When your autistic child is in crisis, the rest of your life doesn’t stop. You still have work deadlines, family responsibilities, appointments, and commitments. But when you’re spending hours on the phone with doctors, providers, and school teams trying to manage an urgent situation, something has to give.
In this episode, Lisa Candera, The Autism Mom Coach, shares why she missed a week of podcasting while managing a crisis involving her autistic son. She explains how years of autism parenting have changed her approach to balancing responsibilities, managing expectations, and deciding what actually needs to get done when circumstances change.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why trying to fit an autism parenting crisis into an already full schedule creates unnecessary pressure.
- How to distinguish between what must happen, what needs your attention, and what can wait.
- Why being capable of doing something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right use of your time and energy.
- How to reconsider commitments, ask for help, and adjust expectations when your autistic child’s needs suddenly take priority.
Whether you’re dealing with an emergency school call, escalating behaviors, a hospitalization, or a placement crisis, this episode is a reminder that you have more choices about how you manage the rest of your responsibilities than you might realize. Sometimes the most practical decision is to take something off your plate.
Time Stamps
- 00:07 – Autism Parenting in Crisis
- 01:53 – When Parenting an Autistic Child Disrupts Your Plans
- 03:52 – The ‘Should’ Question: Deciding What to Do
- 05:01 – Renegotiating Obligations as Autism Parents
- 06:30 – Closing Remarks and Next Episode Preview
Listen Here:
Transcript:
You’re listening to episode 219 of The Autism Mom Coach: Autism Parenting in Crisis.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. I am glad you’re here, and I hope you are doing well.
Last week, I did not release a podcast episode, which is not the norm for me.
I really do like to have the weekly cadence of touching base with all of you and keeping the podcast consistent because I know how easy it would be to skip a week, then another week. You know how it goes.
Anyhow, I had every intention of recording last week’s podcast because it was the day before my workshop, and I wanted to do that last push to get more folks to sign up, talk about the workshop, what folks could expect, et cetera, et cetera.
But then autism parenting life happened.
I spent most of last week on the phone with my son’s team, doctors, and providers, trying to triage and figure out what needed to happen next.
Meanwhile, I do work full-time, and so I had to take PTO for a few hours, and I spent a lot of time on the phone answering calls in between doing my daily work.
And then, of course, I had a workshop coming up on Thursday, so I was doing the social media posts and pushing out the emails that, thankfully, I had already written.
But it was just a lot, and by the end of every day, I was exhausted.
In the back of my mind, I had the thought, “I need to record the podcast episode,” but I didn’t.
And that’s what I want to talk about today because this is one of the realities of parenting an autistic kid. You never know when something is going to happen that demands your immediate attention.
You can have your entire day or week planned out, and then you get the call from school, your child has an emergency, a placement falls apart, or a situation you’ve been managing suddenly escalates.
And now you’re rearranging your schedule, making decisions, coordinating with providers, and trying to figure out what happens next.
Meanwhile, the rest of your life keeps moving, and this is where I think we get ourselves into trouble.
We start treating everything we plan to do as something we have to do, and that’s what was happening in my brain.
I have to do this podcast episode. I have to do more emails about the workshop. I have to do more work on the workshop. I have to do more social media posts.
And all of it was just in the back of my head, creating more pressure.
We try to squeeze the crisis into our already full schedules instead of recognizing that circumstances have changed and we need to refocus our attention.
And I will have to say that in the last few years, I have learned that there is really no such thing as balance.
The house on fire gets the attention.
So I have dropped things, postponed things, rearranged my schedule, and reprioritized everything because that’s what needed to happen.
But still, there’s that nagging question: Just because you could technically do something, does it mean that you should?
And I think the answer to that is no.
First of all, “should,” right? “Should” always gets us in trouble because it brings on obligations and expectations that might not be realistic.
In a crisis, we need to look at what needs to happen, what must happen, and what can wait.
And for me, one of the things that needed to happen was that I needed to take a breath because I was feeling really overwhelmed, and I did not want to bring that kind of energy into the workshop.
And that is another reality of my life. I coach autism moms every day. I have my weekly coaching call every week, no matter what is happening with me.
And so I knew that I needed to clear my head to be present for my clients so that I could help them with whatever they were dealing with in the moment.
And in that context, the podcast could wait.
So I just want to offer that to you.
If you’re in a situation where you’re thinking that you need to cross every T, dot every I, and everything needs to get done because that’s what you thought you would do, even if it’s what you committed to do, sometimes we do need to renegotiate our obligations as autism parents.
Of course, you could push through, and I’ve, in fact, done that for years.
But I am finally at a point where I can see that I do have more choice in this than I think.
I don’t have a choice in the emergency, the circumstances of the crisis, and all of those moving parts.
But I can decide: Am I going to step back in some places? Am I going to ask for help in others? Or am I just going to renegotiate obligations altogether?
And so I wanted to offer that to you.
Give yourself a break, listen to what your needs are, and know that you get to choose.
And so for those of you who are putting so much pressure on yourselves to do everything, to be everything to everybody, I just wanted to give you that permission to step back and take care of yourself, especially during a crisis.
Because it eats up so much of your time and your emotional energy that wherever you can pull some of that back, you really need to do that.
All right, everyone, I am hoping this week is a little bit smoother, and I will be back to you next week with a more fulsome episode.
Until then, take care, and I will talk to you next week.
