29/05/2026
Before Aidan was formally diagnosed with anxiety, his sweating was so severe he would literally walk away and leave pools of water where he’d been standing. No exaggeration. We genuinely thought things were being spilled around the house.
Looking back now, I even wonder whether that’s partly why he refused to wear shoes until the age of about 8 or 9.
We’d go out in the middle of winter and these grannies would look at me in absolute disgust because I looked like this heathen mother who couldn’t even dress her child properly 😆
At age 7 he had his second foot operation.
The sweating inside his casts became so severe that his feet actually started going green with a nasssssty shmonk brewing inside there. We ended up in ER two nights in a row getting each cast cut off consecutively.
Thank goodness we caught it early.
My nose now has deep compassion for what soldiers must’ve gone through with trench foot in the wars.
And because he still had steel pins protruding from his heels afterwards, every now and then he’d accidentally bang one.
The screams that came out of that child still live in my nervous system to this day.
Managing Aidan’s nervous system has been one of theee most layered parts of parenting for me. Mostly because I never realised it was a nervous system issue that I was dealing with until relatively “recently”.
A lot of people don’t like labels. I actually find them incredibly useful.
If Aidan didn’t have a “Costello Syndrome” label, I would have been drowning in unknowns in an already very rare syndrome world. Within the Costello community, we’ve created frameworks of shared experiences between our children. Anxiety. Tethered spinal cords. Heart conditions. Developmental patterns. Behaviours.
Without those “labels”, symptoms could literally go unnoticed and make a child’s life unbearable.
It’s the same with ADHD. Anxiety. PDA.
I’d never even HEARD of PDA a few years ago.
And in a few years time I’ll probably look back on today and realise how ignorant I still was about something else “they” discover. Or maybe “we” discover, as parents stumbling through crisis after crisis, trying to get our kids through the next hurdle while noticing patterns that seem connected long before science gives it a name.
But once something HAS a name, suddenly parents can communicate. Share. Explain. Connect.
And maybe most importantly... stop feeling gaslit into believing they’re dramatic, lazy, overreacting, pedantic or somehow failing because of the coping mechanisms they’ve had to develop while catching the fallout of their child’s nervous system.
People hear: Autism. PDA. ADHD. Anxiety.
But living it inside a child’s body is another thing entirely.
School mornings were another disaster entirely.
Ironically, once he GOT to school, he was usually fine. But the process of getting him there was absolute chaos on his nervous system.
Sunday nights became: Vomiting. Panic. Illness. Dread.
The final day I drove him to school, we never even made it there.
It was the beginning of a new year and a new term. He’d actually been excited.
And there I was, pulled over on the side of the road watching this poor child heaving up his breakfast again.
I remember just sitting there thinking: “I cannot keep forcing this child to do this.”
I called his dad and said we needed another plan.
That was the moment we moved to home tutoring.
And it broke my heart because his school was actually phenomenal. They understood him beautifully and we had searched HIGH and low for the right fit.
I still remember standing at the Dis-Chem pharmacy counter crying when I collected his first Ritalin prescription.
I felt utterly defeated.
Like I had tried EVERYTHING to keep him off medication and somehow failed.
And there I was in the queue, script in hand, blinking rapidly trying to hold the tears back.
By the time I got to the counter, the pharmacist could clearly see she needed to be gentle with this one... and that kindness absolutely finished me 😆 I just drizzled everywhere.
And truthfully? The medication DID help some things enormously.
His reading improved. His writing improved. His focus improved.
But the side effects were rough too.
Nausea. Vomiting. Appetite suppression.
And when you’re dealing with PDA, rigid nervous system responses, disrupted routines and co-parenting sabotage where your child gets dropped home late, unfed, overstimulated and dysregulated... trying to manage medication timing properly becomes almost impossible.
Fast forward a few years and during all the legal chaos and financial pressure, I became desperate to find additional ways to support Aidan’s nervous system naturally alongside everything else.
Around 3 years ago, I started taking a magnesium blend with Vitamin D myself because my OWN nervous system was absolutely shot.
Not wellness-influencer "stressed”.
I mean genuine chronic stress. The kind that causes strokes and heart attacks.
High Court battles. Protection order issues. Financial sabotage. Living in constant hypervigilance. Wondering what disaster was coming next.
The difference for me was huge.
So about 2 years ago, I started Aidan on it too.
And honestly, the change in him has been remarkable.
Not cured. Not magically “fixed”. Not suddenly neurotypical.
Although if he could suddenly start providing his mother with a 3 course meal a few times a week and maybe less whining when the wifi goes down I'd be thrilled!!! 😆
But that’s not how autism, PDA or anxiety works.
Environment matters. Stress matters. Safety matters. Nervous systems are fluid.
And to be fair, he DOES live with a stressed mom on the brink of perimenopause... think mood swings and caffeinated survival strategies 😆
But it gave his body more capacity. More resilience. More regulation. More of a fighting chance.
What’s funny is friends, family and a few clients started asking for it after seeing the difference in us, so I was literally handing it out in little plastic bags for ages like some backyard pharmacist 😂 and I never even intended to sell this stuff initially.
But the requests became so frequent that towards the end of last year I finally decided to formally launch it properly.
Ironically, I originally created it for adults.
But one of the biggest reasons I believe in it so deeply... is because I watched what it did for my son.
For those wondering, it’s a blend of: Magnesium Glycinate, Magnesium Taurate, Magnesium L-Threonate, and Vitamin D3.
And yes, if I can see his nervous system is particularly overloaded, I’ll increase his dosage slightly for a few days.
Anyway. This isn’t medical advice. It’s not anti-medication. It’s not me telling anyone what they should do for their child.
It’s simply one sometimes exhausted autism/PDA mom sharing something that genuinely helped in our home.
Because when you’re parenting kids with complex nervous systems, sometimes the goal isn’t perfection. Sometimes the goal is simply helping their body cope with the world a little more comfortably.
If you’re also in the trenches of neurodivergent parenting, you’re not alone in it.
I share parts of our journey here as we figure things out in real time, not from a place of having it all together.
You’re welcome to stay connected if it helps.
