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An old friend messaged me to say that they had been reading my blog (this blog) I had forgotten that I had a blog if I’m totally honest 

A nice remembering that made me think how good it would be to write another post. 

I realise that I seem to come back here during phases of liminality, when the world I knew and the yet to come appear so intractably distant that bridging seems more a leap of faith than an actual engineering possibility. Maybe there is something in claiming that gulf through the eyes of unknown readers that helps me process. Or maybe that I’m just a massive narcissist without the ready audience of a team of people paid to listen to me and so this becomes the pill. Either way. Here I am, trying to find the shy words that lull at the deepest recesses of my knowing to answer the question that keeps arriving in my DMs – so where are you now?

Where I am

Well easy enough, sitting at my desk, typing at my keyboard, the same desk and keyboard and monitor that I wrote the Management Plan on and that I answered emails for the woodland trust from (albeit for a shorter time). a desk, an orange seat, an attic, surrounded by books.

I don’t think that is what the ask is though.

I think what people are asking is where does this computer point at? who pays the hands to type out words for them?

And that is more difficult to put into words.

No one and everyone.

your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

Many of you know me from the work I did as lead author of a Management Plan for Bannau. It was a policy  document like no other for many reasons, but mostly because my co-writer Jodie and I believed it needed a really strong narrative arc.  It should start with the legacy National Parks inherited from their inception to be resources for the nation in need of healing after the second world war. and end with the start of a different legacy.  Very purposefully I wanted the last lines left hanging with the reader to just be a small moment of insight about why the words of the plan mattered. They were personal, but they were also way bigger than me.  Here they are 

How I do it though, no such glib exclamations of saviour mother, I live each day with no expectations of any achievement other than to have gotten through the day. 

That young son, no longer exists.  They are now a beautiful wonderful clever fourteen year old whose amazing neurodivergent brain has found much of the world around them uncommonly fascinating and unbelievably frightening.  Full of assumptions that do not add up, that hurt and terrorise, that subjugate and destroy I have watched them slowly disappear as they attempt to navigate a world built for neuro typical minds. 

It hurts to watch the destruction of such wonder.  A grief that overpowers as the  silent retreat into themselves deepens. 

and don’t criticise what you don’t understand

About 18months ago my eldest child agonised with something they needed to tell me.  They were 12. 

Up until that point in time they had been a happy enough kid. In many ways extraordinary, in most ways normal.

 I always thought that they were an old soul, like they looked at the world like they had seen it before and in a way already knew all the things they wanted to know. Like it was nothing new.  They were talking in full sentences by 2.  Reading by 3.  Reading maps by 5.  They sounded like a little old man.  They loved the company of adults, reading stories, riding on trains, his reception teacher told me that they used to just sit and chat . As they grew older each year their teachers would call us in, once we had a teacher who suggested that they believed our child was hearing voices and emotionally disturbed. Another who suggested that they may need glasses because they kept getting up and wandering about, another who suggested that my request for an autism diagnosis (first raised with the ‘wonderful character’ teacher) was probably a good idea because she was actually struggling. 

Mostly though just a geek kid doing geeky things, having fun with their geeky friends.  Loving and kind, a worrier, the most amazing imagination, a believer in magic.

But things had started to change as they headed into year 8.  They seemed to be less interested in their friends, had periods of complete withdrawal from the world. And most distressingly their self soothing stimming ticks had progressed from hand wringing to physical aggression towards themselves.  We would see a disturbing level of self admonishment, of constant apology, of real self directed vitriol.  We spoke to the school about the ND assessment (they had been on a waiting list for assessment for four years by this point) and it was agreed for additional support to be put into place regardless of the diagnosis. Problem solved. 

And then April 2024 on a family day out in Dyffryn Gardens it felt like we’d hit some kind of crisis. They kept saying, Mum I’m…. And then just freezing.  For anyone who knows me and my overly active ADHD will know that I attempted every way I could to finish that sentence, each time I offered a solution, their frustration would grow and again, ‘ no listen Mum I’m’  – silence. This went on for days and days with the frustration they felt spilling out into every interaction, every thread, each elements of family life.  It felt like living in a Samuel becket play. Resolution was nowhere to be found. 

Finally after about a week of the stop start confessions,  they showed me a drawing in their sketch book, a sort of anime style quirky hair, eyeballs and bows, the name Sophia was written above the image.  I know that this is a cliché but in that moment I just knew, maybe it was the look on her face, it was the same as the desperation to talk as the days of stunted explanations, maybe it was the hope that finally flickered there too.  But as soon as I saw the picture I knew.  

‘Is this you?’
A nod, and a look of deep deep shame
‘Do you want me to call you Sophia now?’ 
‘Sorry’ quietly offered to me under heavy heavy tears.

Now I wish I had something really profound to tell you about my reaction. 

I was both in shock at the realisation that my son was telling me that they wanted to be something totally different,  and huge relief that they weren’t attempting to tell me that they had killed a kitten or something equally abhorrent over the past few days of stuttering revelation. 

I cannot remember what I said, it may have been thank fuck I thought you’d killed a kitten. It may have just been a hug. All I know is that everything changed from that point. 

please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand

I reverted to type and researched the hell out of trans kids and I read many many first hand accounts of both growing up trans and raising trans kids.  This from Carolyn Hays is by far the words that have been most instrumental to me in that journey

A statistic. … one that finds almost every parent of a transgender child, one way or another. The suicide attempt rate. At the time, the stat was that 46 percent of trans people had attempted suicide at some point in their lives. For the general population, that rate is less than 2 percent. I’ve kept my eye on this stat over the years. I’ve seen it range from 41 percent to 47 percent, and when broken down, I’ve seen it as high as 51 percent for trans boys and men. Now there is really clear research that explains how to bring that statistic down to the below 2 percent of the general population. It’s this: acceptance, support. If parents, schools, faith communities, neighbors, and relatives shift pronouns, let the kid decide how they need to present themselves to the world — hair, clothes, name — the risk of suicide for that child plummets.

and so their old identity became known as ‘the redacted’ and we begun systematically replacing the child Dylan I thought I birthed, with the person she was learning she was.  The bag of eyeballs and bows that started off as Sophia on a shaky notebook, morphed into Deska a hoody wearing non-binary , and now is currently known as Nell.  Nell has fully socially transitioned, including in school,  and identifies with the she/her and they/them pronouns.  She says ‘I’m like 75% female right now’ although to me she is just 100% themselves 

That is where the bits of the story I can easily explain end. 

The rest is a spaghetti like jumble of threads that all seem to lead nowhere and everywhere at once, but mostly to this place.

I have left my paid job as nell cannot attend mainstream school anymore, I support her in homeschool which mostly now happens online.  This is not because of the school, they have been amazing.  Shout out to Delyth.  We love you.

No it is because gender dysphoria is so crippling to them that they live their lives in a deep cloak of shame and anxiety that prevents them from feeling worthy of engaging in normal life. Have you ever watched a child so desperate to join in and be normal and hang out with other kids, and yet so unable to find the way that they freeze in fear and sadness and you as a parent have to stand and watch, physically and mentally unable to make any of it better.  

This is all exacerbated by the challenges of intersecting diagnosis.

Nell is as both neuro and gender diverse. Which it turns out is not that uncommon.  Again some stats – gender diversity in the general population falls between 1 and 2%.  Whereas amongst autistic population a much higher prevelance is observed, with studies placing it anywhere between 10-35%.

 However, the support available to Nell under CAMHS is either additional learning support for autism (which Nell describes as dehumanising and belittling) or talking therapy for the gender dysphoria (see above for the difficulty Nell has in communicating how she feels in words).  And because neither have provided the help that Nell actually needs we seem to be at some sort of impasse where the educational welfare officer writes to ‘the parent/or guardian’ to threaten £2,500 worth of fines with about as much empathy for the repeated trauma our family is experiencing as a wet fish. 

the line it is cast

There is a story I found recently, tucked away in an old copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, first purchased when I became a mother all those years ago that resonated in its totality.  

A mother explains what it felt like to find herself unexpectantly birthing a child with physical disability,  she describes it like a trip to Italy that gets diverted. You pack your bags for the Coliseum and the gondolas, she says,, you learn the phrases, you buy the guidebooks. But when the plane lands, the stewardess tells you: “Welcome to Holland”.  

Holland is slower. It’s less flashy. But she reflects if you spend your life screaming that you were supposed to be in Italy, you will never see that Holland has windmills, and tulips, and Rembrandts.  

I am learning to walk in Holland. I am learning to put down the guidebooks for the child I thought I had, and simply sit with the one who is here as we both learn how we can survive in this new world together

This brings me back to the desk, and the orange chair, and the question of “where are you now, what do you do?”

I am no longer the person with the extension number. But I am also not disappeared.

In stepping away from the 9-to-5, I have carved out a different kind of space. The part of me that needs to work—the part that thinks in systems and writes in strategies, that you may want to tag in a LinkedIn post, or talk an idea through with —is still very much here, still very much needs to be listened to.

But now, that part of me I see as a far more  precious resource, one I can no longer afford to spend on things that do not matter.  In the coming weeks I’ll be posting more about that person her work and her wonderful CIC with the beautiful and brilliant Jodie Bond at Landed futures.  How the flexibility of freelancing has provided me with the necessary space to be all that I need to be.  But for now I felt it important that I make this truth known to the world. 

It will form a massive part of who I become and the person you will hopefully stay in touch with as I learn to read a different map, for the times they are a changin’

With love and apologetic thanks to the many Dylans in my life for helping me anchor these words to the page.