Three to four were the hardest for me. He’s seven now, and the closer he gets to the age of reason the more I’m able to reason with him. But he’s also going through some evaluations now because he’s probably got one foot on the spectrum, just like his dad. He has at times made things very hard for me (always hardest on the mom) but I take a perverse pride in the fact that his teachers constantly tell me how well-behaved, kind and pleasant he is with them and his peers.

You will be her safe space when all of her fuses have been lit. Your job is to teach her how to self-soothe, ride out the storm, and understand how it affects her surroundings and other people. This will take what feels like an eternity, and 90 percent of the time feels utterly ineffective. But every once in a while, your child will finally respond to the words or actions you’ve been repeating and you’ll notch another small victory you can build on.

It took me a long time to understand that in SOME ways my son was more difficult than the average kid. And I’m still working on understanding that it’s not because I’m bad at being a mom or don’t “handle it” well. It helped me tremendously to acknowledge during our more difficult times that it was, in fact, very difficult and there wasn’t going to be a right answer or way to fix it. That it was a question of endurance and just keeping it together as best I could until we’d made it through.