The Weight of Co-Regulating

People often talk about stress as though it exists in separate categories.

Work stress.
Parenting stress.
Relationship stress.
Health stress.

As though the human nervous system politely separates each burden into neat compartments.

But that is not how life feels inside the body.

At least not mine.

My life feels more like one of those giant rubber band balls made up of hundreds of overlapping colored strands wound so tightly around one another.

Motherhood wraps around leadership.
Leadership wraps around neurodivergence.
Neurodivergence wraps around previous trauma.
Previous trauma wraps around caregiving.
Caregiving wraps around exhaustion.

And eventually the layers become so intertwined that you can no longer cleanly separate one strand from another.

And the tighter the layers become, the harder it becomes to untangle any single strand without pulling on all the others too.

That is what emotional regulation feels like for me right now.

Not one stressor. Not one identity. But an entire nervous system carrying intertwined layers of pressure all at once.

I am not just a mother.
I am a working mother.
A working mother in leadership.
A woman responsible for supporting an entire department of people while simultaneously balancing productivity metrics, emotional labor, decision-making, and the invisible weight that leadership often carries behind closed doors.

I am also a neurodivergent woman parenting a neurodivergent child while trying to regulate myself at the same time.

And lately, I am tired in a way I do not know how to explain unless you have lived inside chronic co-regulation too.

About six months ago, our oldest son was formally diagnosed with autism and ADHD, affectionately AuDHD, after more than a year of evaluations, advocacy, waiting lists, questions, and quietly knowing in my gut that something deeper was happening beneath the behaviors people were seeing on the surface.

People say things like:
“Well, aren’t we all kind of on the spectrum?”
“He just needs to acclimate.”
“He’ll grow out of it.”

And I understand what they are trying to say.

That all brains are different.
That all children struggle emotionally sometimes.

But it minimizes the reality of watching a child experience emotions so intensely that they consume his entire nervous system.

A neurotypical child may become frustrated and yell or throw something in anger.

That is not what he experiences.

His emotions enter every part of him.
A changed expectation can feel catastrophic.
A social situation can feel threatening enough to completely shut him down internally while people smile and casually label him “shy.”
Anger is not simply frustration. It is panic. Flooding. Nervous system overwhelm so intense that his body begins reacting faster than his mind can access regulation.

And maybe the hardest part is this:

He knows it.

He knows when his reactions are bigger than he wants them to be.
He knows what he should be doing.
He wants to do it.

But knowing and being able to access regulation are not the same thing.

So after the meltdown comes shame.
Self-criticism.
Collapse.

People see defiance.
I see dysregulation.

People see behavior.
I see suffering.

And often, I am not only responding to his dysregulation.

I am responding to everyone else's interpretation of it too.

The comments.
The assumptions.
The well-intentioned advice.

Do I explain? Or do I let it go because my child is already struggling and I do not have the capacity to carry someone else’s misunderstanding too?

Sometimes I speak up.
Sometimes I don't.

Not because the misunderstanding doesn't matter.

But because exhaustion is real too.

And maybe what makes this so emotionally consuming for me is that when I look at him, I recognize something familiar.

In so many ways, I am him. And he is me.

I recognize what it feels like when the gap between knowing and doing feels impossibly wide.

I understand the exhaustion of trying to regulate yourself in environments that do not feel built for your nervous system.

And that recognition creates both profound compassion and profound exhaustion.

Because co-regulating a child while dysregulated yourself is a kind of invisible labor I do not think people fully understand unless they have lived it.

There are moments where his overwhelm collides with mine and it feels like every nervous system in the room is screaming at once.

The sensory overload.
The guilt.
The helplessness.
The constant questioning:
Am I supporting him enough?
Am I responding correctly?
Am I making this worse?
Why can I remain composed for everyone else but struggle so much more at home?
Why do I know all of these tools and still feel so incapable sometimes?

That last question is the one I wrestle with most.

Because again, Wander Within was never born from a place of having everything figured out.

It was born from trying to understand humanity honestly.

Right now, I am exhausted.

Not because I lack the tools.

But because some seasons of life simply require more from us than we currently have available to give.

Because sustaining multiple nervous systems at once is hard.

Because leadership is hard.

Because motherhood is hard.

Because previous trauma still lives in my body.

Because modern life is hard.

I think part of what makes this season especially difficult is that I am a fixer by nature.

When someone is hurting, I want to ease their pain.

But this is one of those situations that cannot be fixed.

It can be named.
It can be understood.
It can be supported.
It can be felt.

But I cannot fix it.

And there is something deeply painful about loving someone enough to want to carry their suffering while knowing you cannot.

I cannot regulate this away for him.

I cannot remove the intensity with which he feels the world.
I cannot protect him from every misunderstanding.
I cannot force society to become softer, slower, more aware, or more accommodating overnight.

But despite all of this, I need people to understand something clearly:

He is not defined by struggle.

There is infinitely more beauty in him than pain.

His empathy is breathtaking.
His creativity pours out of him in ways that feel almost electric.
When he gets excited about something, his entire body lights up with it and it is infectious in the best way.
His love is not performative or rehearsed. He shows it through closeness, actions, noticing, tenderness.

He experiences the world deeply.

And yes, sometimes that depth hurts him.

But it also makes him extraordinary.

And if one day he is old enough to read this, I hope he knows how much I have learned from him already.

Not despite the way he experiences the world, but because of it.

I will never stop fighting for a world that creates space for children like him rather than asking them to shrink themselves into something that is easier and more comfortable for everyone else to hold.