Lean In
This week, I'm exploring the raw hope and quiet courage needed in parenting children with differences.
Dear fellow parent,
Thank you for meeting me here again. Whether today has brought a moment of calm or a storm of demands, I’m grateful you're reading.
In our last Lean In newsletter, we reflected on the quiet strength of informal support — the shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity that doesn’t come with a name badge. This week, I want to lean into something raw and real: the strange, shakey ground of hope.
Especially when hope doesn’t look how the world expects it to.
Because for many of us, parenting a child with developmental differences means facing a world that misunderstands difference as deficiency. And that hurts.
It’s being told your child needs to be “fixed” when all you want is for them to be seen.
It’s learning how to hold space for your child’s strengths while others only comment on their delays.
It’s speaking up in meetings, writing letters, showing up again and again and again—
not because you feel brave, but because you have no other choice.
Hope isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s sharp, held tight in your fist, carved into each choice and decision we make. Sometimes hope means being courageous even when that looks like making breakfast through tears, or holding your child through a meltdown without anyone else to call.
Hope can bring instability and uncertainty, because when you refuse to give up on your child, when you demand space for their brilliance, you also risk being misunderstood, excluded, or exhausted by systems that weren’t built with your child in mind.
This week, I want to honour parents who have inspired me. I recently participated in an Inclusion Ireland Webinar on Raising resilience within your family. Here I was interviewed alongside two other mothers, Tracy Holmes and Tracy Carroll who are relentless in their championing of their children. They like many more parents have to fight for their child to be seen, educated and also considered in relation to their place within a whole family. They fight for all of us, they are vulnerable and brave for all of us. They have hope and are willing to do what is needed even when they are uncertain of the outcome.
This week you might like to try this:
Pause and reflect:
What did you do this week that required quiet courage — even if no one saw it?
Acknowledge it:
You don’t have to shout it from the rooftops. Maybe just whisper it to yourself before bed.
Ask yourself:
What does hope feel like in your body— warm, shakey, tired or fierce?
What would it look like to let someone else witness your bravery, even in small ways?
So this week, if it feels right, lean into the courage you carry. Let it move you — not toward certainty, but toward the next breath, the next act of care, the next piece of the path that only you can walk.
A Glimpse Ahead
Next, we’ll continue our journey through the L-E-A-D invitations:
Engage with purpose and presence.
And always:
Before you close this email, take one breath for yourself, and one for your child.
Not the child others demand — but the one who already radiates exactly as they are.
And may we become the kind of community that protects that radiance.