I’ll be honest with you — and I always will be, because that’s the whole point of this.
There have been days — many of them — where I didn’t know how I was going to get through to bedtime. Days where I sat on the kitchen floor after a meltdown and just… stayed there for a while. Not because I’d given up. Not because I was a bad mum. Just because sometimes your legs don’t want to hold you up anymore, and that’s okay.
Parenting is never simple. But parenting an autistic child can sometimes feel like you’re navigating a world that was specifically designed not to include your family. And if you’ve ever felt that — if you’ve felt overwhelmed, or exhausted, or like you’re white-knuckling your way through every single day — I just want you to know that I see you. I’ve been there. And I want you to keep reading.
THE WEIGHT OF IT
When Matthew was younger and before he was diagnosed, I had almost completely stopped leaving the house. It sounds dramatic when I type it out like that, but that was genuinely our reality. Every trip to the supermarket ended in a full meltdown — Matthew screaming, arching his back in the trolley, completely inconsolable — while strangers stared, and I stood there feeling like the worst mother who had ever walked the earth.
So eventually I just… stopped going. My husband would bring shopping home from work. I’d wait until he was back at 6:30 in the evening before I’d attempt anything. For eleven hours every weekday, it was just me and the boys, and I was terrified of the outside world.
I didn’t have a support network. My whole family were 80 miles away in Dundee. I had no friends nearby — I’d only recently moved to Glasgow for my husband’s job, and I was still finding my feet in a city that didn’t feel like mine yet. So when things got hard, I had nobody to hand Matthew to for twenty minutes while I went and had a cry in the bathroom.
The isolation doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly closes in, until one day you realise you can’t remember the last time you spoke to another adult who truly understood what was happening inside your four walls.
And the worst part? When I finally reached out for help, I was told I was the problem. A health visitor sat in my living room — without even properly looking at Matthew — and told me that my anxiety was “rubbing off” on him. That if I just “sorted myself out,” he’d be fine. I was devastated. I sat there and cried in front of two complete strangers while my eldest son came over to hug me. I’ll never forget that moment for as long as I live.
I’m telling you all of this not because I want to re-live it, but because I suspect some of you have had your own version of that moment. Where you asked for help and were made to feel like the problem. And I want you to hear me when I say — you are not the problem.
FIGHTING FOR YOUR CHILD
Even once Matthew was diagnosed and we had a name for what we were dealing with, the fighting didn’t stop. If anything, it got louder.
Getting Matthew the right school environment was one of the most gruelling battles of my life. For 4 years, he was in mainstream school, and every day felt like a countdown to the next crisis. He struggled. He was disruptive. He went missing so often that the staff were permanently on edge — and honestly, so was I.
The moment that finally tipped things over the edge? The school called the police. They were convinced Matthew had somehow escaped the building. They did a full fire drill — kids out on the playground, teachers in a panic, police on their way. Matthew had been hiding in the curtains on the stage the entire time. And when he heard about the fire drill? He just calmly walked back to his classroom like nothing had happened.
I laugh about it now. I genuinely do. But at the time? I was beside myself.
The school eventually admitted they couldn’t give Matthew what he needed. And to their credit, they actually helped us get him moved to an LCSC school — a Learning Community for Additional Support — and it was like watching a different child emerge. He thrived. He absolutely thrived. The relief I felt was unlike anything I can properly describe.
But getting to that point took years. Years of meetings, of advocating, of being told he’d be “fine,” of pushing back, of not taking no for an answer. Nobody hands you a roadmap for any of this. You figure it out as you go, you fight when you’re already running on empty, and somehow — somehow — you find the strength.
THE FEELING NOBODY TALKS ABOUT
Can I say something that might make some of you uncomfortable? I hope so, because I think it needs to be said.
You are allowed to feel grief. You’re allowed to mourn the version of parenthood you thought you were going to have — the easy trips to the park, the birthday parties with twenty kids, the school plays and the sports days and the simple, uncomplicated days you imagined. Feeling that grief doesn’t mean you love your child any less. It just means you’re human.
And you’re allowed to feel frustrated. And exhausted. And like you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s not failure — that’s just Tuesday.
There were times during Matthew’s younger years when I felt utterly alone in a way that I find difficult to articulate even now. My mental health took a real hit. I was eventually put on medication for anxiety — a fairly high dosage, though I didn’t realise that at the time. And while it helped me function, I won’t pretend it fixed everything. It just gave me enough of a floor to stand on.
If you’re in that place right now — if you’re struggling to keep your head above water — please don’t wait as long as I did to ask for help. And when you do ask, if someone dismisses you? Ask someone else. Keep going until someone actually listens.
AND THEN — THE MOMENTS THAT MAKE IT WORTH IT
Here’s the thing about the rollercoaster. And I know I’ve used that word before, but I keep coming back to it because nothing else quite fits. The downs are real. They’re brutal sometimes. But the ups? Oh, the ups.
The day Matthew walked into his new school and actually smiled. The first time he made a friend. The moment he started to come into his own in an environment that was finally built for him — not one that expected him to reshape himself to fit it.
My boys are 14 and 15 now, and they are my whole world. Everything I have done — every meeting I’ve sat through, every battle I’ve fought, every kitchen floor I’ve sat on — has been for them. And I’d do every single bit of it again.
You’re going to get through this. Not because it gets easier overnight — it doesn’t always. But because you love your child more than the hard days can take from you. And that love? It’s the most powerful thing you have.
You are not failing. You are fighting. And there is a very big difference between the two.
Be a wee bit gentler with yourself today. You deserve it…
