Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of Happy Mum, Happy Baby, The Podcast.

Today's guest is Catherine Simpson.

She is an author and a journalist.

She has written three memoirs.

One is called One Body.

Then she followed that up with When I Had a Little Sister.

And then her latest offering is Hold Fast. Motherhood, My Autistic Daughter and Me.

And that's what she's really on to talk about today.

I found Catherine absolutely fascinating.

She grew up on a farm.

Then she essentially married an Italian man and moved to Edinburgh, as you do.

She'd always wanted to be a mum.

She knew that that was in her future.

But we talk about how when that dream becomes a reality,

and actually it doesn't look quite how you imagine it would.

What I find striking is she gave birth 30 years ago.

So actually she was going through this a long time ago and we talk about the fact that, you know, things are different now, even the way that we talk about autism is different now. But back then for girls, it was very, very different. And even reading the book, I was taken aback at how many times Catherine was simply told that, no, her daughter was absolutely fine.

And in fact, it was her parenting that was the problem. And I can't imagine what it was like to be gaslit as a parent, as a mother for 10 years before she actually got her daughter's diagnosis.

I imagine even just writing the book

could have been quite the journey for her

of kind of going, God, and then I went through that,

and then I went through that, which is quite a lot.

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