3 Unexpectedly Hard Things About Being A Neurodivergent New Mom
I knew it would be hard. But my hard was different from that of other new moms.
I had my first baby five years ago. I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with ADHD or begun to explore the possibility that my detail-oriented, sensitive, pattern-seeking mind might actually be autistic.
Back then, I fully expected that I would have a “normal” postpartum experience. I was wrong—and now, after years of wondering why things were so much harder for me than for other first-time moms in my life, I’m beginning to understand why.
Here are three things I found unexpectedly hard about becoming a new mom who didn’t know she was neurodivergent.
1. The loss of autonomy made it hard to self-regulate.
Intellectually, I knew that having a baby would mean I was forever tied to another human. Like seemingly every pregnant 30-something, I’d repeatedly encountered that famous Elizabeth Stone quote—the one where she describes motherhood as having “your heart go walking around outside your body.”
I was excited to shift from a fairly self-centered life to one in which my heart belonged to someone else—to love my child so much that I prioritized her as much as myself, if not more so. I craved experiencing that profound kind of love.
And then, she was born. And I realized that I’d had it backward. It wasn’t that I immediately felt a love so deep that it made me want to prioritize her well-being. Rather, I felt an immense weight of responsibility, a requirement that I prioritize her—and that responsibility provided the fertile ground in which my love grew.
That intense feeling of responsibility was partly biological, I’m sure, but also partly imposed by society. In my “baby-friendly” hospital, the standard practice was to have newborns room with their parents, not be cared for in a nursery. There are probably plenty of reasons why this is generally a good arrangement, especially for the baby—but for me, the mom, it eliminated any respite I might have felt from the feeling that I was in over my head.
In those first days, the embers of love I had for my child hadn’t yet blossomed into something recognizable as love. I remember lying in the hospital room the night my daughter was born, watching her fitful sleep—her puffy little newborn face occasionally wincing, newborn eyelids fluttering—and feeling overcome by both tenderness and an almost claustrophobia-like sensation. As the days turned into weeks, it hit me over and over—this realization that I would forever be responsible for another person. That I would never again freely make a choice that was best for me and me alone because now, what was best for me automatically included what was best for my daughter. My heart wasn’t just outside me—it was inside her, no longer under my control.
A part of me recognizes the beauty in that selfless parental love. But in those first months, that beauty was overshadowed by a profound and all-encompassing sense that I had willingly given up my personal autonomy.
All new parents struggle with this change to some extent. But from what I can tell, it affected me more than most—not least because I desperately needed control over my own body in order to avoid burnouts and meltdowns.
Since I was a child, I’ve needed much more alone time than the average person to stay regulated. To me, that looks like having the mental and emotional capacity to pause, think matters through, and make intentional and kind choices. When I exhaust that capacity, it’s like a switch flips. I go from being patient and understanding to testy and judgmental. I can sometimes lash out, saying hurtful things that I later regret. It’s like I’m a pot that’s finally boiled over.
There are so many things that can drain my capacity to regulate myself: being overstimulated, trying to ‘fit in’ as a neurotypical person, having my routines or expectations disrupted, and feeling like too many demands are being made of me.
In the years before I became a mom, I had become decently adept at recognizing when I was starting to feel overwhelmed. I could exit a situation and settle myself down before I overheated. Better yet, I could structure my life in such a way that overwhelm was largely kept at bay.
Turns out you can’t really do that with a baby. I was a sleep-deprived, hypersensitive, hypervigilant new mom. My daughter needed me to always be “on,” even in the middle of the night. Especially in the middle of the night. Day after day, I held myself together around the baby, only to melt down when given a break.
I knew that taking more time to myself throughout the day would help—but I couldn’t just abandon my newborn whenever I felt overwhelmed. To find peace, I needed bodily autonomy—and I simply didn’t have it.
I still wrestle with this issue on a daily basis. My kids are sensitive; they whine, fight, and tantrum, as children (especially neurodivergent ones) are wont to do. And while I’ve developed an ability to appear regulated during these hard moments, it’s really more like I’m dissociating. When I start to feel overwhelmed, I sort of step outside myself into a less emotional headspace.
The dissociation isn’t bad, per se. It helps me get through the hard moments without yelling at my children, and I can often go one step further: mustering the energy to use gentle, reassuring words while they feel their own emotions.
But in an ideal world, I would have more opportunities to self-soothe in real time. That might look like developing new self-care rituals that don’t require leaving—though I’ve tried and haven’t yet found a great way to calm down in the company of other people. More realistically, it means having additional trusted caregivers around so that I can meet my own needs alongside my kids’.
2. Standard support systems didn’t meet my needs.
During pregnancy, I was repeatedly encouraged by doctors, doulas, and parent friends to develop a postpartum support plan. I dutifully created a Google Doc outlining my anticipated needs and delegating work to my husband (who, I should note, was more than willing to step up to the plate). I knew having a baby at home would be hard, but I felt like we could handle it.
We could not handle it. Or, at least, I could not handle it. The one-two punch of sleepless nights and massive hormonal shifts was truly awful. I cried intensely, many times a day, with little warning. The depth of my attachment to—and sense of responsibility for—my daughter was consuming, and I thoroughly Googled every part of parenting that I struggled with, searching for answers that would help me exert greater control over a fundamentally uncontrollable situation.
My husband tried hard to fulfill all the new roles I’d handed him, but he often failed to meet my exacting standards—whether when making me dinner or playing with the baby. It’s difficult to look back on those months and see with clearer eyes how critical I was of him.
The few people who were privy to my new-motherhood experience could tell that I needed support. But I tended to resist that help—because what was being offered, regardless of how well-intentioned it was, often conflicted with my underlying needs as a neurodivergent woman.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, what I needed was a complex mix of ADHD- and autism-related accommodations.
On the autism side, I needed more predictability. More control over my sensory environment. More “safe” foods. More hands-on help from people who were willing to either do things my way or, better yet, convince me (via quality research or demonstrated expertise) that they knew better.
On the ADHD side, I needed more bodily autonomy. More novelty. More opportunities to remind myself that I was more than “just” a new mom. More accessible dopamine (oh, how medication could have helped me through that period!). More understanding of my emotional sensitivity, both from myself and from others who loved me.
And on both sides, I really could have used more connection with other women who experienced motherhood similarly to me.
Instead, people offered… well, meal trains, for one. Don’t get me wrong; meal trains can be beautiful. I’m grateful for the kind friends and family who brought us food on those early, sleep-deprived days. Our meal train ensured we had food to eat.
But—the food was almost always something I wasn’t used to eating. I’m someone with particular food preferences and sensitivities who uses familiar food as a primary source of comfort. For me, eating a new meal can be an unsettling experience, even if the food tastes good. (I’ve since learned that this is a very common experience for both ADHD-ers and autistics.) In that tender postpartum period, all I wanted was comfort food—in the sense of food my mind liked and was used to.
What’s more, the people who brought us meals often stayed for dinner. To be clear, I specifically organized this! I was aware that the “right” thing to do postpartum—after a short hibernation period with the baby—was to invite people in to meet her. I knew my husband missed our old, more social life, and I wanted him to be happy. And part of me longed to connect with the outside world, which, astoundingly, had kept chugging along as my personal world had been turned inside out.
I look back on those dinner visits with some fondness; I truly value that our friends showed up, and I did feel more alive and multidimensional after seeing loved ones during that tumultuous stretch.
At the same time, having “outsiders” in my home was not easy for me. It never has been. As is the case for many autistic people, the presence of another person in my space always makes me a bit uneasy; it throws off my routine and sense of stability. I never fully and completely relax unless I’m alone or in a situation where I can feel confident no one will bother me (e.g., wearing my AirPods and working on my laptop at a local coffee shop).
In those postpartum months, I felt quite resistant to almost anyone coming over to visit, especially if I intuited that I would need to tailor my own behavior or communication in order to make them feel comfortable.
This extended to close friends and even members of our immediate families. These were people who I knew loved us—who didn’t consciously expect any special behavior from me. But because I wasn’t fully comfortable being myself around other people—whoever “myself” is, exactly—I resisted having them over. (A bright spot: I’m feeling this way less often now as I practice “unmasking.”)
3. Babies demand flexibility, but my mind prefers rules.
A common characteristic of the autistic mind is a penchant for rules, systems, routines, organization, logic—you get the gist. This is commonly described as “rigid thinking” or “cognitive inflexibility.”
Here’s what happens in my mind when I’m facing a challenge. First, I collect information, typically by Googling or reading books. As the information accumulates in my mind, I continually run it through a complex analysis that takes into account a range of evaluative criteria (e.g., the information’s source, its evidence base, its compatibility with my values, etc.). Once I have a sense of what is “right” or “best,” I use that information to develop rules and systems for my life.
From the outside, most people just see my rules. And if they try to bend or dismiss them, I can get very frustrated. From their perspective, I’m sure I just seem rigid or controlling.
But it’s not that I can’t change my rules. I just rarely have been provided new information that’s compelling enough to make me want to change them.
I care deeply about doing things in the optimal way for me. If you can convince me that your way will meet my needs better, I am open to it—but that will probably require that you 1) have similar values to mine and 2) have some claim to expertise (e.g., you’re a literal expert or you’ve researched the topic more thoroughly than I have). In other words, the bar is high.
There’s also some path dependence at play. When I’m used to executing a system, I find comfort in the routine itself. I like the predictability of it. I no longer have to gather and analyze information; I can simply execute and feel relatively confident in the outcome.
You can see where this could be an issue as a new parent—especially one who is supposed to be co-parenting with another individual. I quickly began developing specific and rigid rules for how we should care for our baby. I would spend my days—and sometimes sleepless nights—researching the “right” ways to feed, change, hold, and interact with our child, sometimes even hiring well-reviewed professionals to instruct me on the “best” approach.
In hindsight, I can see that I was particularly prone to rigidity around sleep schedules. In an attempt to get our daughter to sleep through the night in her own room, I worked with a sleep consultant to create a detailed nap and bedtime schedule. It was a color-coded spreadsheet, chock-full of formulas that calculated how much sleep she’d gotten in a given period and, consequently, when we should put her down to bed next.
To complement the spreadsheet, I downloaded a sleep-tracking app. As soon as I watched my daughter close her eyes on the baby monitor, I would hit the “start” button. As soon as she woke up, I’d hit “stop” and log the relevant times in the spreadsheet.
The sleep consultant encouraged me not to stress too much about the sleep schedule. She, like many other consultants, endorsed an 80/20 rule: try to follow the approximate schedule around 80% of the time and let things slide the other 20.
But I struggled to be flexible. I think I viewed the 80/20 approach as built for other people—the ones who weren’t as good at closely following rules. After all, if there is a “right way” to do something, why else would someone only do it eight times out of ten? I became quite rigid around our daughter’s sleep, more than once getting frustrated at my husband for putting our daughter down for a nap a horrific three or four minutes late.
One practical consequence of all this inflexibility and micromanagement was that I rarely had much time away from the baby. It’s not that people were unwilling to help. Rather, I felt so much resistance to the idea of caregivers deviating from my parenting rules that I preferred to just do it all myself.
One note here: I don’t want to sell myself too short. I think that the parenting rules I adopted were generally good ones. They were thoroughly researched, and I only kept in place the systems that seemed to work well for my daughter. As she’s gotten older, we’ve identified that she is also neurodivergent—and, in particular, she really thrives off routine and predictability. I’m confident that my emphasis on schedules and systems was at least in part a response to understanding my child’s needs and trying to meet them. But my lack of flexibility was hard on my marriage and other important relationships, and it’s something I’m still actively working on.
There is so, so much more I could write about my postpartum struggles—but my kids are, at this precise moment, relocating every piece of furniture in our living room, and it’s about time for me to get involved. More later.
In the meantime, please let me know in the comments if any of these challenges resonate with you. I think there’s a lot more to be researched and written about motherhood and neurodivergence. Getting a better sense of which of my experiences are broadly shared and which are a little more idiosyncratic will help me prioritize where to go next.
