the morning I stopped saying "you have to go"

There was a particular version of mornings that I got very good at. I had a script for it and everything, though I never would have called it that at the time. I thought I was just parenting. Doing the thing you do, which is get your child out of the house and into school because that is what children do and what parents make happen.

The script went something like this: gentle knock, chirpy opener, a few minutes of grace, then the escalation. You need to get up. I know, I know, but you need to get up. This isn't optional. You have to go. You have to go. Followed by whatever came after that on whatever kind of morning it was — the silence, the tears, the physical symptoms that I spent a lot of time deciding were or weren't real, the eventual negotiation or standoff or both.

I got very efficient at it. I could move through the whole sequence in about forty minutes if I kept things on track. What I couldn't see, from inside that sequence, was that I was running it entirely on the wrong assumption.

The assumption was this: that the problem was getting out the door, and that once we were out the door, the problem was solved.

It seems almost embarrassingly simple in hindsight — of course that wasn't the whole problem, of course the door was not the finish line. But when you are in it, when you are standing in a hallway at 7:15am trying to hold together your own need to get to work and your child's inability to move and the low-grade panic that has been living in your chest for weeks, the door is the only thing you can see. Get through the door. That's the goal. Everything else is secondary.

The mornings when I won — when she went, when we made it — I felt relief that lasted maybe until I pulled out of the school drop-off loop. Then it started again. The mental countdown to afternoon pickup. The monitoring of my phone. The awareness, at all times, of how many days we'd had in a row and whether the streak felt fragile.

The mornings when I didn't win, I felt something harder to name. Not just frustration, though there was that. Something closer to helplessness with a skin of anger over it, which is what helplessness often looks like from the outside.

Neither version of the morning was actually working. I just couldn't see that yet.

The shift, when it came, wasn't dramatic. I want to be honest about that because I think we tell stories about parenting pivots as though they arrive fully formed, accompanied by some kind of clarity. This one didn't. It was more like a slow, reluctant loosening of a grip.

What I remember is a morning where I had run the script through about three iterations and we were somewhere in the middle of it, and I stopped. Not because I'd had an insight. I stopped because I was tired, and because something about the look on her face — not defiant, not manipulative, something closer to genuinely terrified — finally made it through whatever filter I'd been running everything through.

She wasn't refusing. She was scared. Those are different things, and I had been treating them as the same thing for longer than I wanted to think about.

I didn't say anything particularly wise in that moment. I don't have a good line to offer you here, some perfect sentence I found that unlocked everything. I think I just sat down. On the floor of the hallway, which is not a dignified place to have a parenting realisation but there it is. And I stopped talking about the door.

We were late that day. Very late. And I'm not going to tell you it was a turning point in any clean narrative sense, because it wasn't — there were many more hard mornings after that one. But something changed in how I was approaching it. I stopped trying to win the morning and started trying to understand what the morning was actually telling me.

That's the thing no one prepares you for, I think, about school avoidance. It's not a behaviour problem with a behaviour solution. You can't out-routine it or out-consequence it or out-incentive it, though I tried versions of all three. The mornings aren't the problem. The mornings are just where the problem becomes visible.

What she was carrying into those mornings — the anxiety, the dread, whatever was building in her from Sunday night onward — that was the problem. And the only way I was ever going to understand it was to stop treating every morning like a logistical puzzle to be solved and start treating it like information I was receiving about something I didn't yet fully understand.

That is a much harder way to start the day. It requires you to tolerate not knowing, and to resist the urge to fix things that can't be fixed by Tuesday. It requires you to sit with your child's distress without immediately trying to route around it, which goes against every parenting instinct I had spent years developing.

But it is also the only way I have found that actually moves anything.

I still have hard mornings. I want to be clear about that — this is not a post with a resolution at the end of it, because we're not at the resolution yet. But the version of the mornings I have now looks different from the version I had before that day on the hallway floor.

I ask more. I assume less. I have, mostly, retired the phrase "you have to go" — not because the goal has changed but because that particular sentence was never once useful, in all the hundreds of times I said it, and I don't have room in these mornings for things that aren't useful.

What I say instead varies. Sometimes it's nothing. Sometimes the most honest thing I can offer is just sitting near her and letting the morning be hard without trying to make it something else.

It turns out that's not nothing. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to figure that out.

If any of this sounds like your mornings, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. You can reach me at hello@riseandtryagain.com