I Stopped Trying to Fix My Two Autistic Children

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

What happened when I released the weight of expectations and built something entirely new

Transmute motherhood reshaped by autism & special needs into a life you genuinely LOVE inhabiting. A weaving together of a personal lifeline, honest letters, soulwork, & intimate community.

From the Heart Space

In this both beautiful and humbling experience of a life that I lead, I’ve managed to learn just how to let go of certain things and how to fully release them from my hold forever, softly.

The most difficult lesson of this subject came in the form of my exceptional type of motherhood, atypical in its shape of two young children along two very different places of the autism spectrum, supported by my bent but unbroken self—a late self-diagnosed neurodivergent woman herself still figuring out the next steps to take on her often-twisting path.

Oh, and there were many, many hot tears that I offered to no one but myself in response for such a long time…

🌱 Oh, and there were many, many hot tears that I offered to no one but myself in response for such a long time…

Cheniece patrick

Not from a grief in who my children are, but from the grief of us living in this world that can never truly understand nor come to fully embrace and accomodate who the two of them (and yes, all three of us) are as people of worth and value.

And behind these tears also was a bitter-tasting sadness from feelings of having lost my grasp on a life that I would never have a chance to live going forward… Bile, salt, acid, and even a bit of blood punctuated plenty of my moments spent spiraling near the threat of total loss of stability.

Witnessing the regressions in functionality, the missed milestones, and threapy struggles was more than enough to crumble even the most solid of women, and I made a living of sitting with this daily, consistently. Until the humbling nature of life intervened to further bend me nearly to breaking and far too weakened to shoulder the immense weight of what I faced without proper modification…

🌱 With a head hanging low and sweat beading across my upper lip, I finally cast off the burden of all of my prior assumptions of what my life must appear like in order to be a valid one.

Cheniece patrick

What rushed in to fill the spaces left by my releasing was not emptiness. It was instead a level of clarity that I had never known before as a mother. At first I felt very naked and unsafe as if placed right in the center of the allegorical Gardens of Eden after failing the lure of temptation. But I soon enough recognized the sensation for what it truly was—a complete unfamiliarity with who I was at my foundation.

I began a practice of molding this formless and void thing without light into an intricately carved work of living art that I continue to lovingly chip away at today, as the medium of this masterpiece is flux itself. But it still holds.

It is sustained not by the rigid architecture I once believed necessary for the fullness of my joy, but by something far more elemental—by breath, by presence, by the radical act of showing up each day to what is, rather than what I imagined should be.

Some days I still taste the salt and bile and blood. Some days the weight returns and I wonder if I’ve actually learned anything at all. But even on those days, I know that am different now.

My two children nor myself are broken things in need of fixing, as I have always known. We are constantly circling back to meet our new selves just as everyone is, and I hope for a world that wakes up to this truth.

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Ready to stop just surviving and start actually living?

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The truth? You weren’t meant to disappear into motherhood. You were meant to expand through it.

Your whole, authentic self is still in there; and she’s just waiting for you to come back home to her.

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