The Wildings

The Wildings

My “little” family is everything. I keep trying to learn, to understand, to empathise and to improve this world, because these humans deserve better. Here you can learn more about them, about how we work as a family, and about the fascinating, exciting and challenging melting pot of neurodiversity that is our home.

Raising Wildings

The longer story of how we got here, and what raising four very different humans has taught me.

How the Wildings came to be

I met Obiwan in 1998. I was sixteen and he was twenty-one. We became best friends immediately. Ours is a partnership of equals, where we constantly challenge and support each other; we grew up making it, and moulding it. We had both been struggling when we met, and we have gone on struggling through life ever since, but together. It has never been without its challenges.

After about a year of knowing each other we decided, mutually, that we would marry one day. We did, in 2002, when it made the most practical sense. We have made four humans together, and we learn how to raise them by stumbling along and letting them teach us about themselves, about ourselves, and about how we can all rise together. Our aim is to survive raising them as challenging, supportive, equal partners in our world. We live in a cottage in the New Forest, near the beach. It sounds idyllic. Honestly, it is pretty messy.

We come from two quite unique families — or possibly four — and both of us feel strongly that we belong to each other's families, for better or worse, as well as having made our own little hybrid. Our most recent stretch of discovery has centred on the neurodiversity running through all of us, and on the wildness that passes for culture in this house.

I call us the Wildings here, in this space, to include everyone who made us and to capture that culture.