Softening the Edges: A Different Way to Live an Uncommon Life

Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

You Have to Inhabit a Life This Different in an Accordingly Different Way

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.

I KNOW Your Name…

Autism or special needs Mom: We may haven’t met personally before, but I don’t have to know what your parents named you to call you out in this post:

I MEAN that I can open you up ALL of the way deep down to your insides right now by addressing you by the emotion you’re currently holding (and and trying to force down) inside of yourself this very moment (BUT have been too afraid to say out loud before):

“I HATE my life…”

…Am I CLOSE, Mom, or am I just CORRECT?… (..And did I just hear you jaggedly EXHALE through the screen after reading that right now?.. I can’t be too sure about it.)

NOW, allow me to continue recognizing just who you are:

“If I knew then what I know now… My G-d. Life doesn’t even feel REAL to me anymore… I LOVE my child more than I have ever loved anything else, BUT I do also quietly dread my own life sometimes…”

THAT’S who you are, isn’t it? I know… And I’m currently smiling, NOT because I’m here holding you in judgement, but because I’m now sharing with you that you’re NOT nearly alone in this. ALL of the above (and more) reveals exactly who I am too… And it’s not even your failing. It is NOT a character flaw.

I also happen to know that these aren’t just some dramatic topical statements. They’re the realizations that you arrive at over and over again in the small, quiet moments where something in you goes very still and very heavy and says:

“I did NOT sign up for this. I CANNOT keep doing this… I DO NOT recognize the life I am living anymore.”

What you’re doing at such a time is beginning to name something specific BEYOND just the obvious burnout and grief we all know you carry… You’re sharing this from a removed place of watching your own life happen to you from a slight distance while you simply “exist” going through the motions of living that you’re not even sure are your own to begin with…

And it’s IMPORTANT that you name that, Mom… I inistst that you HOLD ONTO it… Just please don’t rush past it straight into a billion solutions that won’t ever hold.

---

You Have THIS Diagnosis

You may NOT be living wrong, but there IS a name for the source of your dread. And that “misalignment” should be reframed to appear inspiring rather than deflating in your eyesight.

The thing is that “conventional life” has its own specific shape that we’re all familiar with because it has been seeded and nurtured within us long before we were ever capable of developing a life of our own design: It has an accordingly conventional relationship to schedules and routine, to rest and productivity, to what a “good week” looks like, and even to how much of yourself you’re allowed to want back… The strategies, rhythms, and self-management tools that most other Moms come to lean on and adhere to are built for THAT shape of life.

And to conflict with this is the fact that autism and special needs motherhood has a completely different shape…

OUR lives have a different relationship to time because our children’s significant needs refuse to operate on any schedule in existence. A different relationship to rest because our own nature of exhaustion can’t be relieved by any amount of sleep alone. A different relationship to planning because even our best-laid plans collapse in ways that conventional paper and digital planners alike have NO column for (even though I still decided to buy myself yet another one just recently…). A different relationship to identity because (insert your kid’s particular diagnosis here) manages to completely reshape our child’s life AND our own at its arrival.

Whenever you try to inhabit your life using the conventional tools designed for others, the result is nearly always dread, the sense of failing at something that others seem to manage just fine, assuming that you’re simply ineficient, or that something else MUST be wrong with you and how you’re living your life.

But you are not doing it wrong. You ARE using the wrong map for this specific terrain:

I’ve said many times before using my platform here that you can ONLY navigate the life you’re actually living, NOT the one that you were “supposed to” have… And the dread you’re currently feeling is not some verdict… It’s actually a compass in this case: It is trying to teach you that something in the way you are currently inhabiting your life is misaligned with its unconventional nature and shape.

AND, your misalignment isn’t a condemnation. It IS an invitation to adjust… That’s inspiring and not deflating, because there is something you can do with that information…

And THIS is the central truth of everything Little Alchemies is about, and it bears repeating here because this dread is often partly fueled by the distance between the life we are really living and the one we believe we should be living by now.

---

The Practice

Thankfully, there are many practical modifications possible that can help along the way of simplifying our reality, and I call this application “softening the edges” of your life…

I don’t call these practices “solutions” because their purpose ISN’T to make the hard things (like the unnecessary weight, your misaligned expectations, and the places where you are making this harder than the life itself requires) any easier… Because the simple truth is that every life has its own “necessary weight”. And the autism and special needs motherhood life carries with it more than most… “Softening the edges” is about removing everything that is NOT part of the “necessary weight” (like the extra obligations, impossible standards, those things you do because conventional life Moms do them and you haven’t even questioned whether they fit for you).

Drawing from my days as an Online Business Manager, here are three methods to get this type of simplification accomplished:

1. Do Less, and Mean It

NOT just as a temporary accommodation for a hard season, but as a permanent philosophical stance. The life you are living cannot hold what a conventional life can hold. Not because you are less capable, but because it is a more demanding life. Something that is carrying a hundred pounds with struggle cannot also carry another fifty regardless of how willing it is.

What can be released? What is on your list that was never really yours to begin with? What expectations (from yourself, others, AND the culture) are you carrying that this specific life never actually required of you?

PRACTICAL MODIFICATIONS:

• Audit your schedule for obligations that produce more obligation than meaning. (Read that again.)
• Identify social commitments that cost more than they restore.
• Release the domestic standards that nobody in your house actually needs. (This is a loud one for me!)
• Say No to things that fit conventionally-shaped lives but not yours.
• Please just let the dishes sit in the sink when the alternative is your nervous system.

2. Get and Receive Help Without Guilt

Like MOST moms, the autism and special needs mom has also often internalized that asking for help is evidence that she can’t manage what others somehow manage just fine. This story is both false and expensive.

You were never meant to do this alone. No one was. And this specific life with its higher demands and more limited capacity for outside support needs MORE help than a conventional life, not less.

PRACTICAL MODIFICATIONS:

• Identify ONE thing that could be delegated, hired out, or asked for this week.
• Practice receiving help without immediately reciprocating or minimizing.
• Join or build community specifically with women who understand this life from the inside. (Visit my community, The Lounge; it’s FREE to sign-up, so come play!)
• Allow your child’s other parent, a family member, or a support person to do something imperfectly rather than re-do it yourself.
• Name one human being who could hold something you have been carrying alone.

NEW! Join the easeful, low-pressure private online community option designed for mold-breaking mothers like you

3. Automate and Tool What You Can

Every minute spent on administrative friction is a minute not available for your actual life itself. The scheduling. The reminders. The logistics. The things that have to happen but DO NOT require your presence, creativity, or emotional engagement.

This is not laziness. This is the intelligent reallocation of limited resources toward what DOES actually require you.

PRACTICAL MODIFICATIONS:

• Identify three recurring tasks that could be automated or simplified somehow.
• Use grocery delivery, meal kits, or simplified meal frameworks to eliminate decision fatigue.
• Set up automatic bill pay, subscription management, and recurring order for household staples.
• Use calendar automation for appointment reminders, medication schedules, therapy tracking. (I personally use and even recently gifted a lifetime license to one of my community members the life organizer LiveIt [formerly Journal it!])
• Let go of the manual management of anything that technology can hold.

---

The Mental Dedication

YOU HAVE TO DECIDE TO INHABIT THIS LIFE.

Everything above (the softening, the help, the automation) requires ONE thing underneath it to work: a decision from you.

Inhabiting this life differently is NOT something that can successfully happen in a passive way… It is not something that arrives when the circumstances finally cooperate (they never will). It is a practice. And like all practices, it begins with a deliberate, repeated, ongoing choice to show up for it.

And that choice sounds like this:

“I AM going to inhabit this specific life, in this specific way, with this specific set of tools. NOT because it is the life I would have chosen for myself, but because it is the ONLY life available for inhabiting. I choose to live inside it rather than waiting at its edge.”

And that dedication is not a one-time decision, either. It is one made again on the hard Tuesdays. Again after the appointment that did not go the way it was supposed to. Again when the dread returns (as it WILL, because dread in this life is not a problem to be solved once, but a recurring visitor to be met with a recurring response).

The response is not “How do I escape this?” It is “What does this particular version of the dread need today?” And then the smallest possible softening and return to the dedication…

THAT is the practice. Not a transformation or an arrival: an active practice.

---

An Invitation:

You are not failing at your life. You ARE living a life that is genuinely different from the ones that most of the strategies, expectations, and self-help frameworks were designed for. And you have been trying to inhabit it using the instructions written for a completely different shape of existence…

Your dread is not a verdict. It is a message. It is telling you that the fit is wrong, not that YOU are wrong.

This life CAN be inhabited. Not perfectly and without the hard days, heavy seasons, and recurring grief of what was imagined versus what is… But genuinely and honestly, with pockets of realness and aliveness and belonging that belong entirely to YOU.

Soften the edges. Get the help. Make the decision again.

You have to inhabit a life this different in an accordingly different way. And you are allowed to do just that.

THAT is the whole invitation…

With MUCH warmth,

 

---

---