she is not her school avoidance

Somewhere in the middle of all of this — the appointments, the school meetings, the research, the mornings, the forms and the phone calls (the endless phone calls!) and the careful management of a situation that doesn't always want to be managed — it is possible to lose sight of something important, and I say this as someone who has spent a significant portion of the last year building a colour-coded folder system for a child whose primary difficulty is not, it turns out, a lack of organisation.

Your daughter is not her school avoidance.

She is a specific, particular, unrepeatable marvel of a person who is somewhere in the middle of becoming whoever she is going to be, and that process — the becoming — does not run on the school system's timeline, or on the developmental chart your pediatrician has on the wall, or on the schedule you had in your head when you imagined what these years would look like, back when you still imagined them with any confidence. It runs on hers. And I have to keep reminding myself of that, usually on the days when I have just come off a phone call with the school and my relationship with optimism is at a low point.

The problem with being deep in the management of a difficult situation is that the situation starts to become the whole story, and your child — who is not a situation, who is a person, a whole and complicated and specific person — can quietly become a problem to be managed rather than a person to be known, and I am not sure when exactly that shift happened for me but I notice it when I catch myself describing her to someone and realising that everything I have said has been about what is hard for her, and nothing has been about who she actually is.

So who is she, when I'm not thinking about school?

She is funny in a way that catches me off guard — the kind of funny that comes from noticing things other people walk straight past, and which occasionally makes me laugh at a moment when I was trying very hard to be serious and authoritative, which she finds additionally funny, because she has inherited whatever the gene is for noticing when something lands at the wrong moment and filing it away for future reference. She has opinions about things that have nothing to do with school or anxiety or any of the things that fill so much of our time — strong, specific, well-argued opinions that she will defend at considerable length if you are willing to engage with them, and also if you are not willing to engage with them, because she has not yet fully grasped the concept of a conversation that has ended. She is kind in ways that are not showy, the kind of kindness that shows up quietly when someone needs it and doesn't require an audience. She reads more than anyone I know. She remembers things. She makes connections between ideas that make me think about something I thought I already understood in a completely different way, and I find myself in the slightly humbling position of learning things from a person I have to remind to eat breakfast.

None of that is in her file, and I think about that more than I probably should.

I have been collecting stories, quietly, for a while now — not from books or clinical literature, because I have read enough of those to last several lifetimes, and they tend to end with a recommendation to consult a qualified professional, which I am doing, thank you — but from life. The stories of people who had a genuinely hard time at school and went on to find a place in the world that suited who they actually were rather than who the system needed them to be.

They are not hard to find, once you know to look for them, and they are everywhere — the ones who couldn't make it through a school day and now run companies, make art, build things, teach, heal people, write, in ways that make it clear in retrospect that the school environment was not measuring what it thought it was measuring. The ones who were told they were difficult and turned out to be different, which is not the same thing even though the two get confused with some regularity. The ones who spent years being measured against a standard that was never going to fit them and then found, eventually, a context that did — and discovered that they were not only adequate in that context but remarkable, which is a word that tends not to appear in school reports, in my experience.

I am not collecting these stories as false comfort, or as a way of pretending that what we are living through right now is not as hard as it is, because it is hard and I know that you know that and I am not going to tell you otherwise. I am collecting them because they are evidence — evidence that the school years are not the whole story, that the person your child is becoming is larger than the difficulty she is currently living through, and that struggling now doesn't determine what comes next, except that she will know, when she gets there, what it cost to get through something genuinely hard.

There is a particular cruelty in the way adolescence and school collide for some children — the way a system designed for the average meets a person who is not average, and the gap between them gets read as a deficiency in the person rather than a limitation of the system, which is a very convenient reading for the system and a very costly one for the person on the other side of it. Your daughter is not deficient. She is developing, somewhere on a trajectory that does not go in a straight line, that has loops and long periods of apparent stillness that are not stillness at all but the kind of invisible consolidation that only becomes visible when you look back at where you started.

I try to look back at where we started, on the days when looking forward feels like too much.

I don't have a tidy ending for this one, because I don't think the thing I am trying to say has a tidy ending — it is more like something I have to keep arriving at, over and over, every time the school year or the system or my own anxiety pulls me back into seeing her through the lens of what is hard rather than who she is. She is not her school avoidance. She is a specific, particular, unrepeatable marvel of a person who is somewhere in the middle of becoming, and the becoming is not finished, and on the days I can hold onto that — really hold onto it, not just know it intellectually but actually feel it — those are the days that are easier.

I'm working on having more of those days.