Categories
Burnout, Grief and Acceptance

Burnout,Boundaries, and Finding Peace

Burnout didn’t arrive for me just once.
It has come in waves over the last decade of parenting children with complex needs. Each time, it looked a little different. Each time, it asked more of my body than I realized I had left to give.
For a long time, I didn’t call it burnout. I thought it was just what parenting required of me. Constant vigilance. Constant adjustment. Constant emotional presence. I learned how to function inside that level of demand so well that I stopped noticing how dysregulated my body had become.
The most recent wave pushed me past a threshold.
In January, our son hit PDA burnout and could no longer attend school. He needed constant support, safety, and regulation at a time when we were already operating at half capacity. Helping him recover required everything we had left.
And then some.
Caregiving doesn’t pause when a child falls apart. It intensifies. You show up more, listen harder, hold steadier-often while your own system is quietly unraveling.
That’s when my body began to speak more clearly than my mind ever had.
Dizziness. Vision changes. Nausea. Weight gain. Fatigue that sleep couldn’t touch. Anxiety and depression layered over everything. I moved through appointments and tests while still functioning at home, because our children couldn’t wait for answers.
Eventually, the tests came back. There was relief. There was fear. And there was a deeper realization underneath it all:
I couldn’t keep doing this the way I had been for the last ten years.
Nothing about our life was going to suddenly become easier. But something had to change.
We started questioning everything we had been unconsciously carrying-expectations around school, work, social obligations, and what a “normal” family life was supposed to look like. We began setting boundaries that protected our capacity instead of performing resilience for the outside world.
The changes were not dramatic. They were deliberate.
I learned how to live inside chaos without letting it live inside my body. I found tools that helped me regulate instead of override myself. I stopped trying to educate everyone and started choosing who felt safe enough to stay close.
Peace didn’t arrive as calm or ease.
It arrived as capacity.
It looked like being able to sit with my children in discomfort, frustration, or pain-without fixing it, without absorbing it into my nervous system. It looked like allowing help without guilt. Like honoring grief without trying to resolve it.
As our family adapted, joy returned-not the loud kind, but the steady kind. The kind that comes from being understood. From being accepted. From no longer explaining yourself to people who aren’t living this life.
Burnout taught me my limits.
Boundaries taught me how to live within them.
I’m still a caregiver. Still a mother. Still navigating a life that requires constant attunement.
But I’m learning how to be here without disappearing.
And for now, that is peace.

Categories
Neurodiverse Motherhood

The Day Motherhood Became Caregiving


For a long time, I thought of myself only as a mom.
Our life was different than what I had imagined before having children, but I still understood it through the same lens most parents do-busy days, constant needs, exhaustion, love. I didn’t yet have language for what was actually happening.
That changed when my kids were around eight and seven.
It became clear that I couldn’t take a job outside our home-not because I didn’t want to, but because our life required something else from me. My daughter needed constant protective supervision. Not supervision in the casual sense, but the kind that exists for safety. For survival.
When that reality was formally recognized and validated through IHSS, I was given a choice:
I could hire someone else to do that work, or I could take that role on myself.
It was in that moment that I realized something I hadn’t fully named before.
Other parents weren’t standing at this crossroads.
I felt gratitude-deeply-for living in California, where caregiving like this is acknowledged and supported by the state. There was relief in knowing the work I was already doing had a name, that it mattered enough to be recognized.
And at the same time, there was grief.
Because that recognition also meant my options were gone.
This wasn’t a role I could step in and out of. My daughter needed supervision around the clock. She needed help with feeding, bathing, and daily care. She needed monitoring for seizures. She needed someone whose attention didn’t drift, whose body stayed alert even when exhausted.
She needed me.
Not long after, my understanding of caregiving expanded again.
As my son grew older, we watched him move deeper into burnout. What we once thought were behavioral struggles revealed themselves as something else entirely. We began to understand his nervous system differently. We learned about autism with a PDA profile, and suddenly so much of his experience made sense.
His needs were different from his sister’s-but they were no less real.
He required support, accommodation, and regulation in ways that went far beyond typical parenting. And once again, IHSS recognized that what we were living wasn’t just “hard parenting.” It was caregiving.
I remember the moment it landed fully in my body.
I wasn’t just a caregiver now.
I was a caregiver for both of my children.
That was the day I understood that I wasn’t only a mom anymore.
Those two roles live in the same body, but they carry different weight. Motherhood is expansive and relational. Caregiving is logistical, protective, constant. One is often seen. The other is largely invisible.
I didn’t stop being their mother when I stepped into caregiving-but something shifted. The future I had loosely imagined narrowed. Not in love, but in choice.
This isn’t a story about resentment or regret. It’s about naming what changed. About understanding that many of us arrive here quietly, without ceremony, and without language for what we’ve become.
I’m still their mom. Always.
But I’m also their caregiver.
And holding both has reshaped my life in ways I’m still learning how to understand.

Categories
Neurodiverse Motherhood

Why I’m writing here.

I’ve shared pieces of our life online before, mostly in small moments. A caption here. A story there. But there are parts of this life that don’t fit well in short form.This space exists for those parts.I’m a mom to neurodiverse children with complex needs. Some of our communication happens beyond spoken words. Much of our parenting happens outside the expectations people carry about what motherhood is supposed to look like.I’m writing here to slow things down.To give context to moments that are often misunderstood. To talk about caregiving without turning it into inspiration or tragedy. To name the quiet grief, the regulation work, the invisible labor, and the deep love that all exist at the same time.This won’t be a how-to space. I’m not here to offer advice that fits everyone. I’m here to tell the truth as we live it, with care and intention.Some posts will be short. Some will be heavy. Some will simply be observations from an ordinary day that isn’t actually ordinary.If you’re parenting in a similar space-or trying to understand someone who is-this place is for you.And if you’re new to this world, welcome.

Categories
Small Moments, Daily Life

An Ordinary Day in Caregiving


Most days don’t look dramatic.
They don’t come with milestones or breakthroughs or clear markers of progress. They’re made of small decisions, constant attunement, and noticing things most people never have to think about.
Caregiving, for us, looks like anticipating needs before they’re spoken. It looks like monitoring energy levels, sensory thresholds, and emotional cues. It looks like adjusting plans quietly, without announcement.
Some days are heavy.
Some days are surprisingly light.
Often, both exist at once.
There is joy here, but it’s not loud. It shows up in regulation after a hard moment. In laughter that comes unexpectedly. In being understood without explanation.
This life asks for presence more than productivity. Flexibility more than control. Listening more than fixing.
Nothing about an ordinary day looks remarkable from the outside.
But inside it, everything matters.

Categories
Burnout, Grief and Acceptance

When the Body Carries What the Mind Can’t

For a long time, I trusted my ability to push through.
Caregiving trains you to override yourself. To function despite exhaustion. To normalize levels of stress that would stop most people in their tracks. You learn how to live in a body that is always alert.
Until the body refuses.
My symptoms didn’t feel dramatic at first. They felt inconvenient. Dizziness. Vision changes. Nausea. Fatigue. I told myself it was stress. Hormones. Lack of sleep. Anything but a signal I needed to stop.
But caregiving doesn’t leave room for stopping.
I moved through doctors’ offices and diagnostic tests while still managing daily life at home. MRIs. Procedures. Waiting rooms. Fear that lived quietly in my chest while I continued feeding, supervising, regulating, and holding space for my children.
There was a moment-waiting for results-when everything inside me went quiet. Not calm. Shut down. And even then, I kept going. Because caregiving doesn’t pause for uncertainty.
When the diagnosis came, there was relief. And also clarity.
My body wasn’t betraying me.
It was protecting me.
It had been absorbing years of unrelenting vigilance, responsibility, and emotional labor. It was carrying what I had not been able to set down.
Healing didn’t come from answers alone. It came from permission.
Permission to change how we live. Permission to set boundaries without justification. Permission to stop performing strength. Permission to protect my nervous system as fiercely as I protect my children.
I am still learning how to listen to my body without fear. How to trust its signals. How to respond with care instead of urgency.
This body has carried my children through everything.
It deserves to be listened to now.

My take away from going through this was to listen to my body. Doctors are programmed to find the “problem”, run the tests, prescribe the “fix”. They may feel unprepared to tell you that this could all be stress induced. Yes, I checked the boxes with the doctors because stress does being on real medical problems as it did for me, but ultimately, it was listening to my gut and my body to learn that it was STRESS that was the problem that needed to be “fixed”.