.

  That is not me, the thought arrives, even as I am being it. I am not like this.

  He flinches. He looks up. His eyes go wide and then they fill and then he is wailing. He did not see it coming.

  There it is. My own autistic meltdown. He bears the brunt of it.

  I know what I am watching, because I have watched it in him for years before I recognised it in myself. The holding. The holding. The capacity that was holding and is no longer holding. The trigger that is not the cause. The eruption has nothing to do with the missing dollar sign. It has everything to do with the years of holding that came before the missing dollar sign, and the years of holding that will come after.

  I am the adult. I should know better. I should do better.

  I keep cycling. The imploding, the exploding, and the wilting. The diagnostic narrating, and the conscience demanding. The child wailing and the mother who knows what she is and cannot stop being it.

  The guilt that follows is double. There is the guilt for exploding, and underneath that guilt, there is the deeper guilt. The guilt for being the one who gave him the nervous system that triggers the eruption that is mine to own.

  ---

  I gave him this. That is the weight I cannot put down, no matter how many times the cognitive part of me has tried to put it down for me. I gave him the neurotype that is making his life this specific kind of hard.

  Cognitively I know this is not the helpful way of thinking. I know neurodiversity is not a failure passed down between bodies. I know the genetic story is more complicated than any straight line from a mother to her son. I know the way the literature would frame this and the way an honest clinician would push back on the framing if I told her I was holding it.

  But it is true.

  Because of that, I must step up. I must not falter. I must not fail him. He must not walk my path.

  The path I do not want him to walk is not the path of being neurodivergent. That is something we cannot change. He is neurodivergent. I am neurodivergent. There is no version of him that is not him, and there is no version of him I would trade for a version of him without his neurotype.

  The path I do not want him to walk is the other one. The path of not knowing. The decade of suspecting his own mind was the variable. The years of carrying the unknown weight before there was language for it.

  He must not walk that path. He has a name for what he is.

  ---

  He is asleep now. The house is quiet. This quiet has arrived too late, like medicine for a fever that has already passed.

  The silence I needed all day arrives only now. The day in which I needed it is already over.

  The question that comes with the silence is one I do not dare say out loud.

  Will he blame me one day for the neurotype I gave him? For the eruptions? For the years of being mothered by someone whose nervous system was running the same program as his and could not regulate either of them through the worst of it?

  For all his brilliance, his daily struggles are so real.

  I do not have an answer. Cognitively, I know it is not a fair question. Emotionally, I keep asking it. Some days gently. Some days harshly. Most days the question just sits in my chest where it has lived for years.

  A weight I have learnt to carry.

  ---

  If you have stood in your own home wondering what was wrong with the way you were doing this, Meltdowns vs Tantrums is the post that named for me what I had been watching for years.

  And if you have only just begun to wonder whether the way you have moved through the world might have a name, Why I Called It Grow with Their Flow is where I keep returning to.

  I write when the writing is honest. If you’d like the posts in your inbox, you can subscribe below.

  Subscribe

  May 7, 2026

  autistic mother, autistic women, caregiver wellbeing, late autism diagnosis, meltdowns, neurodivergent child, neurodivergent parenting, twice exceptional, writing

  ---

• Meltdowns vs Tantrums: What I Got Wrong for Years, and What I Do Differently Now

  The afternoons have blurred now. I don’t know if I blocked them out or if this is what memory does when it has been asked to hold too much.

  What is left is the fog.

  The school bus pulling up outside our building. The doors opening. Him stepping off. And then, before we had entered the lift, before I had even put the key in the door, before I had done anything at all, his body on the floor of the lobby. Wailing. Arms flailing. Legs kicking. Sometimes curled up like a foetus. Sometimes flat on his back. My head bowed. Neighbours walking past, while I kept my head down.

  I had not even done anything yet.

  If you are reading this with one happening in the next room, here is what I would say first. Lower yourself. Stop talking. Stay near, but not pressing. The detonation was already in the room before you walked in. The rest of this post can wait until later.

  This is the sentence I still cannot say without something tightening in me. I had not done anything, and I had already failed.

  I used to think the problem was me. Some nights, alone with a sleeping child and a head full of podcasts, I was certain of it. The way I set limits. The way I softened them. The way I had not yet found the right technique, the right tone, the right feelings book. It would take me years to understand that what I was watching on the lobby floor was not about anything I had done.

  The Word Can’t, The Word Won’t

  There is a clinical distinction I did not know then and cannot stop noticing now.

  A tantrum is goal-directed. A child wants a thing. The thing is withheld. The child escalates to try to get it. The hallmark is this: the tantrum ends when the outcome becomes clear. The child is still inside himself during it. He is monitoring the room. He is watching. He is adjusting. He is choosing.

  A meltdown is not any of those things. A meltdown is a nervous system that has run out of regulatory capacity. The child is not choosing it. He cannot stop it by being shown consequences, because the part of the brain that weighs consequences is not online. He is not in there in the way he usually is.

  A tantrum tends to want a witness. A meltdown does not.

  The word can’t. The word won’t.

  This is the distinction. Everything I now know about how to be with him, on those afternoons and the ones since, follows from it.

  There is a clinical name for what I was watching. After-school restraint collapse. A child holds his body together all day, in a room full of inputs, and releases it the moment he reaches somewhere safe. Home is where the release happens. Home, meaning me. The collapse is not a failure of parenting. It is the nervous system telling him where home is.

  I had trained as an occupational therapist before he was born. The training did not reach me here. It turned out that knowing the word for something, is not the same as knowing it in my own body at four in the afternoon.

  What His Body Told Me

  The child the teacher described was not the child I brought home.

  In school he was the “class monitor.” He stood at the back of the line to make sure his friends were following the teacher. He was advanced academically. He was reading chapter books before most children were reading at all. He chose the teacher’s side of a conversation over his classmates’ side, because adults were easier to parse than peers. I arranged for a call with his teacher and described to her the child I was actually living with. The sobbing, the floor, the impossible inconsolability. She paused for a while before saying, It’s a different child you are describing. I was so confused.

  It took me years to understand that those were the same child. He had given the school everything he had. By the time he reached me, there was nothing left of him to give to anything, including himself.

  I did not know to read his body for what it was showing me. I thought the hallmarks of distress in a child were something like: crying for comfort, seeking touch, wanting the parent close. His distress looked like none of those things. It looked like something I had no language for. He was unreachable. Arms flailing. Legs kicking. Sometimes curled so tight his small back was rounded in on itself. Words gone. The child who could, during good times, have a logical conversation about something above his age level was not reachable inside this body on the floor. He was not refusing to speak. He did not have speech.

  At home, the triggers read to me, then, as unreasonable. The lift button I had pressed before he could press it. The lift button he had pressed, but now the lift had arrived and he did not want to go in. The sock that felt wrong. The snack he had agreed to that now was the wrong snack. Or the right snack, too warm, too cold, too soft or too hard. The shower he needed, that he would not take. He sat naked outside the bathroom door, refusing, for the sake of refusing.

  Once, when the chaos was too much, I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. He kicked it so hard that the plastic lock broke. He was still so small.

  Everything, at some point, would be wrong. I learnt to walk through the afternoon the way a person walks through a minefield she has already surveyed and committed to crossing anyway. I knew where the bombs were. I stepped on them anyway, because there was no path that did not include them. The detonation was going to happen regardless of which foot I put down next.

  This is what I did not understand then. A meltdown is not a response to a trigger. A meltdown is the shape a nervous system makes when it has nothing left. The trigger is whatever small thing happens to be in the room when the capacity runs out.

  What Has Helped

  The things that helped arrived slowly, over years, and none of them were strategies I had read in a book.

  I learnt to stop talking first. The typical parenting advice, when a child is on the floor, is to narrate. To name the feeling. To reason with the body in front of me. I had a dozen phrases at the ready. You are feeling frustrated. I know this is hard. Can you take a deep breath for me. I had rehearsed them. I had done the courses. I had read the books. They did nothing, and sometimes they made things worse, because what reaches a nervous system that has run out of capacity is not language. It is another nervous system, steady.

  This is the piece I am still learning. Co-regulation is a biological event, not a conversation. The calm that comes into a room, if it comes, comes in through another body. Mine. Silent. Near. Not above him. Not pressing closer. Just the fact of a breath that is not the breath he is having.

  I learnt to sit down. When I stood over him I was one more input. When I lowered myself to the floor, or to the step, or to the low chair, I removed myself from the list of things his body had to manage.

  I learnt the difference between close and crowding. Close was being within reach, within sight, a steady presence he could feel but did not have to manage. Crowding was the hand on his back he could not tolerate yet, the voice too near his ear, the body that had decided he must be calmed right now. I used to crowd. I thought I was helping. I was not.

  And I learnt, hardest of all, that the repair happens after. Not during. For years I tried to debrief in the middle. To explain, while he was still wailing, what had happened, what he had felt, why I had done what I did. None of it could reach him. Nothing I said was being received, because the part of him that receives was not available. The conversation I wanted to have could only happen hours later, sometimes the next morning, when his body had returned to itself and he was ready to hear me. I am sorry that was hard. I am here. I was here then too.

  The thing I tell the younger version of myself, if I could, is this: the goal during a meltdown is not to fix it, teach through it, or get to the other side faster. The goal is to be a steady presence for a nervous system that is borrowing mine, while it comes back online. The rest is for later.

  Tantrums Are a Different Shape

  Tantrums respond to different things, and flattening the distinction is what went wrong for me, in both directions.

  When I treated meltdowns like tantrums, I made meltdowns worse. When I treated tantrums like meltdowns, I taught him that escalation worked. Both readings fail, and the failure looks different each way.

  A tantrum, in my house, is when he wants a thing and is making the cost of withholding it higher than the cost of giving in. He is inside himself during it. He is calibrating. He is watching whether the cost has become high enough. If I match his intensity, I have raised the stakes. If I negotiate, I have told him the outcome is on the table. If I soften out of exhaustion, he has learnt that exhaustion is the currency.

  What has helped, for him, is the low steady firm voice. The short sentence. The unspoken fact that I am not going to be moved. Not angry. Not punishing. Not raising my own voice to match. This is not happening. I am going to stay here with you while you move through it.

  The other thing that is possible after a tantrum is the thing that is not possible after a meltdown. A conversation. He is still in there. We can, when the pitch comes down, talk about what happened. What he wanted. Why it was not on the table today. What we could do instead tomorrow. That conversation is not a reward for the tantrum. It is the ordinary work of a parent and a child both being steady enough to do it.

  After a meltdown, no such conversation is available, and trying to have it is another kind of harm.

  What Didn’t Help, and What I Know Now About Why

  The list of things that did not help is longer than the list of things that did. I am writing the longer list because the books did not.

  I tried the feelings thermometer. I tried the angry song. I tried the calming corner and the posters on the wall. We read the books in his good hours. He could, when his body was settled, tell me the stages of the thermometer and act out the breath and name the feeling in the jar. In his bad hours none of it came near him. Not one page. Not one verse of the song. Not the corner I had decorated for him.

  I tried deep breaths. I tried counting to ten. I tried naming the feeling for him mid-crisis, because I had read that naming is regulation. I tried Zones of Regulation. The feelings wheel. Naming is regulation when a nervous system is on. When it is off, naming is another input, and it made things worse.

  I tried holding firmer boundaries, because someone had told me I was too soft. That did not work. He did not meet the boundary with a shrug. He met it with every cell of his overwhelmed body, and the detonation took hours to come down from.

  I tried softer boundaries, because someone else had told me I was too firm. That also did not work. He learnt, because he was bright and he was watching, that the boundary was not real, and he put my steadiness on the list of things that would give way if he pressed hard enough.

  And some days, exhausted and over-stimulated and past my own edge, I screamed at him. Out of desperation, out of nothing left. And I wilted from the guilt afterwards. The guilt did nothing useful either. The nervous system he was borrowing from, mine, was empty. When mine was empty, nothing worked. I had to learn to take my own regulation as seriously as his.

  That last one was, I think, the hardest thing for me to learn.

  These days, when it happens, and it still happens, I do less.

  I sit down. I move slow. I do not narrate. I do not name the feeling. I do not reach for him before he can be reached. I wait.

  When he is ready, he comes to me. His hand on my arm. Or he does not come to me yet, and I keep waiting. Eventually one of us will stand. The shower will run. There will be food.

  He has been mine for so many years, yet I am still learning him. I suspect I will still be learning him when he is old enough to read this and tell me what I got wrong, or right enough.

  As I am writing this, he is perched on the monkey bar, trying to do his homework, frustrated. His long legs dangling, his fingers busy, his brows furrowed, his grumbles loud. The air is quiet. I am quiet, and I am watching.

  I am not doing anything, but I am.

  If you want to follow the wiring underneath these afternoons, The Wrong Operating System goes deeper into what twice-exceptional looks like from the inside.

  If you’ve been on a floor of your own, Why I Called It Grow with Their Flow is the floor I keep returning to.

  I write when the writing is honest. If you’d like the posts in your inbox, you can subscribe below.

  Subscribe

  April 29, 2026

  autistic mother, gifted and autistic, meltdowns, neurodivergent child, neurodivergent parenting, occupational therapy

  ---

• The Gift of a Tender Heart — Parenting a Child with Selective Mutism and Anxiety

  My youngest son is still very small. He speaks little at school—selective mutism holds his words—and sometimes he refuses to go at all. Anxiety shadows his days, and his sensitive spirit feels everything, deeply.

  He hears the faintest hint of disapproval and immediately tells himself things no child should say: “I’m a bad kid. You don’t love me. That’s why I’m naughty. I’m going to leave this house. I won’t love you when I’m older.”

  It unsettles me—the depth of feeling in someone so young, swinging between love and fear with such intensity. And yet, I also see that his gentle soul is woven into his very being, a part of his genetic makeup. Maybe it is what makes him special.

  I can see the beauty in it, too. He is caring and deeply empathetic. When I’m unwell, he will stroke my arm and speak soft words of comfort. He is generous with his praises, making you feel like the most special person in the world. He doesn’t have the vocabulary yet to name every feeling, but he finds simple ways to describe them with surprising depth.

  He tells me he loves songs that are sad—not in a crying sort of way, but the kind that makes you “just a little sad.” One day, I tried to tell him that if he misses me at school, he can think about me and hear my comforting words in his heart. But he shook his head and asked me not to say that—it would make him sad to think about it.

  In his mind, my words carried a shadow I hadn’t intended. He began asking why I wouldn’t always be there, and I realised he was touching on the idea of me not being here forever. What I meant as a simple way to comfort himself had, for him, become a thought about losing me—something I wasn’t ready to explore with him yet.

  He asks big questions for someone so small. “Why do people want to do bad things? Why do people ever want to litter or pollute the earth?” His mind reaches beyond himself, trying to understand the parts of the world that feel senseless to his tender heart.

  His sensitive spirit is so tender and vulnerable, and though it sometimes makes me ache, I know this is what makes him extraordinary.

  Perhaps this profound sensitivity, this fierce feeling, is not a burden but a hidden gift.

  I want to protect his gentle soul—not drown it out. Because I see myself in him.

  I buried my own sensitive heart for years, thinking hiding it would keep me safe. But it’s not something you can tuck away. It simmers beneath the surface, stewing and bubbling, waiting for its moment to erupt.

  I don’t want that for him. I want him to hold his tender heart gently, to understand it, to give it space to breathe. To teach him that sensitivity is not a flaw to hide — just part of who he is.

  How do I show him the path to embrace his feelings without fear? How do I help him process the weight of the world on his gentle soul, so he can turn that depth into courage, resilience, and wisdom?

  I don’t know how to show him the path. I only know what it cost me not to find it.

  The conversation with this same child about death — the question that comes from this kind of sensitivity — is in When Your Neurodivergent Child Asks About Death. The exhaustion of parenting a tender, anxious child sits underneath When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough. And the larger arc of becoming the mother to children like this is in The Circle of Life. The misreading of his meltdowns, and what I learnt to do instead, is in Meltdowns vs Tantrums.

  New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.

  Subscribe

  August 5, 2025

  anxiety, child anxiety, mental-health, neurodivergent child, neurodivergent parenting, selective mutism, sensitive child

  ---

• The Circle of Life — A Neurodivergent Mother’s Reflection on Parenting, Growth, and Acceptance

  Elton John’s Circle of Life is one of those songs that has always moved me in a way I couldn’t quite explain. It carries a weight, a truth that feels universal yet deeply personal. It wasn’t until I became a mother that I truly understood why the song resonates so deeply with me.

  Perhaps it comes from my time working in palliative care, where I was constantly reminded of life’s impermanence. Watching people in their final moments, I saw the full spectrum of life — the joys, the regrets, the love, and the inevitability of letting go. It shaped my perspective, making me keenly aware that our time here is limited. And that awareness drives me to do my best for my children, not in a way that seeks to control their future, but in a way that honors the present.

  The song speaks of how some people seem to rise effortlessly while others struggle, yet we all take leaps of faith, hold onto hope, and navigate life’s challenges in our own ways. That idea resonates deeply with me as a parent.

  It is enough to do my best. I have to remind myself of this constantly. I cannot control when my child is ready to receive a lesson, whether they have the maturity to understand it, or if they are in the right mindset to embrace it. I can only offer guidance, plant the seeds, and patiently wait, having faith that with time, they will grow into the people they are meant to be. They are not mine to shape entirely; they have their own lives, their own destinies to fulfill.

  The Circle of Life is not just about human experiences — it encompasses all of existence. Everything in this world — animals, plants, human beings — we are all part of this endless cycle. Life begins, flourishes, and eventually comes to an end, only to give way to new beginnings. It is a reminder that no one is exempt from this cycle, no matter how much we wish we could hold on to the present forever.

  There was a time in my life when I was deeply contemplating the meaning of life and death. It was a dark time, but also a necessary one. I grappled with the question of why we live if we are all destined to die. Now, I have made peace with the impermanence of life. That peace has shaped how I talk to my children about death — I don’t want them to fear it as I once did. Instead, I want them to see it as part of the natural order, something to be accepted rather than dreaded.

  The song reminds us that life is uncertain — a mix of fate, faith, and hope as we all try to find our place along an ever-unfolding path. Parenting is, in itself, a leap of faith. We do our best, never knowing for sure if we are making the right choices, but hoping that love, patience, and guidance will be enough. We cannot walk the path for our children, but we can walk alongside them, trusting that they will find their place in this great unwinding journey of life.

  And so, just as time moves forward and nature continues its cycle, I hold onto faith. Faith that my children will grow, that they will learn, and that, in their own time, they will become who they are meant to be. Because that is the circle of life.

  ---

  The palliative care years that taught me about legacy and time are in A Legacy Left Unwritten. The companion essay on the question of whether what we do is ever enough is in When Doing Our Best Doesn’t Feel Like Enough. And the recent conversation with my child that brought all of this back into the kitchen is in When Your Neurodivergent Child Asks About Death.

  New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.

  Subscribe

  March 14, 2025

  grief, meaning and purpose, neurodivergent parenting, palliative care, writing

  ---

• The Moment It Clicked — Understanding My Gifted Child’s Meltdowns and Changing How I Parent

  He had just spent hours learning Coding, entirely self-motivated, navigating complex concepts with an ease that amazed me. But that same day, we had a meltdown over a simple journal entry—Fun Times with Friends.

  He sat there, paralyzed, unable to put words on the page. The frustration built until it erupted—tears flowing, emotions spilling over.

  I watched him, torn between wonder and confusion. How could he teach himself to code but struggle so much with writing a few sentences? How could the same mind that built intricate Lego structures meant for adults completely freeze when asked to describe a memory?

  And that was when it started making sense.

  Looking back, the signs had always been there—I just hadn’t connected them yet.

  The huge meltdowns. The deep emotional intensity. The way he had taught himself to read at an age when most children were just beginning to recognize letters. His ability to hyperfocus on his interests, disappearing into worlds of dinosaurs, space, and coding, absorbing information like a sponge. His advanced problem-solving skills—evident in the way he effortlessly assembled intricate Lego sets far beyond his age level.

  And yet, daily life felt like an uphill battle. Writing was a struggle. Routines were a constant power struggle. I would repeat the same instructions over and over again, only for him to seem as though he hadn’t heard me at all. Even his younger brother had started reminding him to get through the bedtime routine.

  How could a child who was so bright, so capable in some areas, struggle so profoundly with things that seemed so simple?

  I wrestled with the contradiction. Was I expecting too much? Was I failing him somehow?

  His elementary school teacher was the first to suggest that he might be gifted. But I dismissed it almost immediately.

  If he was struggling this much, how could he possibly be gifted?

  It wasn’t just one moment but a series of them. The late-night Google searches, the deep dives into parenting forums, the stories from other parents whose children sounded just like mine. The slow realization that what I had dismissed as quirks or struggles to “work through” were actually pieces of a larger picture.

  When the evaluation confirmed both his giftedness and his struggles—what’s known as twice-exceptionality (2e)—everything suddenly made sense.

  Twice-exceptional kids are both gifted and have additional learning challenges. High ability can coexist with real struggles that aren’t always immediately obvious. It explained why he could hyperfocus on a topic that fascinated him but be wildly distractible with everyday tasks. Why he could solve complex problems yet melt down when faced with a simple worksheet.

  I had been so focused on his challenges that I hadn’t seen his exceptional strengths for what they were.

  When we finally had an answer, I felt a mix of relief and guilt.

  Relief, because I finally understood what was happening.

  Guilt, because I hadn’t seen it sooner.

  I’m an occupational therapist. Even though I hadn’t worked in pediatrics, shouldn’t I have noticed the signs? Shouldn’t I have trusted my gut instead of believing the well-meaning reassurances from other parents—those who told me all kids throw tantrums, all kids struggle sometimes, that he would grow out of it?

  I see now that those reassurances, though meant to comfort me, had kept me from seeking answers sooner. I had doubted my instincts. I had focused on the wrong questions.

  But guilt doesn’t change the past. It only steals from the present.

  There’s no point in looking back with regret. Now, we focus on equipping him with the tools and skills he needs to thrive. We meet him where he is, not where the world expects him to be.

  I no longer try to force him into molds that weren’t made for him. Instead, I help him understand himself—to build on his strengths, work through his challenges, and grow into the person he is meant to be.

  And in doing so, I am learning just as much as he is.

  If you’re in that space of uncertainty, wondering whether to trust your instincts — I was there too. For years, I explained things away, collected the reassurances, and tried to stop worrying.

  The diagnosis didn’t change who he was. It just gave me a way to finally see him clearly.

  That’s still what I’m learning to do.

  Understanding my son also led me to understand myself. That threshold is in When You Start Wondering About Yourself. The diagnosis that followed — when an ADHD assessment turned into an autism one — is in Expected ADHD, Got Autism. And the gifted-and-autistic profile that came back in his evaluation turned out to be mine, too — that essay is The Wrong Operating System. The longer story of his meltdowns, what I read them as for years and what I read them as now, is in Meltdowns vs Tantrums.

  New essays, delivered as I write them. Quiet, occasional, no noise.

  Subscribe

  March 14, 2025

  gifted and autistic, mental-health, neurodivergent parenting, occupational therapy, parenting, twice exceptional, twice exceptional child

  ---