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.
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About the author
I’m Katie-jo—though most people call me KJ. I’m an autistic, ADHD Christian, writer, musician, wife and mum, trying to make sense of the beautiful, complicated tangle of faith, family, disability and everyday life. I write about the places where these things meet: in churches, classrooms, homes and communities, and in the quiet moments when we are learning how to love one another better. For many years I worked in schools and alternative provisions, supporting young people with additional needs and helping educators create spaces where nobody has to hide who they are in order to belong. I’ve taught, trained, guest lectured and contributed to NHS materials on making healthcare more accessible for autistic people. I also work alongside families navigating the often bewildering world of disability support, including through my role as a parent representative for the Bedford Borough Parent Carer Forum. Much of my life has been shaped by home education. I’ve educated my own children, helped run large online communities and supported local cooperatives, discovering along the way that learning rarely follows a straight line—and that the best classrooms often begin with curiosity, trust and a willingness to listen. I care deeply about disability inclusion in churches, and about the work of making room at the table not as a gesture of kindness, but because everybody belongs there. Through fiction, music, advocacy and the occasional stubborn conversation, I’m trying to help the Church listen more carefully, love more bravely and become a place where people can arrive exactly as they are.
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