Divergent Learning Diaries

I’ve written in some detail about the impact that burnout has had on my autistic daughters.  One is heading for her first anniversary of being in burnout recovery, a dubious milestone but also a testimony to the importance to attach as much space and time as is necessary to allow for recovery, in the way that works for the individual child.

The impact on parents of raising neurodivergent children is well documented.  Only those that live it truly know how hard it can get.  Close relatives, Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, older siblings all develop a good idea of the daily traumas a family can go through. But unless they are your children you can’t really know.

I entered a phase of burnout myself in the  summer of 2022.  

This was following the school year where Joni, then Patti were assessed and diagnosed, and the school year where their difficulties were becoming an obvious impediment to their lives. 

This was also the summer when they were leaving primary school and transitioning to secondary school.  Given my own role as a secondary school Headteacher I could see the challenges that were to lie ahead (as it turns out my dire expectations of the path ahead were not necessarily unfounded)  I was pretty much in panic mode internally.  I had gotten myself caught up in a tribunal process over Joni’s EHCP and school place.  I was experiencing for the first time the blunt sting of unhelpful responses from a slew of local authority officers.  Guidance would have been nice.  Maybe even kindness?  But I got nothing. In addition, I was holding down a stressful job in which there had been a number of specific dramas during the academic year.

As summer hit we decided we would go to seed.  Rest and repair. 

First though, we would go to Latitude.

We would camp, we would immerse ourselves in culture, we would sing, we would dance, we would drink wine in a field. 

We would breathe.

Except we didn’t.  We suffocated.  

The festival with its sounds, smells, colours and abundance of other humans was too much for our daughters.  They suffered.  In turn we did too.  We came home.

Then, I crashed.

I crashed pretty hard.   As a resourceful woman, who has never liked to admit defeat, I realised swiftly that at this moment, I needed to let myself be defeated.  

What I can remember was this.   A kind of warm, fuzzy shroud.  A constant pricking in the eyes.  A weight. A profound physical ache. A heaviness about my soul.

For a few days I didn’t leave my bed.  My family continued around me feral. I said I was sick and needed rest.  After those few days the ponderous sadness continued to hang over me and I found moving hard but, feeling oppressed by the walls of my bedroom, I stepped back into our life.  But it was different now.   Anytime I spoke, whatever I spoke about, even if it was a mindless comment, tears would flow.  My voice constantly shook.

The days turned into weeks.  Around four to be exact.  Four weeks where I didn’t really live.  But I repaired.  I ate, I slept,  I cried.  Eventually I started to be able to talk without crying.  Eventually I could move without aching.  I accepted help from a counsellor, a doctor and I got myself back into a position where I could face the next phase, although in honesty the recovery would take more than a few weeks.

I know now that I burnt out that summer. Instinctively though, I did all the right things.  I gave myself time and space to heal.  I was kind to myself. I needed this space to process how my life was going to be different now. 

Earlier this week I was sat across the table from a parent who I could see was doing that same processing.  She was caught between two worlds.  The one where her lively, funny daughter, the sweet girl would tread the familiar path of childhood and adolescence.  The child who would be inspired to learn and evolve in the same way as her peers. The ‘expected’ way.  The child who would gain a slew of exam grades and dance seamlessly from school towards the career and life of her dreams.  Then there was this world.  Where her neurodivergent daughter found staying in her lessons impossible.  Who would either respond with panic attacks on the corridor or a tirade of abuse at a passing adult.  Her daughter’s behaviour, telling us all in the only way she knew how, that the current arrangement just isn’t working.  That she needs another way. 

With the empathy of a parent who has had those conversations, continues to have those conversations I spent moments gazing at this mother.  Absorbing.  Thinking.  Aligning, but not knowing what she needed at that moment.  The urge to leap across the table, hug her and say, ‘Its just so fucking shit isn’t it?’, has to be suppressed while in professional mode.  I wondered where this woman was in her process.  Whether she had hit the floor yet.  If she had, what had it been like for her?

One of the great paradoxes of my being is that it’s absolutely essential that I find time to take good care of myself when there really aren’t enough hours in the day to do so.  But I have to. I need strength to weather the inevitable storms that come with parenting neurodivergent children.  I must make time for myself.  Or I’ll have no capacity for them.  And they need me so much.

I found my salvation in an unlikely and new space.  

That same summer, I was getting my hair done and my hairdresser (also a friend) helped me surface just how low I was feeling (How do hairdressers do this?).  She told me that she had tried breath work and sent me information about a class I could go to.  I went.   I sat in a room full of strangers, one August evening, with the reverberation of sound bowls and gongs ringing in my ears.  And I sobbed.  Right in front of them all. 

I had unwittingly surfaced overwhelming grief and guilt about the circumstances of my father’s death over a decade before.  It was painful, but cathartic.  I went back.  I cried some more times.  I sat in the pain of so many things, including the hurt that I could see my children experiencing.  The mysteriously soulful breath work teacher, also a Reiki Master, offered me Reiki healing.  I went.  It helped.  I went again.  

New frontiers.  I learnt Reiki myself.  I  am now a Reiki practitioner if I want to be.  But mostly I use it by myself.  With sound, and meditation.  It has been transformational.  My Reiki teacher held space for me to heal, to accept and to begin to see the gift in every challenge I encounter. 

The ability to meditate and contemplate inspired a resurgence in my creative self.  Gave life and breath to the writer sitting here now. In flow.  A renewed purpose.  A passion unfolding.  

My crash, my burnout led me to this.

I found my way through the fog in the most unexpected of ways. And while I’m sure that the path I discovered might not be the preferred way for everyone (My husband, for example, thinks Reiki is bollocks) it’s vital that parents in similar situations find their outlet.  Their release.  I fear for those who don’t or can’t.

As for me.  Some days are good, some are tough.  However, two years after the ‘crash’ I look at what I have with immense gratitude.  The unexpected twists of the plot have brought me here now.  Writing the words you are reading.

Thanks for reading them.