The Yes Letters Volume 1: Finding Your Yes
A Neurodivergent Guide to Parenting, Presence and Authenticity
You got up earlier than you needed to.
You had a plan. You felt the quiet of the morning and, for a moment, something in you lifted.
And then the kids woke up.
By the time you're walking out the door the positivity you felt an hour ago has become a constriction in your chest and a desperate ransacking of your brain for that breathing tip you saved on Instagram at midnight, the only moment you'd had to yourself all day.
You hit your thigh on the doorknob and lose it.
The kids climb into the car with fear on their faces and the guilt that floods you is so familiar it has its own postcode. You overexplain. They cry or backchat and the sensory storm that follows overloads all of you. By the time you arrive wherever you're going, you're already replaying it, already running the very real thought that your kids would probably be better off with a different mum, that what you'd really love is to just walk out the door and keep walking.
It's mid morning.
When someone asks how you're doing, you say "we're great thanks" because you learned a long time ago that this is the right answer.
You have a pile of beautiful books on your nightstand. You haven't finished any of them. You've saved approximately one million posts on Instagram and never gone back to a single one. You've tried the systems, the strategies, the parenting approaches, and some of them make sense in theory but none of them work with your brain or your kids' brains and you are so tired of trying things that don't work that some part of you has quietly decided there is no point trying another thing.
And yes, a book is all well and good, but it's not going to be there when the dish of spaghetti is on the kitchen floor because someone lost it at tea time. It's not going to help you find the words to repair and reconnect with your kids, or to talk to your partner in a way that doesn't spiral into an argument that never gets anywhere.
She's tried everything over the years and nothing works so there's no point even trying another thing.
If you just felt something shift in your chest reading that, this book is for you.
This isn’t another parenting book that tells you what to do
It's 120 daily letters written from inside the same life you're living, one honest, imperfect, real day at a time.
The Yes Letters Volume 1: Finding Your Yes began as a daily writing practice in January 2024. Every day, I wrote to my email list from wherever I actually was, not from a place of having it figured out, but from inside the mess and the beauty and the ordinary extraordinary texture of being a neurodivergent woman, mother, and human being doing her best.
Some days I wrote about Yes Parenting and the specific art of finding a Yes when everything in you wants to scream No. Some days I wrote about perimenopause blindsiding me with unidentifiable emotions at traffic lights. Some days I wrote about rest, about boredom as a gateway, about laundry, about tulips on a windowsill, about the tens of thousands of meals we make for our children and what it means to keep showing up anyway.
This book holds January to April of those letters, 120 days of reflection, honesty, and the kind of wisdom that only comes from living it rather than studying it.
You don't need to read it in order. Let your intuition guide you to whatever page calls to you on any given day.
What this book is really about
It's about what becomes possible when you stop fighting who you are and start finding a Yes to it instead.
Not a sudden leap into confidence and productivity, but a gentle unfolding. The fog lifts just enough that you can start to see the small things again, the shape of the clouds, the taste of your coffee, the moment your child does something ridiculous and instead of shame you feel a flicker of laughter rising.
It's about seeing the wholeness of your life instead of only the places you're falling short. About belonging to friendships where people genuinely get it because their experience is similar, where you can laugh at the behaviours other people judge, where a voice note at 2pm that's mostly just screaming counts as real connection.
It's about knowing, in your bones, that even a hard day can be a good day. That a hard week can be a good week. That you are not fucking up your kids or your life because humans are resilient and what we all need to find our way through is warm emotional attunement, and this book is soaked in it from the first letter to the last.
It's about celebrating the way your brain is wired, not despite the hard parts but alongside them, and slowly, gently beginning to advocate for your own needs, interests, preferences and desires, and for those of your children.
There is no finishing line here. No magical destination to arrive at. The journey is the gift, and every day is an invitation to learn, heal, grow, and get it wrong and love yourself anyway.
Fuck perfect. Let's find a Yes to authenticity every day of the week.
What You’ll Find Inside
246 pages. 120 daily letters from January to April 2024, covering:
Yes Parenting and the art of finding a Yes when everything feels like No
Nervous system reverence and the different kinds of rest your brain and body are asking for
Neurodivergence and the gentle radical act of celebrating the way your brain is wired
Reclaiming imagination and the small moments of beauty that become your anchors
Menstruality and menopausing and the wisdom that arrives when we stop fighting our cycles
You can read it from the beginning or open it anywhere. Either way, it will meet you where you are.
What it means to be with yourself as you change
Emotional intelligence and what it actually looks like to make friends with big feelings
Grief and joy and the way they live alongside each other
Why I’m the person to walk alongside you in this
I started writing about Yes Parenting when my boys were 7 and 9. It hit the headlines. I was on TV, radio, and in the printed press. People told me to wait until they were teenagers, that they'd end up in prison by adulthood, that the way I was raising them was the reason society was going downhill.
I did it anyway. As a single parent. Before I had the language for our family's neurodivergence. Before I had the extraordinary community of friends I've spent the last decade building. Without the support I have now.
My sons are young adults. Between us, the arguments we've had, me with each of them and each of them with me, could be counted on my fingers and toes. They know themselves to the depths of their being. They have my back and I have theirs, and they do it because they want to, not because they were conditioned into people-pleasing.
I am a therapist, an energy healer, an AuDHD woman navigating disability, perimenopause, and a life that gets more beautiful the more honestly I live it. I wrote these letters in real time, from inside my own mess, my own joy, my own sacred rage and sacred rest.
I'm not writing about this from the outside looking in. I'm writing from the same kitchen, the same guilt spiral, the same desperate love for my children and my own imperfect, magnificent self.