In this episode, Sarah Kernion, a dedicated advocate for neurodiversity and mother of two non-speaking autistic children, shares how she embraces her children’s unique ways of interacting with the world. She discusses her ‘inchstones versus milestones’ mentality, which celebrates the potential of neurodiverse individuals. Sarah offers personal anecdotes, emphasizes the importance of sitting with grief and adversity to move past it, and expresses her hopes that her advocacy will lead to greater understanding and inclusion for neurodivergent individuals in the workplace and beyond.
Episode Highlights:
01:52 Understanding Suffering and Acceptance
04:29 Parenting Neurodivergent Children
07:36 Challenges and Realities of Special Needs Parenting
12:07 Harnessing Neurodivergent Strengths
14:55 Adapting Parenting Styles
17:41 The Gift of Diversity
27:31 The Importance of Resilience and Vulnerability
28:52 Understanding Brain Plasticity and Empathy
30:13 Embracing Discomfort and Growth
31:15 Personal Journey Through Postpartum Psychosis
33:14 Living in the Present and Preparing for the Future
Sarah Kernion is a keynote speaker, neurodiversity educator, and advocate for the autism community. As a mother of two non-speaking autistic children, she is driven by her personal experiences to empower companies to understand and appreciate the complexities and strengths of neurodivergent employees. Sarah encourages adopting an inchstones vs milestones mentality in life’s development. Her journey through diagnoses, IEPs, and medical evaluations has taught her resilience. Beyond parenting, she leads workshops in workplaces and healthcare settings to foster inclusive environments. Sarah is committed to breaking down barriers and promoting acceptance and possibilities for every child with special needs.
You can connect with Sarah at: saturdaysstory
Episode Transcript:
00:45
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words. Instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Sarah Kernian inspires and influences others with her insight, imagination, and initiative so that they are moved to choose inner action over isolation in order to improve with inchstones. I love that concept.
01:15
to give a little bit more about her and Saturday’s story.com. This idea of coming through from understanding autism. As a mother of two non-speaking autistic children, Sarah is a passionate neurodiversity advocate, challenging stigmas and embracing vulnerability using her inchstones versus milestones mentality to celebrate neurodiverse individuals and their potential. Her journey is more than a story. It is a global call to action for understanding and inclusion in companies worldwide.
01:46
Sarah, I know I put a long string on that kite, but thank you for being here today and thank you for your time. We were discussing earlier about this understanding of suffering and how that oftentimes the avoidance of suffering causes more suffering in the long term. And for me, this idea that I always say that the greater the weight, the greater the weight, the greater that we face.
02:11
we wait to face adversity, the greater the weight, the greater the waste of that adversity once we actually face it. Can you explain to me this concept of being able to suffer in a way that’s… I had never experienced, well, first of all, thank you for having me. I love actin on verba in every bit, in every iota, in every part of what those letters put together mean. I lived a very typical milestones hit.
02:40
life up until having children. And when my daughter Millie was diagnosed with autism around the age of two and a half, the pain that comes along with a diagnosis of a child of one of your children is really the grief that the life that you anticipated and the life that
03:10
the dream that you had been sold no longer exists. And there’s a wonderful poem that I give in a lot of my talks which talks about you prepare to go to Italy your entire life as a young woman who wants to become a mother or a man that wants to become a father. And you prepare for Italy and you learn about Italy and you learn the phrasing and you learn and you decide where you’re gonna go in the map. And when you land after getting on the flight and you land in Holland and the flight attendant says, this is where you will be.
03:39
but you’re not, you never landed in a world of pestilence and famine and disgusting humans. You landed in the world of tulips and windmills and Rembrandts, but your whole life has been watching people coming and going from Italy. And so for me, going back to the suffering and grief, you have to sit for a moment in the hot loneliness that is the fact that you are not in Italy.
04:09
and you are in a place that you never anticipated you were gonna be in. And I think by acknowledging it, sitting with it, allowing it to pass through, the moving through that pain allows for the suffering to dissipate because you end up being so mindful of where your feet are, so mindful of where your choice, your conscious choice of motherhood. There’s so many ways to parent, right? There’s so many ways that we were just bombarded this day and age with.
04:36
theories on what parenting is best, conscious parenting, gentle parenting, authoritative parenting. But what I found boiled down to is all of those can be true all at once. I’m here as a parent to this specific child. And how that conscious choice, once I got through the news and the aftershock of what that diagnosis was, it brought me so into the present moment as a mother that it made for
05:06
arguably what I believe was to be my motherhood experience. I became who I was because of that diagnosis from my daughter and then subsequently my son. And it’s so true. So many times we end up subconsciously pushing the brake on ourselves with this resistance, with this denial, with trying to push this thing to the side.
05:33
There’s an analogy that they have in the book called already free where they say if we take Discomfort and we try to push it to the side the more we continue to do that the more I eventually start to Go around and now my entire life rotates around this thing rotates around that thing that I am unable to face and then Vicariously my family’s life rotates around my lack of capacity
06:00
That’s right. To embrace the reality of the situation. And now I’m doing a huge disservice to them, let alone send them on a trajectory from ethically, morally that does not serve them. And then I had the audacity to be surprised when all of a sudden there’s incongruencies afterwards. Exactly. I don’t mean to laugh at it, but it’s just, there’s these false narratives and these stories that we tell ourselves of what is happening or has happened.
06:28
that actually don’t match up with what they being experience and the actual event of what you experience. And yes, I mean, I love that I can visually see what you’re saying. And like, it becomes then the core of your existence is the denial of the reality and the truth. And it’s almost then permeates and becomes the only thing that you think of. And the only reason that you’re
06:57
getting up every day. And I made, it was a very conscious choice to become more than a caretaker and make these diagnoses a part of just what my life is to be, not that I am to become the diagnoses and to immerse and to be confused and questioning and wrangling with the why over and over again.
07:25
you know, I am someone’s child too. So their hope for me is for me to become the best version of who I am. I’m not here to then just succumb to this black hole of grief, denial, and like you said, pushing away where that I just become engulfed by the denial. And, you know, unfortunately, specifically in the special needs parenting world, I do believe that I know obviously we could probably go to the end of the internet on this topic, but
07:54
you know, Ryan Holliday and Stoicism, there is such an ego in the way for most of these parents that I come in touch with for one-on-one peer counseling. They’re so angry and they feel so hurt by something that doesn’t have to hurt them. And their ego is just like leading, like everything about it is like, well, that’s not supposed to
08:24
what I’m supposed to experience. That’s not who I am. Well, who told you that? And it’s become one of the biggest conversations that I’ve had over and over again in a one-to-one peer-to-peer, autism mom to autism mom STEM sessions is them saying, I want this for my child. That’s what I want for my kid. And I would say, that’s so wonderful you want that.
08:53
I don’t know if you realize that wanting something versus what is the best for your child, have you faced the music on that yet? And what story that that is creating? And to your point, the story then becomes what you’re not doing and what your child’s not doing versus what they are doing. I actually ran into a friend just this morning who was so sad when her son got diagnosed.
09:23
And she came to me and she said, how do I, I heard that you are so tied to the developmental pediatrician in New York City and central Jersey. Who can I get to remove the diagnosis from my son’s file? And I said, do you want Lucas to be anything but Lucas? She’s like, no, I just love him so much. So, well, what is removing a diagnosis going to do? It’s not gonna change who Lucas is.
09:53
I think when people start to realize that they do their own inner work and they move their ego out of the way and they start to live for who they are and who their children are and the unique experience it is to, I believe the gift of raising a neurodivergent child, there’s so much this world can benefit from the way that they see the world and the complexity of it. It’s so true.
10:20
Even that emotion that we attach to this hardship that we try to avoid, again, until we face it, it permeates everything, it influences everything, it has a residue, this texture that comes over the lens of everything that we see. And until we, when I spoke to Robert Green on the show, he talked about this idea of this radical realism, this idea of just accepting it for what it is, what you’re describing this idea of ego. People need to understand that it…
10:48
everything in this world is not about them. Yeah. Or their expectations, or their lack of expectations, or those expectations being met or even realistic. It’s like, that’s fantastic that you would like to have this thing right now that’s irrelevant. Yeah. The reality is this, what are you willing to do to move forward? And then back to this notion also of, where is the evidence that this is actually harming you? Right, right.
11:15
It’s not, it’s harming your ego. It’s harming the fact of what your expectation was. Adapt that expectation, reorient now in real time. Because if you truly care about your child, that’s what you should be caring about. Not what you think or what the stigma is or what somebody else may or may not think in the process of trying to raise this human. I think, you know, I’m sure you would agree with this in any sort of feat that you tackle. My…
11:41
trajectory and my choice to do that for specifically Mac and Millie, my under two with autism, is not in competition with another person’s choice to parent their autistic child. There’s a phrase in the special needs community of if you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism. And I believe that that’s the same for truly any human. I don’t think that any child should be compared.
12:11
in a developmental way to any other child. I understand that we have frameworks of education and society that have become standardized norms. However, in the way that you create this little cocoon of your home and allow for there to be so many different choices to make that don’t harm any of the others, but that are specific to them, it allows…
12:38
that it just allows, it frees, it’s so freeing as a parent. You know, it’s, I had a, I was on a, doing a talk last night with LinkedIn’s families that are in their Asia offices. And the one employee said, how do you stay resilient to parenting and disciplining your neurodivergent child versus your neurotypical one? Because it’s such a different way of parenting.
13:08
You really can’t discipline. I can’t discipline my younger to the same I do my oldest. And what I said is that what I’ve learned through my children being who they are, this might be different for theirs, is that my younger two have 100% receptive language skills through the roof. I actually talk to them exactly how I would talk to my oldest in terms of being disciplined. They might not physically react the same way.
13:35
But if I look at my daughter and she swipes the ice cream out of my son’s hand, which she did the beach last week, and takes it and she took a bite of it. And I say, and she is death grip on that ice cream cone. She’s got another one already. Like she already has one. She takes it and I say, Mellie, I know that you want both. That’s your brother’s. We do not take your brother’s ice cream. And she looks at me and like with her glasses down, like, and gives it back. Exactly like a…
14:05
typical eight and a half year old that was put in her place. She knows, she has an ice cream cone, but because I assume competence, I assume that her receptive language and I assume that she knows exactly what she’s doing because I’ve witnessed it over and over again. If I talk with her, like she understands, which she does, we end up being able to get to the same level of disciplining, even though it looks wildly different.
14:34
Cause all I’d have to really do if my oldest did that was say, Morgan. And she’d go, sorry, mom. You’re, I just wanted to try his. I’d be like, I get it. We don’t take your brother’s ice cream. But it’s really the same. It’s just the acceptance of who they are and parenting to that child. Let me also pause. It’s freaking exhaustive. This is exhaustive, right? It’s exhaustive. If I’m not doing my best,
15:04
in that parenting sense, to make them the most independent, self-advocate selves that they can be, whether they’re typical or neurodivergent. I don’t think I’m doing my job in my role as a mother. Well, and you pointed that out that again, you’re not just being artificially, toxically positive in the in this. You’re accepting this radically forwarded and saying, okay, there will be some challenges, but what doesn’t have challenges? Right. And so if that’s the case,
15:33
how am I going to embrace this? And then let’s also be honest, what are the alternatives? Yeah, what are the alternatives? Yeah, I mean, exactly. The alternative is denial of how their growth is going to happen, to be sad and arguably continually grief stricken by what they’re not doing. And, you know, one of the, I’m sure you would know even just as a…
16:00
observer of or avid learner of neurodivergency, autism, they get really honed in on certain things. Like love, my daughter is obsessed with the alphabet. She is fully, obviously, alphabet. She loves letters. She loves anything that has the alphabet. If I have a shirt that says NYC on it, it’s the first thing she points to. If you can hardly look at it as a beautiful thing they love to do.
16:28
it ends up becoming just the first step of a walk, like to your point about widening their development and growth. But you have to accept that that’s how she wants to learn. And my son is much more into the sensory and the lights and the colors and that. So you can pair that with, you love that red button so much. Do you know what else is red? The apples. Go get a red apple for mommy. But that’s not gonna work with my Millie.
16:58
And that’s certainly not how I taught Morgan her colors, but it’s just looking at it through a different lens with each kid. And I think…
17:11
Knowing that the growth can continue to happen and that it’s going to look so different than what any of your peers are doing is one of the biggest lessons in being here in the moment and the power of now, without a doubt. I wouldn’t trade my children for the world because I would not be able to live in the moment, in the present, and be so…
17:38
full of gratitude for what I’m learning as a 40-year-old woman now. It’s because of my children being who they are. Well, it’s also this understanding of how to adapt and see what’s really going on in real time. We talked about people understand that there are five love languages. Even in leadership, it’s similar. There are some people that want you to be direct and succinct, some people that need you to circumvent and go really around the subject before they get to that place of understanding. It’s the same thing with a child, right?
18:08
You meet them where they are for one, it’s about anything that has letters for another one. It’s about colors. That’s fine. Let’s accentuate the positive in this. Let’s meet them where they are in this. Let’s use this commonality to help them succeed and further their development in this arena, as opposed to just saying that bugs me that they’re fixated with colors or, or stimming or anything else that, you know, nonverbal children do. Correct? Yeah. I mean, there’s a, um, my daughter does this when she’s really happy.
18:38
She hits her hard. She goes like, and it’s mostly during song or reading books over and over again. And that’s her way of realizing, her way of saying, this feels really good. Like, I feel really good right now. And it’s not going to be a laughter or the elation that you might hear of a kid coming off a ride being like, that was so much fun. But she just goes like this. And it’s, again, it doesn’t have to be as hard as people make it.
19:07
like to your point about is this really happening? Is what you’re saying that you feel like you’re experiencing, is that actually what’s happening? Or is that something that you’ve thought that, I’ve been told this is gonna be exponentially harder. So you’re right, it is exponentially harder.
19:24
I found that even in the gross motor skills, fine motor skills area, that they don’t tend to catch up per se with their typical peers. But as I look and have modeling of friends that have older children or autistic individuals that I’m friends with that are in their 30s, the skills that have been so forced upon us from a milestone era,
19:54
is not really indicative of success at all. You know, my friend, Kari Magro is one of, he’s known as the autistic professional speaker. He’s in his 30s, self-advocate, speaks all over the country, opens up for temple at major conventions. And he can’t ride a bike to save his life. He’s like, I can’t button a shirt. Oh, well. I mean, it’s just like, when have we become so scripted?
20:24
to these eight and a half by 11 sheets at a pediatrician’s office, what for me as a new mom to say like, I did a good job, I didn’t do anything. Like my daughter didn’t roll over because I coached her to roll over at three months. She just innately figured out through being a human and one with a typical brain that this is her hand and this was her hand.
20:54
figure that out as quickly and that’s okay. Guess what? They’re walking. They can run. It’s really interesting once you just, again, it sounds so easy to say, but you just take a deep breath to what the potential is and lean into competency over deficiency. And it’s just freeing. It’s so freeing. I hope through talking about how Millian Mac are developing,
21:24
that companies and institutions start to realize that how they see the world and how they learn will benefit industries going forward. That’s become a thread of mine that I never really thought was part of my mission. But someone in my circle pointed it out that the way that the million Mac absorb things, specifically like a sporting event or a movie or a concert,
21:55
that they’ll watch over and over again. They’re so satisfied by that repetition. And specifically with my daughter, she will watch college football and NFL football all along the fall. Does not even care. She’s a song I could narrate and sing. Her life could be a Broadway show if she could choose. That would be me singing her life to her. But on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, she will sit there and watch football all day.
22:23
And she’s watching it in a way like, they didn’t do that last time. I’ll catch her on her iPad watching an Alabama national championship game, the same one. She’s eight. And I just wonder, I have to hold out. It’s not hope, it’s just this light indication that her mind could potentially be a positive for competition or for
22:53
you know, an institution to see things differently, to have a competitive edge. I know a few CEOs and founders and co-founders that are on the spectrum. And as you say, there are certain things that they’re not good at, but they were good enough to find people around them to hire into those positions and man, when it comes to whatever their profession is, if it’s IT, if it’s coding, whatever it is, they have this super power that allows them.
23:20
to see light years ahead. I’m not just talking two or three moves, I’m talking- Oh, multiple. Right, and when they see that, and now they can give that to an integrator, or they can give that to a person that can paint the vision, it’s, like you said, it’s exponential to anything else that we see right before us. It is, I mean, it’s, and again, like, what is life if not that? Like, I really feel that in my bones of like, when I get to witness my child-
23:49
start to do these things. And because of me hoping to allow her and him to become the best versions of themselves, I can then celebrate those in a way, even though they probably, I’m sure I believe that they know that they are different and that they absorb the world differently than maybe their sister does. But that it’s still to be celebrated. And it’s still to, and that’s where I,
24:20
because I’m so acutely aware of how their growth is going and progressing, I am charged with celebrating, first and foremost. There’s no one else that’s more charged with celebrating that. And it’s not from a sense of trying to say that my child’s better or, you know, I’m constantly pleasing them. It’s not praise per se, it’s acknowledgement of, oh my gosh, I saw that too, but you saw it before me. You know, you catch.
24:48
These autistic kids who don’t make good eye contact, looking over at you like, you saw, mom saw that? I saw that? And it’s the sixth sense, very persnickety kind of detail, but the attention to it is the good stuff. It’s the good stuff. And I see it more and more as my younger two age. And it’s, I have to believe that it’s because of harnessing and not squashing what they’re innately.
25:16
choosing to engage and how they engage the world and not trying to shape shift that to be typical or there’s a term called masking in the neurodivergent community, which is trying to be typical. And so you get really good at covering your autistic or neurodivergent traits. And I think the more you just lean into having the safe space for them to do that through their stimming or,
25:46
You know, my son really loves jumping. I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s typical for an autistic little boy. But then I think he jumped. Another six year old boy doesn’t want to jump. You know, he just loves to jump 10 times as much. It’s, it’s also great for my couch, but you know, well, it also shows that why we would be maybe talking about very specific attributes or characteristics. It’s the same with a child.
26:15
does not have the neurodivergence. Yes. If you have one child that happens to love to read, one that loves music, one that loves athletics, we don’t try to push the one that’s not athletic to read or study music. We don’t try to push the one that loves music to go out and play football or something that they don’t enjoy. Let’s just find the thing that they like, the thing that they are naturally, this attribute that they already have ingrained within them. And as you were saying, if we’re resistant to it, it may seem more difficult. But again, what has to change?
26:45
Our child can’t change this, but we can adapt. We can change. We can innovate. We can reorient in a way that truly says, okay, that’s the case. And I have found in my experience, again, this idea that adversity is a gift. It puts you in a position that you would never have chosen normally. But once you’re there, it gives you a perspective that you couldn’t have gotten any other way. And there’s no way you would have voluntarily found that. And then when you have that perspective,
27:12
Now you start to see these other vantage points again, that maybe the other 90% of the world doesn’t, that’s okay because that’s now to our advantage. That’s now something that we can really harness to serve us in any arena that we enter. Gosh, I mean, you just hit the last, whatever arena that we enter. I think, you know, I’m also a real avid scholar of Brene Brown’s research on shame and vulnerability. And I love that she always says, she’s like, when you’re in the arena, do not tap out. There’s a reason that you’re in there.
27:42
and there’s going to be doors being lifted left and right. Don’t tap out. And there is a general pattern to tap out when things get too hard. And I believe it only does the trajectory of the natural progress of things. It delays, if you want to talk about delays, the delay is actually not the actual typical milestone delay. It’s actually the delay in the potential.
28:11
for your child. And, you know, we can talk about research and stuff on, on, in order of our different minds, but the brain’s plasticity under five is, I’m sure, you know, is, is wildly huge. And once they hit five, it’s a different way of circuitry development. And I always thought about that in two ways. One, yes, it’s plastic and it has much more ability to, to change. But what do I really want to change? Do I really want to change that?
28:40
that plasticity or do I just want to accentuate the circuitry that they actually have? Now, for me, you know, Mac and Millie have a co-morbid diagnoses of apraxia, which is an oral motor planning issue. So their brain knows what it wants to say, but their musculature cannot, doesn’t have the connective response. Now that to me feels more like the plasticity of the brain and how I can help with that. But the way they actually think, I just wanted to encourage that circuitry, not change it.
29:10
which kind of pushes the envelope with some in the autistic community. Of course, but that’s why you’re doing what you’re doing. Right. When I spoke to Dr. Mark Goulston, he says, and he was a psychiatrist for over 30 years, taught FBI negotiators like how to do their job, taught Chris Voss what he was doing, incredible executive coach before he recently passed away, but he said, when you’re listening to people, he says, people want to feel heard.
29:39
They want to feel seen, but most importantly, they want to feel felt. So you being a mother and having to put yourself with this application of pragmatic empathy, truly being in their place, what are they feeling? What is this emotion? What is, what is their response? What is the reaction? This serves you not only for your child, but now you can recognize it as a characteristic within another person or.
30:05
I just still see this other person going through, as we were discussing, hardship, difficulty, adversity, resistance. So many times we find that, especially in society, we’re conditioned to believe that once it’s difficult, that’s when it’s okay to tap out. But the reality is once it’s difficult, this is truly when you’re actually getting to the place of learning. This is truly the friction that sharpens you if you’re willing to embrace that.
30:34
And there was a lot further that we can go in those, those capacities, but we have to have the courage to embrace this discomfort and welcome it in a way. Welcome that suffering and say, this is going to make me better when I’m on the other side of it. And as so often is the case, once we’ve gone through it and we’ve looked back upon it, it’s not nearly as daunting as we thought it was. We realized that we’re not made out of porcelain. We’re not fragile. And then we also start realizing.
31:02
And there’s a lot of other areas where I’m under indexing unnecessarily artificially. So how long have I been living within this belief system that was simply, again, my own narrative that I was telling myself all along? I mentioned before I had such a typical trajectory from, you know, let’s say birth to 25 or 26. And my first big experience with pain and hardship was I had a terrible, arguably, terrible
31:31
bringe line postpartum psychosis with my first, with really deep anxiety postpartum. And I got through that and had wonderful, I was living in New York at the time and had a wonderful women’s health psychiatrist that worked with me to get me through that, through therapy and medication and all the right positive body ownership postpartum research-based tools. And I remember getting through that and it was a,
32:01
maybe a half a year to where I was healed from that specific event. And I thought to myself, silly, looking back now, that was the hard thing that my life was giving me. Like there, I did it. Like, look at me. I like really took such initiative to work through that. And I mean, to the point Marcus, where I was speaking about postpartum and maternal postpartum experiences, because I realized that was another element of motherhood that was…
32:30
not being discussed enough was that, is this fourth trimester and the hormones and the just, you know, sheer exhaustion factor of in birth and all these things. But at a certain age where I thought life would hand you a few of these, and it was, if you got through one, you’re like, I know what pain now is, check that. Like, and I love now that I know that to not be true.
32:58
And to know even now in multiple phases of experience of chapters of pain and suffering, that there is going to be a wave of that again. I know there will be. And it doesn’t scare me anymore. It doesn’t, I don’t fear this unknown. I get asked quite a bit, you know, what does Mac and Millie’s future look like? What does it hold? Do you ever fear what will happen when you’re gone? Or what, you know, what will happen if, as they, you know,
33:28
age out of the school system. At the risk of sounding naive, I don’t even think that far ahead. I don’t. My goal every day is to do the next right thing for each of my kids and for myself. And I believe that becomes a really genuine compass of life. And if I am having Mac and Millie become the best versions of themselves today, Friday, April 12th, 2024,
33:58
that I go to bed pretty happily every night. And I know that it might sound like I’m unprepared, but it’s actually the opposite. I’m actually more prepared for all the unknowns because of that choice to do so. Yeah, this is truly a VUCA environment in which you’re embarking, bald to unknown. Oh yeah. Having said that, the reality is we’re all.
34:27
embarking on the same horizon, if we’re very honest. Right. There’s no guarantee, first of all, that we will have the next day. And as you were saying, this very present mentality, whether you be a CEO, a leader, a father, a mother, any sort of capacity where your decisions matter, even in poker, they say, it’s not about you’re, you’re not supposed to win. You are supposed to make the best decision that you possibly can in this moment. Right. Could I get involved in this hand?
34:57
No, that’s the best decision. If I don’t play a hand for two hours, that’s maybe the best decision. If I’m in the chaos, if I’m in the face of adversity and I can still maintain that structural integrity under pressure and make the best decision irrespective of how much pressure’s on me, then that again is the goal. And lots of times when we do that on a long enough timeline, now it’s hard for us to lose. Now we’re able to go to that next place, which comes back to your point of
35:27
these inchstones, I always talk about them as microadversities, these smaller things that are these smaller chunks, these smaller bites. Lao Tzu’s concept of, I’m not building a wall, I’m just laying one brick as perfectly as I possibly can right now. And then I try to do it again tomorrow and I try to go with later. But if we can just focus on those things, even as in mountain warfare school. Yeah.
35:54
If I looked at how high that mountain was, that thing would crush me. But I’m just trying to get to that next foothold, that next spike, that next place, that next breath. I think special means parenting requires you to be an aid in a greater capacity physically to your children. But it is because of that, like I actually specifically took, you say climbing to the next foothold. I took my oldest and a friend of hers and my daughter Millie to a indoor climbing wall.
36:25
I had to help Millie the entire time. There’s no, you know, en belay. I am right there. I am right there with my hands under her tush. But watching her take that all in in a different way is allowing me then to see how she’s seeing it. It’s like the more, while I’m aiding her, she’s actually aiding my vision on how to take in the world. So I don’t ever see it as a level of less then.
36:56
There’s such a label that they’re less than, that they can do less, they don’t do as much. And it’s actually not that at all, but because they have to be supportive in a way, because the world is set up how it is, it looks like they can’t do as much.
37:20
And it’s actually what you’re saying about a loud suit. It’s actually, no, they’re actually only focusing on the next brick. Did you not, it’s like, did you not notice that y’all? Like that’s, that’s what she’s doing. She’s only focusing on the next brick. And the sensory part of that is the ability to tune out almost. I mean, Millie and Max truly only know how to be themselves. There is not a single thing that society has infiltrated to their mind and hearts.
37:49
that has told them they should be something that they aren’t. How, that’s honestly like for me, as a very like feminine, girly, blonde Manhattanite woman, I’m influenced by society. They certainly aren’t. It’s the best lesson to learn. They are just building that next brick as perfectly as they can. And they need a little help. Who doesn’t? I was gonna say, these are all lessons that they keep telling us.
38:16
people keep saying now, come back to the present moment, focus on the process. Don’t worry about, right? All these things. And again, being authentically who the hell you are, a lot of people don’t remember who they were before society told them who they were or stacked upon them an expectation of what the next thing should be. And then again, but that’s the beauty of adversity because it burns all that stuff away. It strips away all the BS, all the pretense, all the masks. And once that falls down.
38:46
Once we have that weight off of us, it’s actually liberating. And now we can boldly move forward in the direction that we should be oriented towards already, as opposed to trying to walk against it sideways or backwards in a way that doesn’t serve us to our strength. I think like you’re saying within the adversity too, once you’re open to those experiences, you then are able to learn. You’re more agile in your learning capacity, right? Like.
39:17
which is again why I interact and travel so much with my younger two, is that people say to me, well, that’s rocking their routine, their routine-based kids. They love structure and organization to what they, and how to anticipate. Well, I do too. But the interesting part about it is that my eight and a half year old who doesn’t speak knows exactly how to board an airplane. She knows exactly what to do.
39:46
probably better than most eight-year-olds do. And like, those and sits down and buckles and it’s like, so what the world was saying is that that’s breaking her of her routine. But the irony is that she actually, once she experiences it and knows that that is part of her repertoire of routines, she probably is the best traveler. I always joke, I would travel to China with Millie. She’s like, I got my iPad, I got my headphones, I got mom and she brings the snacks. Like.
40:15
Like she actually probably won’t challenge that routine, but you have to establish it. My daughter, my oldest is dragged around to therapies and related services for her younger siblings. That’s just the name of her life. And the opposite is that her brother and sister are dragged to basketball games on the weekends. And…
40:41
As you can imagine, the court sounds and the atmosphere and the bleachers and the crowd and the buzzer. I mean, it was a lot at first when my oldest started getting into, you know, more competitive basketball. And I thought, I’m not going to let my family as a whole not show up for their sister. I mean, they might not be able to stay in support in a typical manner, but we’re gonna go.
41:10
And it took him about a year to get my son to fully be able to sit through a basketball game. And it started off with me sitting on the court. This was 18 months, two years ago. So he’s four and a half, five at the time, fully facing me. His head is buried into my chest. My hands are covered over his ears. And I’m rocking him off the floor of the court while the game is going on. And I’m going, we’re at a basketball game.
41:37
or at your sister’s basketball game, she’s on the court right now. Every so often he’d look, turn back, he’d just watching, listening to his show, listening to his songs. He’d look up this, I’d see the buzzer countdown and you know, that’s a eh. And I’d like consciously notice, I’d plug his ears as tight as I could and I’d slowly start to like give it one second then do it. Brother just walks right up into the stands right now. We sit in the top corner, it’s a little more contained, it feels a little like more of a nook.
42:05
And Mac and Millie are just part of the families that come to the basketball games now. But people always go, well, how did you do that? I just, I engaged with what the reality was. There’s a court, it squeaks, there’s a ball, it dribbles, there’s a buzzer, it sounds. How can Mac be okay with that environment over time? And they just, they’re now just siblings of a basketball player. And while I know my 11 year old tween doesn’t like to, you know, give accolades to her mother and you know.
42:36
say thank you so much for bringing Mac and Millie. I’m gonna leave a little bit, I don’t like to use the word hope a lot, but I’m pretty hopeful that when she hits her 30s and 40s, she’s gonna remember that her brother and sister were there to support her as much as she was for them. And it’s a testament to that gradual exposure kind of therapy, right? You’re just slowly, and it’s like anything else, weightlifting, going for a walk, going for a run, any sort of conversation, cognitive capacity, all those things we learn. Yeah.
43:06
I called it an adversity scale. So we have that 10 on our scale, whatever the hardest thing is, you’re missing postpartum at that point in your life, that was your 10. So you’re like, Oh, anything from here down, I’m good. And most of life is going to be below that. But sometimes adversity comes up and clicks it up a notch and it says, Hey, this is what the reality is. And we go through the five stages. We go through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But even that, that exposure to those things, those five
43:36
steps with a lot of pressure on us, we get better at going directly from one to five. We don’t skip the steps. We accept it entirely. And now we say, okay, this is going to be difficult. I get that. I have no misconceptions about that. Yeah, there’s no misconception that I’m not jumping through any hoop to get to the end goal. There’s no, trust me. It’s like, I know we’re not, we’re not jumping a level at all. Absolutely. But once we’re there, like you say, now it says, okay.
44:05
this is this inchstone component, this is what the hardship was. And now look at your, like you said, your kids are able to be in that environment. It’s so cool. It’s like the coolest thing ever that, you know, then we go to the app, it sounds, it’s so basic and it’s so simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. And that we just go and do everything that any other typical family is afforded to do. It’s gonna look a lot different. And the ignition energy and the sustain, the sustainment energy is all.
44:35
heck of a lot more intense, but we’re there. And we’re engaging and we’re living. And we are living and we are experiencing. And I really believe that everyone that has watched those lived experiences that directly in my world have benefited from seeing those inchstone moments. They see it, they’ve seen and remember those moments where I was only able to be there on the court for five minutes and walk out and come back in and walk out.
45:04
It’s a modeling. I mean, if anything, what is parenting if not modeling, right? You’re modeling for what a full adult human can and should look like. And that modeling of Mac and Millie’s development, even to other children has been just such a positive. It’s such a positive for everyone involved. And I do believe that the more I talk about what they can do and how they can do it.
45:33
that in 10, 15 years, obviously alongside the world, hopefully doing more and other people in similar fashions, it will create space in the workplace for the neurodivergent mind to be simply a part of the HR structure of any organization. They’re doing that. I mean, these AI companies are doing it. They are, and it shows us the power of inclusion.
45:58
but not in this arbitrary way where we have a bunch of people that are unqualified to be in a certain arena. It’s not like that at all. I’m saying that there are certain advantages, certain strengths that they have. Why not bring them into this, into this arena in a way that actually not only serves them, but it contributes, but now they’re able to be a part of a company. And now the company is getting this again, that’s a secret weapon. It’s this thing that other people turn their head to, or they don’t want to have to worry about a site.
46:28
listen, the whole John Boyd idea is like, listen, look for the mismatches, look for the opportunities there. Yeah, one of the topics that rose to the top after my first year in talking about neurodivergency and advocacy in live speaking forums was how receptive Gen Z is to the inclusion of neurodivergent employees.
46:55
even within their social friend work and frameworks, they have an emotional intelligence, I think that is greater than the generations that have, like our generations that have come before and their inquisitive nature on how and why, because of their raw more emotional intelligence and leaning into the vast pinwheel of emotions and how the, within…
47:20
joy is gratitude and happiness and all these little micro, like to your point, like micro categories of the core human emotions. I was shocked to receive that Gen Z is going, because they are gonna be the future leaders. And if they are the ones that are going to be hiring Mac and Millie one day, it gave me a lot of personal validation from, they didn’t even, they didn’t realize they were giving it to me, right? I thought, well, these are the ones in 10 or 15 years that’ll be hiring Mac and Millie and they’re asking the right questions now.
47:51
saying, how do I best support my cousin who comes over for Thanksgiving? That’s on the spectrum that always runs up to my bedroom to hide. And I thought, that woman might be the head of HR one day, who has the experience in a family setting, now is hearing it in a professional setting. And will continue to hear it through hopefully me and other voices, that when she gets to become the hiring manager in 10 to 15 years goes, yeah.
48:20
I would love to see what Millie has to offer on the strategic end. And it becomes a no brainer as to what that support looks like because it’s just already part of the implementation of what an employee workforce looks like. So I know Gen Z gets a bad rep. I’m like real pro Gen Z. It’s just like any generation, right? Gen X had certain advantages, certain disadvantages. Gen Z has certain advantages, disadvantages, and every generation will. To be clear, I’m a geriatric millennial though. I’m the…
48:49
I’m right on the cusp. I’m an exenial to be to be fair. I am in that very micro generation I’m 83 which I grew up without a cell phone, but I got a smartphone in college. So I’m gonna guess you’re a few years older though. Yeah, I’m 52. So I Literally had one foot in and out but at the same time we have to again we have to embrace that chaos That that’s the only place opportunity is and if we’re not willing to weigh down into it
49:18
and build the resilience to be able to withstand whatever it takes to get to those places. Especially if the enemy is afraid to go into chaos. Yes. That’s my advantage. I will shake it up all day, knowing that I can be resilient while other people will hesitate and wait to do whatever it is that they think they need to do next. I really hope that even beyond special needs parenting, I really hope that through discussions like this, that all parents continue to choose that. Parenting is chaotic. It’s just by nature chaotic. You’re raising…
49:48
small humans that are developing and growing. And it’s hard to choose the hard within the hard. It is, it really is. And I hope that through discussions like this, people say, well, maybe if I do it once, can maybe I’ll, or I’m gonna do it again. You know, my sister has three typical children and her husband and her are taking them all to Japan this summer. And they’re under the age of 10. Wow. And she goes, and every summer they do this. And she said, Sarah, why not?
50:17
Why not? I mean, it’s the same cost as going to the beach for a week. There’s no reason, it’s gonna be really hard. But just like last summer in Italy, the kids are only gonna remember eating gelato four times a day. They’re gonna eat sushi. They’re gonna remember the rice teddies and swimming in the ocean. They’re gonna, it’s hard, but it’s always worth it. So I really hope these kinds of conversations push even the typical most, I don’t wanna say average, but the bell curve of
50:47
folks to choose a harder, more leaning into the chaos because it can create and open up a world, I think where we understand more people and more experiences and just have a greater lens on life. Absolutely. Sarah, I wanna be respectful of your time. Can you tell us more about Saturday’s stories? Can you tell us where we can learn more about you, hire you, bring you into speak to our corporations, to our companies, et cetera?
51:17
Wonderful, thank you. So Saturday’s story began, really, I was a tried and true mommy blogger in Manhattan back when I first had my first child, which expanded to Instagram. And I just really leaned into being vulnerable and sharing about the special needs parenting journey. So it started Saturday’s story was that I loved Saturdays. I loved the options that Saturdays had. And it was always just so exciting in New York, whether you were single, married in a relationship or as a family or with a child.
51:47
that has evolved now to my advocacy work. I do talks on the instance over milestones mentality to employee resource groups, just generalize HR conferences to just bind whether it’s the parents or the medical professionals, the related service professionals that really anyone that’s coming in touch with with neurodivergent individuals, which is all of us these days, whether self-identified or not. And
52:15
mostly share most of my professional wins on LinkedIn. So they can find me through Sarah Kearney and on LinkedIn as well. And my website, SaturdayStory.com. I love it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for the work that you’re doing. And I would be amiss not to thank Mark McGrath for the intro as well. He’s a good connector, that one. I think so. I think he’s tremendous. Thank you so much. I will talk to you soon. Thanks, Marcus.
52:41
Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
