When your brain sends you to the wrong cinema

I’ve been thinking this week about capacity. The invisible load. All the things we carry that other people – the ones not living our life – don’t necessarily see, or understand, or really get.

It made me chuckle when I thought back to some of the more humorous moments when I’ve clearly had a brain glitch and things haven’t gone entirely to plan.

A few years ago, I turned up for a meeting at my child’s school – a meeting with the headteacher – an entire week early. A little embarrassing. But to be fair, she was very graceful about it, rearranged her schedule, and we had the meeting a week early anyway.

But a better one than that? I booked for my family to go to the cinema, and when we turned up, I realised we were in completely the wrong town. Right venue, wrong location. Fortunately, the cinema was showing the same film at a very similar time, and since they were part of the same group, they were incredibly kind, let us watch it there, and transferred our tickets over – which I don’t think they were officially allowed to do. I couldn’t believe I’d just driven, without thinking, to completely the wrong place. That one could have ended very badly. You can imagine the reaction from the children if we’d told them we couldn’t watch the film. Fortunately, all turned out okay.

What it really shows is that quite often we’re juggling so much. We’re remembering everything for everyone. Right now, off the top of my head – I need to book an MOT, book the dentist, there’s certain shopping I need to get, and I have a parents’ evening coming up. There are so many things we are constantly remembering, not just for ourselves, but for every other member of the family. And the pets. And sometimes an even wider circle than that.

With parenting there’s always that busyness. That sense of always being switched on.

But when you’re the parent of a neurodivergent child, everything gets a bit more intense. It goes up a notch or two. Because then you’re juggling occupational therapy appointments, speech and language assessments, trying to organise therapies, book appointments, meet deadlines for EHCPs. There’s always an extra layer – on top of the usual household things, the normal errands and chores, and on top of that you’re often co-regulating with your child, supporting them through their difficulties.

If you have experience with a PDA child, you’ll understand how much of the time you can end up acting almost as an external nervous system for them.

So it’s no wonder we sometimes drop the ball.

I think it’s good to remind ourselves that we don’t have to do everything all of the time, and that when you’re living in survival mode, different rules apply. It’s okay if the laundry doesn’t all get done. It’s okay if your kids are eating beige food, or you haven’t cooked everything from scratch. It’s okay if you’ve done a quick wipe round rather than a deep clean. Sometimes it’s okay to let yourself off.

Because you might be using so much energy in co-regulation, in advocating for your child, in making sure their needs are being met – and that takes a lot. It’s emotionally draining. And by letting a few things drop, you’re not being lazy. You’re making conscious, careful, and actually quite smart decisions about where to put your energy.

But there will still be moments where we have brain glitches – much like the ones I’ve described. So I’d love to know if you’ve had any similar experiences.