Before
I began motherhood fully intending to be the best mother who ever lived. Former party girl turned mother earth: Gymboree mornings, everything cooked from scratch, most of it politely declined in favour of an Ella's pouch. I persisted. Today I have two good eaters, and I am counting that as my first win.
The school years
Then came school. My children started at a private school, and the differences between them and their peers became harder to ignore. My daughter was diagnosed autistic with an ADHD profile, and I was told again and again that she was exceeding expectations. It took me a while to see they were expectations I had set without realising. My son, later diagnosed autistic with a PDA profile, was never going to be a team player. He was an "I'll do it my way" kind of boy. He still is, and I have come to admire it.
I stopped trying to fit my children to the system, and started understanding the brains in front of me, beginning with my own.
The fall
Then life changed, all at once. I went through possibly the messiest separation in history and hit the hardest rock bottom of my life. We went from private schools to food banks, and from the state system to home education, while I fought the worst depression I have ever known. I will never forget the first time I queued at the food bank. I was terrified someone would see me, and the shame spiralled around me. For years I had believed I could achieve the dreams nobody ever raised me to have. Standing in that queue, I wondered whether I had ever deserved any of it. How could I, looking at where I was? Maybe he was right, and I would be nothing without him. That feeling woke something in me. Call it the devil, the part of me that cannot be killed. She was ready to build that life herself, and to make sure nobody could ever claim ownership of what she achieved.
Relentless
I had to work out, fast, how to get us back to baseline and, while I was at it, how to build an empire of my own. All while raising neurodivergent, traumatised children the way they deserved. We weren't living month to month. We were living day to day. It took me a while to lift my head out of survival mode and into "we're here" mode, and longer still to believe I had actually made it. What that left was a burnt-out mother, a shell of herself, who had lost sight of what she was even trying to achieve. I lost my purpose.
The shadows
Nobody was coming to save me. So I rebuilt again, and this time only after I had sat with the darkest parts of myself. In the middle of the rebuild, I realised something grave. The common denominator was me. The relationships that went wrong, the friendships that drained me, the reason I could build but never sustain the dream: all of it was rooted in fear, and in not accepting myself in my entirety. I had been hiding from myself and denying myself accountability. So I stopped telling myself I was bulletproof and started acknowledging the damage, and the pain that had shaped the person I had become. When I held that little girl inside me, told her I saw her and, more importantly, accepted her, and when I started moving as the whole person rather than the version I thought the world should see, everything came together very quickly. Leaning into my own ADHD diagnosis taught me more about my children than any report ever had. The one thing I always believed was working against us, my neurodivergence, became the thing I built on. The first thing I changed was who I was speaking to. I stopped trying to speak to everyone and started speaking to my people: the divergent ones, who always knew they were destined for greatness and could never quite get there. To do that, I had to accept that part of myself completely first, so that others felt safe enough to accept themselves too.
The fortress was never a fantasy. The fortress is you. All of you.
The fortress
I rebuilt this house like Fort Knox. I built systems with my wiring as my strength, not my downfall, and the change didn't stop at my mindset. It happened across the board. I will always be working on the next thing. It's who I am, and for me it was always more about the journey than the end point. I live for this: showing up for my clients, my children, my friends, myself and the dream. It was never work. It is my ikigai, my purpose, the gift I was entrusted with, and I believe that with my whole soul. I think that is why God, or the great divine as some call it, took me through a life others wouldn't wish on their worst enemy. It forged me, and I am grateful for it every single day. Those are words I couldn't have dreamt of saying a few years ago. Now our life looks like me doing all the things, while making room for the children to do all of theirs. Loving my people. Enjoying every moment of the day while still building towards the bigger ones. We take the trips, we have the home, the beautiful things and the experiences, and they upgrade as we go. I feel grateful and blessed for every moment of it. That is not to be confused with the days I want to scream. I promise you, those are part of the process too. I know the system now: how it works, where it fails and how to move through it. I know what the child is carrying, and what the mother is carrying beside them. My relationship with my children has never been stronger, and neither has my work. Everything I learned on that road, I am now giving away to the women I coach, because I refuse to leave a single woman behind me feeling the way I once felt.