I met Katonya Trent, founder of the organization and community, Konnected Thru 22, on Instagram over a year ago through our mutual friend Yaa Abbsensetts-Dobson, founder of Spoken Black Girl. And I remember being instantly drawn to that Mama Warrior spirit of hers, along with her inspiring story of delivering her son, Kareem, at 22 weeks, alone, inside her home. How can anyone not marvel at the strength and resilience it takes to move through such a life altering experience?

No one would fault her for focusing solely on her child in the years ahead. But Katonya’s heart and advocacy are expansive; she is a fierce premature birth advocate, author, and speaker, working, not solely for her son Kareem, but all families who are raising children born premature.

My brain has always worked “differently”, and I was relieved to find a new level of self-acceptance after being diagnosed with ADHD in postpartum. Once we left the toddler years, we learned that our son, W, also had ADHD. This added another layer to developing new strategies and tools as a family. At times it can feel like double the chaos, but being on this journey with W has also helped in two ways: 1) having a kid who is also neurodivergent has allowed me to see ADHD behaviors and tendencies from an outside perspective and 2) it has motivated me to keep trying new tools and skills so that W can grow up practicing them from an early age. Living in a household where two out of three people are neurodivergent (W’s dad is the walking definition of executive function!), means that most of the decisions we make are based around our ADHD. And like many parents in our neurodivergent community, we have found that some of the things that work for our family may not “make sense” to more neurotypical folks.