It can be really hard to explain your life to someone who isn’t living it. You can find yourself trying to justify things that really you have no need to justify, the conversation can just veer that way. Maybe their face is taking on a quizzical expression, or they’re asking questions that show you they really don’t understand.

It’s even harder when you’re living even slightly out of the mainstream. Take screens for example. Oh the noise around screens and how they’re destroying our children’s brains, halting their development and turning them into monsters. What do we think we’re doing not putting any restrictions in place? Why do we let them have screens at mealtimes or when we’re out and about? We can explain until we’re blue in the face about how screens help our children regulate and how it’s necessary for them to escape into a screen when the outside world gets too overwhelming for them. But still it’s hard to not feel judgement, not to question “are we bad parents?” for allowing this. Even though we know we have to do what’s right for our children and ignore what others think, it’s hard.

Then “picky eating”. Our kids would live on sandwiches and fruit if they could. There is a rotation of 2-3 meals we go through that they (or at least 2 out of the 3 of them) will reliably eat. Even then, sometimes they might not eat anything. We’ve tried to introduce new food but either we will get screamed at or it gets thrown on the floor. This is fairly expected for babies and toddlers but when it’s your older-than-preschooler age children, it becomes less so. So I’m grateful for your suggestions of tofu or peas and sweetcorn to get protein into our children. Problem is, they won’t eat them. And when we see parents on social media bemoaning having picky eaters but being able to serve them chicken or spag bol… Well that’s when you realise you’re not only not in the same race, you’re not even on the same field.

Over the next few weeks we have a number of assessments and appointments for the twins so we can figure out how best to support them when they start school. We’ve decided to send them to school in a different town because it is smaller and more nurturing. Like my counsellor said in one of our sessions “it’s not as simple as just sending them to the school down the road!” It’s not. We already know our girls wouldn’t cope there. Now, we are not sure what the assessments are going to conclude, if anything at all and I’m not sure how I’m going to feel whatever the outcome is. It may be a case of “wait and see”, where we’ll wait until they’re older to see if these current struggles are an age and stage thing or a neurodivergence. Or we may get diagnoses. Time will tell.

We’re living our life as if we have 3 ND kids as that’s what it currently feels like. So our life inevitably will look different to yours or to other families you know. I hope that by giving you glimpses into our life you will be able to view other families that do things differently to yours, or to your expectations, with more compassion and grace.

It’s not the life I imagined when we first talked about having children. Every now and then I need to kick myself in the butt to snap me out of self pity or “what could have been”. It’s pointless, fruitless and dismisses the beauty of the life we have. I try to remind myself that some families face hardships beyond what we could imagine. That doesn’t diminish our struggles but it helps put things in perspective.

A poem that reflects this tension of living a life you didn’t expect to is “Welcome to Holland” by Emily Perl Kingsley.  I’ve posted it below.

I hope you have the courage and support to live your life how you need to and want to. This world can be so noisy and heavy with assumptions and expectations. But this is your “one wild and precious life” as Mary Oliver says. So live it.