Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina

I am parenting kids who need skills I am still developing myself. Some I never had. Some I lost somewhere in decades of masking. Some I'm building in real time, right alongside them. This episode is about what it actually looks like to parent ND kids while figuring out your own brain. The hard moments, the repair, what they've taught me that I didn't expect, and what I most want them t...

Content note: includes a brief, lightly veiled reference to a difficult childhood moment involving suicidal thoughts. He'd get two scoops of butter pecan in a sugar cone. I'd get lemon custard. He always finished first. I never understood how. This episode is about my Daddio. About what it means to have one steady, present, reliable person when everything else is uncertain. About how one p...

Your nervous system is not being dramatic. I promise. This episode is about sensory processing differences...what's actually happening neurologically, why it gets mistaken for trauma or personality, and what it looks like when two kids in the same house have completely different reactions to the same MIDI music toy. Also: why I always had an earbud in at every office job I ever had, and why th...

Too little routine and everything feels like freefall. Too much and it starts to feel like a cage. Somewhere in between is the sweet spot, and finding it is a daily negotiation. This episode is about what it actually looks like to hold structure loosely when you're ND, homeschooling twin boys, and standing in a hotel room at vacation while someone cries about socks. The socks were never about...

When someone says accommodations are "special treatment," I want to ask special treatment compared to what? This episode is about the curb cut effect, why designing for the people who struggle most makes things better for everyone, and what I learned from years of taking zeros on homework I had actually done. Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina Episode 6: Accommodations Aren't Just For B...

Getting a late diagnosis is supposed to feel like relief, and it does... Then the grief hits. This episode is about what nobody tells you comes after the answer. The friendships that didn't work because nobody taught you the skills you needed. The therapy that helped but never quite got to the root. The fawn response, and why you spent so many years making yourself easy to keep for people who were...

I started dieting at eleven. I was told I'd be prettier if I lost weight at five years old. I spent decades punishing my body instead of living in it. Then at 17, I tried taekwondo, and everything I thought I knew about my body turned out to be wrong. This episode is about the long, complicated road from hating your body to understanding it. Yo-yo dieting, interoception, a 2020 health scare that c...

You were never lying. You were never being fake. You were just a kid trying to get through the day without getting it wrong. This episode is about masking, the thousand small adjustments ND people make every day to seem like they fit. Where it starts, what it costs, and what it looks like when you finally, slowly begin to take it off. Spoiler: it looks like Lego, crochet, and a Doctor Who hoodie o...

Have you ever been the person everyone brings their heaviest things to without having any idea how to put any of it down? This episode is about what happens when you feel everything, trust everyone, and have absolutely no filter for any of it. The ND brain, hyper-empathy, and what it finally feels like to care without carrying. Late to Everything Except Puberty with Melina Episode 2: The Empath Wi...

"But he makes eye contact. He loves hugs. He's so smart." That was my first reaction when a therapist suggested my son get an autism assessment. I want to talk about that reaction because I think a lot of us have had some version of it. This episode is about where our picture of autism and ADHD comes from, why that picture is so incomplete, and what happens when you go looking for an...