I was not such a bitch before my children were worn down by years of slow, grinding neglect. I became one through exposure. The tone, the edge, the precision that now startle others are the after-effects of advocacy conducted in hostile conditions. I used to be patient. I brought muffins to meetings and printed copies of policy so that everyone would feel informed. I believed that reason, research, and goodwill would be enough. I thought that kindness could make systems human. But belief cannot survive repeated contradiction. Every deferred accommodation, every meeting that ended in praise for effort instead of change, stripped away another layer of civility. My children’s distress became the proof of what politeness failed to prevent, and I became the mother they whisper about.
The contradiction of required politeness
When the next IEP meeting begins, I already know what will be said. They will talk about teamwork, tone, and mutual respect. Someone will remind me that progress requires collaboration. I cringe inwardly thinking of how hard it will be to keep a neutral expression and nod. The request is always the same: please be pleasant while we review what went wrong. Please package despair in accessible language.
I have already lived that version of collaboration. I once attended with pastries and gratitude, citing evidence and deferring to expertise. I hired specialists when the district refused, signed every release, followed every behavioural plan. I was compliant, thorough, endlessly polite. Still, my son deteriorated. He went from school participation to months in bed, hollowed by anxiety and disbelief. His exhaustion is the measurable result of all that civility.
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25 signs that your IEP team is disabling your child
In the space where families gather with school teams to shape a child’s Individual Education Plan, the language often carries more weight than paper can bear, for each phrase can open a door toward inclusion or quietly plant the seeds of exclusion, and the difference lies in whether the plan nourishes capacity or erodes it. […]
The collapse of the collaborative ideal
Politeness protects institutions, not children. It functions as a behavioural management tool for adults. Calm language receives praise while urgency is treated as pathology. Every delay arrives padded in empathy, every denial couched in care. The structure is designed for despair—it transforms outrage into etiquette, it rewards self-containment, it ensures that suffering stays administratively invisible.
The evidence of compliance
If outcomes mattered, the data would show that cooperation produced no safety. Each meeting generated paperwork instead of progress. My son’s health records trace the decline with forensic clarity: escalating anxiety, sleeplessness, self-reproach, eventual withdrawal. These are the consequences of professional tone meetings. The process recorded good intentions and delivered harm.
The paradox of credibility
Now, when I sound harsh, they hear instability. They cannot recognise that intensity as the accumulated sediment of restraint. Every sharp phrase contains the archive of a hundred careful ones. My supposed bitchiness is not pathology; it is testimony. It is what remains when the institution has trained you to translate grief into diplomacy for too long.
The ongoing necessity of dissent
I understand why professionals value composure, but experience has shown that civility without truth preserves dysfunction. I will keep attending, but without performance. My tone will be factual and unsparing. I will describe what happened, including the measurable harm that politeness once concealed. I know the process still favours despair, but I also know that despair is data. If this meeting is to mean anything, it must begin there—in the record of what civility destroyed, and in the unvarnished voice of the woman who became a bitch to keep her children alive.
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The architecture of exclusion: how schools erase, silence, and wear down families
Schools are supposed to be spaces of inclusion and support—but for many families, especially those raising disabled or neurodivergent children, advocacy is met with a wall of politeness, professionalism, and performative listening that hides a deeper violence: rhetorical control. One of the most common tactics is tone policing: the redirection of attention from a parent’s concern […]
