rise & try again - About Me

Hi. I'm glad you're here, and I'm sorry you needed to find this place.

If you've landed on this page, there's a decent chance you've recently spent time doing what I still do on a regular basis — opening your laptop at some ungodly hour, typing increasingly desperate variations of "why won't my daughter go to school" into a search bar and hoping the internet will hand you something useful. Sometimes it does. Mostly it hands you a quiz about whether your child has a "growth mindset" and a sponsored ad for a planner.

This is not that.

I'm a parent, just like you, and I am right in the middle of this. Not on the other side with a tidy resolution and a lesson learned. Not a therapist with a framework. Just someone who has sat in the school parking lot bargaining with a teenager, who has Googled "504 plan vs IEP" more times than I have Googled literally anything else, and who has cried in the car more times than I'd like to admit — though at least the car has become a surprisingly useful place for actual conversations, which I'll tell you more about later.

My daughter is in high school, and for the past three years, getting her to school has been — let me find the right word here — a project. Not in the cute Pinterest sense. In the sense that it has reorganized our entire family's daily life, introduced me to a world of acronyms I never wanted to know and now cannot unknow, and taught me that I am capable of both extraordinary patience and extraordinary amounts of stress-eating.

What I've learned, slowly and not always gracefully, is that school avoidance is not a discipline problem, a parenting failure or a phase that resolves itself if you just believe hard enough. It is a real, well-documented, genuinely hard thing — and it is affecting far more families than anyone talks about, which is part of why everyone going through it feels so completely alone.

So I started writing about it. Not because I have the answers — I want to be very clear that I frequently do not have the answers — but because I kept finding that the most useful thing in my week was talking to other parents who were in it too. The ones who didn't flinch when I described a particularly bad Monday morning. The ones who said "yes, us too" without me having to explain myself for twenty minutes first.

That's what I'm trying to build here. A place where you can read something and feel less like you're failing and more like you're just in a hard situation that requires more information and more support than anyone prepared you for.

Here you'll find two kinds of writing. Some of it is research-based — what the science actually says, how to navigate the school system, what kinds of help are worth seeking and how to find them. I am not a medical professional and I will always tell you to talk to one, but I will also give you enough context that you walk into those conversations knowing what questions to ask. The rest is more personal — essays about what this experience actually looks and feels like from the inside, written carefully to protect my daughter's privacy while still being honest about mine.

I don't have a tidy origin story where I hit rock bottom and found the answer and now I'm here to guide you to it. I have a work in progress, a lot of notes and a deep belief that the parents who are searching for help at midnight are exactly the parents whose kids are going to be okay.

You're in the right place. Pull up a chair. The coffee's on — and yes, I do sometimes have a glass of wine instead, and I'm not going to apologize for that either.