oh, you just have to get her to school

People mean well. I want to start there, because what follows is going to sound uncharitable, and I am trying very hard to remain a person who extends good faith to others, which is something I have to remind myself of more frequently than I'd like since we started navigating this particular situation.

People mean well, and also, some of the advice has been genuinely spectacular in its confidence given how little it has to do with our actual life.

My personal favorite, the one I think about when I need something to do with the low-level frustration that lives in my chest on difficult weeks, is some version of: you just have to get her to school. Delivered with the gentle certainty of someone explaining that the trick to parallel parking is simply not to overthink it. Just get her there. Once she's there, she'll be fine. Kids are resilient. She just needs to push through it.

I have replayed this advice many times, trying to locate the step I missed. The getting her to school part. Where exactly does that go, between the part where she's in the bathroom for forty-five minutes and the part where the school calls to ask where she is. I must have skipped a page.

The thing about this flavor of advice, and there are many flavors, is that it exists in a parallel universe where school avoidance is basically a preference, like a child who doesn't like broccoli but will eat it if you're firm enough about the broccoli. It doesn't account for the anxiety that is genuinely physiological, for the fact that "just going" for some kids activates a threat response that no amount of parental resolve can simply overrule, for the hours of research and professional appointments and school meetings that happen before a parent gets to a place of understanding that this is not, in fact, a broccoli situation.

There is also the related classic: have you tried just making her go? Which I love, because it implies I had not considered this option, that I had been sitting across from her in the mornings exploring a range of creative alternatives without once landing on the idea of simply making her do the thing. The emphasis on just is doing a lot of work in this sentence. Just make her. Like reaching for something on a low shelf.

I don't say any of this in the moment, because I am tired and also because the people saying it genuinely don't know what this is like, which is not their fault, because I didn't know what this was like either until I was living inside it. What I usually say is something like "yes, it's complicated" in a tone that I hope communicates both gratitude for the engagement and a complete absence of available energy for further conversation on the topic.

We keep going anyway, with or without the broccoli comparison. That's the whole thing, really.