Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish Compassion-based tools and practical strategies for parents and professionals navigating neurodivergence. Learn to regulate, advocate, and create systems—at home and at work—that foster belonging, confidence, and authentic thriving.
The Butterfly-Card Version of Mother's Day Isn't Yours. This Is.
Published 3 months ago • 8 min read
The Understory
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish
Spring 2026 | Issue 25
For the Mothers Who Never Stop
There is a version of Mother’s Day that gets a lot of airtime: brunch, flowers, a card with a butterfly on it. Children who sleep late and make breakfast and say thank you without being asked.
And then there is your version.
Your version may include a child who woke at 5am and couldn’t say why they were upset, only that everything was wrong. A morning that required more negotiation than a peace treaty just to get shoes on. A week that included at least one email to a teacher, one call to an insurance company, one meeting where you had to explain your child to people who had already made up their minds about them... and you had to do it without losing your temper, without crying, without letting them see how tired you are.
Your version of motherhood is not lesser than the butterfly-card version. It is more. It asks more of you, every single day, than most people will ever be asked to give. And it deserves to be seen: clearly, honestly, and with the full weight of what it actually is.
In this newsletter--find 4 photos of 3 generations of my family
So this week, before we dive into conference recaps and resources and the series ahead, I want to stop and say something simple:
You are doing something extraordinary. Not despite the hard parts. Because of them, and through them, and on the days when you have nothing left and you do it anyway.
What This Actually Looks Like
I want to name it, because it so rarely gets named. The work of mothering a neurodivergent child: a child with autism, ADHD, a learning difference, sensory processing challenges, anxiety that lives in the body, a nervous system that experiences the world at higher volume than most; this is a specific kind of work. It is not just parenting. It is parenting plus.
It is the patience that most people never have to find.
The patience to explain the same thing twelve different ways until you find the one that lands. The patience to sit with a meltdown you didn’t cause and cannot fix, and to stay present anyway. The patience to watch your child struggle with something that looks easy from the outside, and to resist the urge to do it for them, because you know, you know that the struggle is where the growth lives.
It is the fierce, relentless advocacy.
The IEP meetings where you walked in knowing more about your child than anyone in that room, and had to fight to be believed. The emails you drafted and redrafted at 11pm, choosing every word carefully, because you knew that tone mattered as much as content. The appointments you scheduled, the specialists you researched, the waitlists you got on, the insurance battles you fought. The times you were told your child was fine... just difficult, just lazy, just anxious... and you held your ground and said: no. Something else is happening here. I know my child.
It is the self-regulation you do for two.
Here is something that doesn’t get said enough: when your child is dysregulated, your nervous system feels it. Not metaphorically, literally. Our nervous systems are wired to resonate with the people we love most. When your child is in distress, your body sounds an alarm too. And then you are asked by the situation, by necessity, by love to regulate yourself while also helping them regulate.
That is not a small thing. That is an act of profound physiological effort, done dozens of times a day, mostly invisibly, almost never acknowledged.
It is the regulation you do with everyone else, too.
With the teacher who doesn’t understand. With the provider who speaks in jargon you have to translate in real time while also tracking whether their recommendations actually fit your child. With the school administrator who is sympathetic but constrained. And with your partner or your child's father living in another household, if you have one, who may love your child just as fiercely but approach things differently, and where that difference can quietly become a fault line in the relationship when neither of you has the tools to bridge it.
You are managing your own nervous system, attending to your child’s, and trying to help the adults around you stay regulated enough to be useful, all at the same time. This is the invisible labor that sits beneath all the visible labor. And it is exhausting in a way that a good night’s sleep does not fix.
You deserve support for your own nervous system. Not as a luxury. As a requirement for you, and for everyone who depends on you.
This One’s for You If…
Consider this a small, imperfect honor roll. A list of things you may have done this week, or this month, or this year things that didn’t make it into anyone’s thank-you speech, but deserved to.
You Are Seen
✦ You Googled something at midnight because you needed to understand what your child was experiencing.
✦ You cried in your car after a hard meeting, and then went back in.
✦ You held your tongue when you wanted to say something sharp, because you knew it wouldn’t help.
✦ You celebrated a victory so small that no one else would have recognized it as one.
✦ You read the research. All of it. Even the parts that scared you.
✦ You asked for help, even though it felt like admitting defeat.
✦ You didn’t ask for help when you probably should have, because there was no one to ask.
✦ You showed up imperfectly, and kept showing up.
✦ You wondered if you were doing enough. You were.
✦ You loved a child who sometimes made it very hard to be loved, and you didn’t stop.
The Hardest Part: Turning That Compassion Toward Yourself
Here is what I know about the mothers of neurodivergent children: most of them are extraordinarily compassionate toward their children. They work to understand, to accommodate, to meet their children exactly where they are. They make adjustments and allowances, not out of permissiveness but out of deep attunement.
And most of them extend almost none of that same compassion to themselves.
The internal voice that shows up after a hard day, the one that tallies what you didn’t do, what you said wrong, what you should have handled differently, tends to be considerably less kind than the voice you’d use with your child. Or with a good friend. Or, honestly, with a stranger on the street who was clearly having a terrible day.
Mindful Self-Compassion asks one disarmingly simple question: what would you say to a dear friend in this situation? Not a friend who needed fixing or a lecture. A friend who was tired and trying and not sure she was getting it right. What would you say to her?
And then it asks you to say that. To yourself.
This is not toxic positivity. It is not pretending the hard things aren’t hard. It is meeting yourself, in the hard thing, with the same basic human warmth you’d offer anyone else you loved. Research consistently shows that self-compassion, not self-criticism, not self-pity, but genuine warmth toward oneself is one of the most powerful predictors of emotional resilience. It is not a soft skill. It is a survival skill.
A gift to yourself this Mother's Day:
“I am doing something genuinely hard. I am doing it with love, even on the days when love doesn’t feel like enough. I deserve the same kindness I give to everyone else in this house.”
Take a breath. Put one hand on your heart. Say it like you mean it — because you do.
What’s Coming: The Regulation Roadmap Series
Starting next Friday, May 16, this newsletter launches a five-part series drawn from my experience at the 21st Annual Parents Reaching Out Conference in Albuquerque — where I presented, listened, and came home with far more than I brought.
Here’s what’s ahead:
May 16 — Online Safety, Neurodivergent Youth, and Why This Matters Right Now
May 23 — Organizations Opening Doors: Employment and Support Resources for Your Family
May 30 — Compassion for the System and What It Unlocks for You
June 6 — Three Ways Parents Show Up in Advocacy and Which One Gets Results
June 13 — TBA — and worth the wait.
Running through all of it: the launch of Beyond Behavior: The Regulation Roadmap, a course built for exactly the kind of mother I’ve been describing in this newsletter, launching June 23. More on that very soon.
A Confession From the Person Writing This Newsletter
I am about to become an empty nester. My younger daughter graduates from high school in two weeks.
She is taking her International Baccalaureate diploma exams. She is largely not studying. While I rewrote textbooks in my notes and stayed up until 3am most nights of my high school career, she is currently deciding which earrings go best with her prom dress and how to decorate her graduation cap.
This has been hard for me.
Through my own Internal Family Systems parts work, I have come to understand something important: when I was her age, I had a part running the show. A part who believed in her bones, with genuine terror that she had to get straight A’s in order to survive. That she might, in some real and visceral way, cease to exist if she didn’t.
My daughter does not have that fear. She has her own fears and her own hard things to navigate just not that one.
And so now it is my turn. My turn to regulate my nervous system. My turn to notice the part of me that wants to hand her my earring-and-graduation-cap anxiety and call it “concern.” My turn to let her walk out to the edge of the branch and make her leap in the way she decides, in the timing she chooses.
Like so many mama Great Horned Owls, I am flying to a nearby tree and calling to her encouragingly. And I must let her go.
I will need to hold myself when she falls--because she will. I will need to hold myself and let her find her way up from the ground, offering support only if she asks for it. That is the work. That is the hardest version of the work.
And I am so grateful, genuinely, practically grateful that I have tools. That I have learned to notice what is happening in my body before it comes out of my mouth. That I can recognize which part of me is speaking and ask her, gently, to let a wiser part take the wheel. That I can hold myself with some of the same compassion I would offer any mother sitting across from me in my office, struggling with exactly this.
The tools are not magic. They don’t make it easy. But they make it possible and possible is everything. That is what I want for you, too.
Happy Mother’s Day.
Not the butterfly-card version. The real one: the full, complicated, exhausting, astonishing, love-drenched version that is entirely yours.
You are doing something that matters. You are doing it largely without a map. And you are not alone in it, not anymore.
With admiration and care,
Janine
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"Whether you're just beginning to explore neurodivergence, feeling overwhelmed by the journey, or ready to build a sustainable path forward—you don't have to navigate this alone. Together, we'll turn today's challenges into catalysts for transformation."
Transforming What We Face Into How We Flourish Compassion-based tools and practical strategies for parents and professionals navigating neurodivergence. Learn to regulate, advocate, and create systems—at home and at work—that foster belonging, confidence, and authentic thriving.
