Parent That

Is this a boundary he needs me to hold - or a need I'm about to punish him for having?

That question sits at the center of every chapter in this book, and it never gets easier to answer. From a three-year-old refusing to come out of his room, to a shattered glass door in the middle of a school-night meltdown, to a power cord confiscated at midnight and handed back to a boy who simply wouldn't apologise - this is the honest, chronological story of raising a son whose needs don't always look like needs from the outside.

This is the follow-up to Not Today, I'll Wear It Tomorrow, the memoir of the long fight to get him diagnosed. This book picks up where that one left off: not the fight to be believed, but everything that came with it - the daily, ongoing work of trying to tell the difference between defiance and distress, often with no time to think and no way of knowing, in the moment, which one she's looking at.

Witty, raw, and unflinching about the chapters that still make her cringe as much as the ones she's proud of, Parent That doesn't offer a formula. It offers something more honest: the company of a mother who's still asking the question, thirteen years in, and has stopped expecting that to change.

For any parent standing in their own version of that doorway, wondering if they're about to get it right or get it wrong - you're not the only one still working it out.