A little alchemy for the mother rebuilding her life around caregiving & EVERYTHING ELSE nobody ever warned her about… Honest letters, soul-deep exercise, & inbox-sized moments of company one letter at a time. Come inside for motherhood, identity, grief, & the slow, sacred work of feeling like YOURSELF again...
I want to tell you about the waiting rooms, Mom:
NOT the ones you’re probably picturing first (although those matter too, and I know them by their ceilings…).
There’s the one with the short chairs and the receptionist and the stack of magazines from 2019. The one where you fill out the same four pages of questions every single time, and none of them ever ask the thing you actually came to say. The one where you and your child sit together for forty minutes and then get separated, and you’re shown into a smaller room alone with a plastic plant, trying very hard not to look at the clock…
Then there are the ones nobody can see.
THOSE are the ones I stayed in for the longest. (…And if you’re also an autism or special needs mom who has quietly started losing yourself somewhere between the diagnosis paperwork and the next appointment, I think you’ve been sitting in a few of them too.)
The waiting rooms in your head
Waiting for the call.
Waiting for the paper with the word on it. And then waiting for the second paper, because the first one only half explained it. And THEN the placement... And then the school. And then the version of the week where you can finally, finally sit down…
Every one of those waits felt reasonable on its own (maybe). And that’s the trick of it. You never actually decide to put your life down for three years. You just keep deciding to wait until the next thing gets sorted, and the next thing is always just over there, one more phone call away.
I was SO good at it, too... I had a whole system (because of course I did… I used to manage other people’s businesses for a living). I turned my ClickUp folder into a template for re-use by the public. If I can locate it, it’s yours.
My whole life was arranged around a day that hadn’t happened yet.
What the waiting actually costs
Here’s the piece I actually sat down to tell you, though, and I’m going to say it plainly because I genuinely wish someone had said it to me years earlier:
The waiting eats the exact same years you were saving…
Not different years. Not some spare ones tucked away somewhere for later. The same Tuesday afternoons and the same weekends and the same version of you at 34 or 41, who was funny and had opinions and used to sing in the car…
Those years don’t get banked. They go.
And I’m not telling you this to make you feel worse. …You’ve got enough people (and enough 2 a.m. thoughts) doing that already.
I’m telling you because of what it opens up:
Because if the years aren’t actually being saved anyway… then there was never really a reason to keep waiting for permission to live inside of them.
Losing yourself as a special needs mom doesn’t happen all at once
I think we imagine losing ourselves as one big dramatic event. A breakdown. A moment you could circle on a calendar.
For most of us, it is NOT that. It’s quieter... It’s a thousand small postponements that each made perfect sense at the time:
You stop reading because there’s always one more intake form. You stop calling your friend back because the only news you have is an update you’ve already relayed to six people. You stop having a voice that belongs to YOU, and start having a voice that belongs to the latest report from the latest specialist…
And nobody notices, because you’re doing such a good job of it… We become exceedingly competent managers of the wait. We just forget to also live inside the life we’re managing while we wait.
You don’t have to wait until you’re ready
You can wait for the diagnosis and still make something on a Tuesday.
You can still be in the middle of the placement paperwork and have a voice on a Thursday… one that belongs to YOU, and not to whatever update you had to pass along that morning.
You do not have to be well enough, settled enough, through it enough, all the way out the other side of this, to start being HER again…
…I used to think the order went like this: get through this, then get back to yourself.
It doesn’t. The getting back is how you actually get through. It’s what makes the waiting survivable. And it’s also, quietly, the thing that makes it not a waiting room at all...
(Read that again, if you need to. I needed to.)
🪄 A little alchemy for the in-between… Little Alchemies is written in the in-between moments — waiting rooms, the five minutes after bedtime, whenever quiet actually arrives. If this is the kind of company you need right now, consider becoming a subscriber, and come radically choose yourself alongside the rest of us.
Both things, in the same breath
I need you to know I’m not going to tell you the grief wasn’t real.
It WAS.
There was a version of my life I was “supposed” to have... I could describe her WHOLE house to you: The sports on the weekends. The easy phone call to a babysitter. The child who got invited to things... I was allowed to want that. I’m allowed to STILL miss her sometimes.
That is not a failure of love for the children I actually have... Those are two separate rooms, and I’m allowed to stand in both. (And so are you.)
SO we’re going to do the honest thing here, the way we always try to in these letters, and hold them together… because our hearts will not let us separate them anyway.
You can grieve the life you’ll never have and STILL love the one you’re living, even in the same breath…
One small thing you’ve been saving for “after”
This is a “softening-the-edges” kind of change, not a BIG reconstruction. Which matters, because you don’t have the hours for reconstruction right now. (If you missed it, I wrote more about softening the edges of an uncommon life here.)
So here’s the WHOLE practice:
Pick one thing you’ve been saving for after. Just one. Make it small enough to survive your worst day.
Not the blog. Not the business. Not the whole life you’re going to build when it all calms down... Something closer to:
the ten minutes before you get out of the car
one true sentence in a notebook that nobody reads (including you, reading it back later and judging it)
a song on the drive to therapy, instead of the podcast about the thing you’re worried about
Then DO it once. Not perfectly. Once.
That is genuinely the whole thing…
You’re not building a habit yet. You’re proving something to yourself, which is that today was a today… and not a hallway you were sitting in until somebody called your name.
For you, if you’re still in the waiting room
Maybe you’re reading this in the parking lot right now. Maybe you’re reading it in the small room with the plastic plant, phone brightness turned all the way down, half-listening for the door.
I won’t tell you the wait is almost over. I don’t know that, and honestly, neither do the people who keep saying it.
But I can tell you that you are allowed to exist inside it. Not after. Now. The woman who had opinions and sang in the car is STILL in there, waiting in the way that true things wait… patient, a little dusty maybe, but present.
So here’s MY question, and I really do want the answer:
What have you been saving for after?
Not to guilt you. I asked myself the very same thing on a Tuesday, in a room with a plastic plant, and it changed what I did that night. I researched talk therapy practices accessible via telehealth (because another commute was unrealistic).
If this resonated, if something here named something you’ve been living, write it back to me. The reply button is always open, and I read everything.
The door is open. Come in, sit down, and stay awhile.
With MUCH warmth,
Cheniece Patrick ♡
P.S. If you’ve been waiting so long that you’re not quite sure who “her” even is anymore, The “You Still Exist” Reset is a free, 7-day series of short written reflections for exactly that (about ten to twenty minutes a day). It’s here whenever you want it: The “You Still Exist” Reset
Little Alchemies is more than just another lifestyle blog or newsletter about parenting special needs and neurodivergent children; it’s a mom’s real life personal journal and a sanctuary for other mothers and women inhabiting their lives again after Survival Mode. And Survival Mode isn’t proof you’ve lost yourself; it’s raw material… Here is where an autism & special needs mom turns it into something that’s HERS again, one self-return experiment at a time.
A few honest questions
❓ Is it normal to feel like you’ve lost yourself as a special needs mom?..
Yes. So many of us do, and it rarely happens all at once. It’s usually a long run of small postponements (one more appointment, one more form, one more wait) that each made sense at the time. Feeling lost isn’t proof you’ve failed. It’s a sign you’ve been carrying a lot, for a long time, mostly alone.
❓ How do I start finding myself again when nothing has calmed down yet?
Start smaller than feels worth it. Pick one thing you’ve been saving for “after” and do it once, today, imperfectly: ten quiet minutes in the car, one true sentence in a notebook, a song instead of a worry-podcast. You don’t need things to settle first. The small returns are what make the hard season survivable.
❓ Is it okay to grieve the life I expected while loving my autistic child?..
It is. Grieving the life you pictured is not a failure of love for the child you have. Those are two separate rooms, and you’re allowed to stand in both. Most of us feel both at once, often in the very same breath, and holding them together honestly is far gentler than pretending one of them isn’t there.
❓ What can I do in a therapy waiting room that’s just for me?
Treat it as a pocket of time that belongs to you, not only to the wait. Write one honest sentence, close your eyes for a few slow breaths, read something that has nothing to do with diagnoses, or simply put the phone face-down and notice where you are. It doesn’t have to be productive. It just has to be yours.
You can grieve the life you’ll never have and STILL love the one you’re living, even in the same breath.
If you’ve been waiting so long that you’re not quite sure who “her” even is anymore, The “You Still Exist” Reset from The Alchemy Lab is a FREE, 7-day series of short written reflections for exactly that (about ten to twenty minutes a day).
What have you been saving for after?..
Not to guilt you. I asked myself the very same thing on a Tuesday, in a room with a plastic plant, and it changed what I did that night…
TRANSMUTE the weight of living into GOLD…
