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Author: Room to Regulate
Room to Regulate started as an emotional release – I was tired of giving space to all the heaviness that comes with being your family epicenter – when I'm not regulated, no one is regulated. I wrote it all down. Every overwhelming, anxious thought. I sat with it. Then I built around it – because my story isn't unique. I have ADHD – late diagnosed, of course, the Millennial Mom special. Our anxiety manifested in different ways. We were unlabeled, mislabeled, re-labeled. We held it together through our 20s. Many of us excelled in our careers, and then came motherhood. For a long time I thought the exhaustion, the mental load, the constant recalibrating was just what motherhood felt like for everyone. Don't get me wrong. Whether you are neurodivergent, raising a neurodivergent child, a house full of neurotypicals (do those exist?!), married, unmarried, working, or not – parenthood knocks the wind out of you. And when you're an information seeker, the "why" rabbit hole is endless. It took a while to understand that a lot of what I was carrying wasn't a personal failing — it was a structural one. The systems around us — schools, workplaces, insurance, policy — were never built as an ecosystem. They were built as individual systems. The byproduct of that puts families with the most structural need at the highest risk for falling through the cracks. The hardest parts of my days were the predictable result of that gap, not evidence that I was doing it wrong. View all posts by Room to Regulate
