Joy Doubled

About the book

Some stories are passed down to protect you. Ayomide is exhausted. She is a mother, an advocate, a daughter, and a woman whose own mind works differently in a world that was never designed for her. Navigating the labyrinthine maze of SEND assessments, school meetings, and systems that seem built to say no, she is fighting every day for her son Ayodeji, a boy of boundless joy and electric imagination, to be seen for who he truly is, not the label they keep trying to pin to him. But Ayomide is not fighting alone. Three generations live under one roof: grandparents who carried their culture across oceans and through unimaginable loss, parents holding the present together with tired hands, and a child who builds worlds out of pipe cleaners and foil. And threaded through all of it — whispered at bedtime, enacted on living room floors, alive in the family’s bones — is Anansi. The spider. The trickster. The one who always finds a way. As Ayodeji uses the old stories to make sense of his new world, and as Ayomide begins to understand that she isn’t just fighting for services but fighting the story that her child is the problem, the family discovers what it means to weave your own web when every system around you is designed to catch you in someone else’s. Tender, urgent, and full of quiet magic, this is a story about who gets to tell the truth about their own life — and what it costs to refuse to let anyone else tell it for you.