This Wasn't in the Brochure
A book about parenting, neurodivergence, and the things nobody warns you about.
There’s a version of parenting that exists in books and antenatal classes—a version with developmental milestones that arrive on schedule, sleep regressions that resolve, and challenges that respond to the right technique applied with sufficient consistency. That version is a fairy tale. A useful one, sometimes. But a fairy tale.
This Wasn’t in the Brochure is about what happens when the life you planned meets the life you get. It’s a book about parenting and neurodivergence—both your children’s and your own—written from inside the experience rather than above it. The gaps between what the experts promise and what actually works at two in the morning. The slow realisation that some of the traits you’re learning to support in your kids are the same ones you’ve been masking in yourself for decades.
This is not a self-help book. It doesn’t offer five steps or a framework. It offers the thing that actually helped me: the recognition that the brochure was always incomplete, and that showing up for the version of life that exists—rather than grieving the one that doesn’t—is its own quiet form of courage.