You’re not wrong: reflections on motherhood and advocacy

This post is for the mothers who have felt their very humanity questioned, their intentions dissected, their credibility chipped away in meetings, emails, and silences. For those who have grown so raw from the performance of composure, so sick with the stress of constant advocacy, that they barely recognise themselves anymore. For those who wake up tired, who fall asleep mid-thought, who wonder what kind of mother they are becoming inside a system that demands they be everything and punishes them for being anything at all.

Stockholm syndrome

It begins with polite emails and scripted apologies, with administrators thanking you for your patience as they delay, deflect, and dilute every request. They say they are here to support your child. They say they value your advocacy. They say they want what is best—so long as your advocacy remains polite and does not require resources.

At first, you believe them. Or you try to. You learn the vocabulary. You reference policy and spend your evenings cross-referencing emails and deciphering jargon. Your friends think you’re obsessed—as if school advocacy were some new special interest, a kind of fervent calling. As if you wouldn’t rather do anything else than spend night after night documenting the harm your children are experiencing. You love your job, but you don’t have much energy for it anymore.

You remove all emotional language from your emails because you know it will be used against you. You cry as you draft them like legal briefs—measured, restrained, pre-emptively accountable. You stay up late and get up early, stretched impossibly by your life. You think, How would I want a client to say this to me?—guiding staff toward insight, never sounding didactic, never scolding. You realise you are an expert, and yet you must make them believe helping your child was their idea. You become fluent in cautious optimism. You take their perspective, forcing down your own feelings. You keep assuming best intentions long after the evidence has run out.

The problems become more visible, more patterned, more grotesque: your child’s needs are acknowledged but never met; IEPs remain theoretical; fidgets are confiscated; time-outs are weaponised against ADHD symptoms. Your child tries to strangle a teacher in distress—and still, you are told to trust them. Still, they insist no additional support is required. Except, if they call you to pick up your child and you can’t answer, they may need to call the police.

Maybe you are the problem

Once you become precise—once your questions become specific and your expectations clearly tethered to policy and evidence—their posture changes. Suddenly, you are not collaborative; you are combative. You are told that if you believe school is harming your child, perhaps you should not send them. You are labelled uncivil for refusing to let your child be harmed. You are told your communication style is too much—too aggressive, too detailed… too autistic?

Now all communication must go through the principal, because the teacher finds it too overwhelming to receive information about your child’s experience.

You are told that extracurriculars are a privilege, contingent on conduct—as though disability negates joy; as though neurodivergent children do not deserve to represent their school; as though inclusion ends at the gym door. You are not framed as someone exposing harm. You are accused of creating it. Your documentation becomes disruption. Your clarity becomes confrontation. Your persistence becomes pathology.

The very systems that failed to support your child weaponise their own bureaucracy—complaint protocols that reroute urgency into procedural delay; communication rules that turn transparency into threat. You are made to answer for your tone before anyone answers for the harm. You are punished not for being incorrect. What you say is true. But you are shamed for stressing staff out, for not being more understanding—because they already have so much pressure, and expedience is more comfortable than accountability.

A weak patina of hope

You scream in the car because there is nowhere else to put it. The windshield wipers swoosh, rhythmically indifferent; the damp air presses in like a pillow, softening your grief just enough to let it breathe. You grip the steering wheel too tightly, knuckles white, heart pounding, jaw clenched—your body holding the accumulation of every deferred reply, every exclusion, every meeting where you smiled too much and said too little because you knew what would happen if you didn’t. The pain nests in your shoulders, your stomach, the brittle space behind your eyes.

Later, at home, you wear calm like armour. You ask about their day. You act like things are okay because the school told you maybe your mistrust is the barrier—maybe the problem is your lack of faith, not their lack of action. You begin to doubt yourself. You try to sound collaborative. You compliment small gestures. You rehearse the word positivebecause it is their favourite. You tell yourself this is strategy, not surrender.

In the quiet hours, after the children sleep, you smell their sweet heads and hear their breathing. You wonder if they will ever forgive you—for sending them back into the machine. For choosing routines over rupture. For trying, too many times, to make it work.

They keep you busy, while your child swirls the drain

They do not refute your claims; they undermine your credibility. The calmness of their tone becomes its own kind of violence. The platitudes—your child is wonderful!—mask the exclusion and inaction. The system does not argue; it waits. Your May complaint is deferred until September. Your IEP meeting is scheduled for November. Your persistence is praised even as your clarity is punished. Your pain is acknowledged and ignored.

And always, the list grows: new questions at every meeting—have your child’s medication dosage been reviewed? Have you contacted CYMH again? Have you followed up with the OT? Another form to fill, another intake to pursue, another process to complete before they will consider what should have been automatic.

You are kept busy. Always one step behind the next requirement. A constantly moving target—bait and switch! As though support is a prize you must earn through exhaustion. You begin to wonder if these tasks are not bridges to inclusion, but barriers designed to delay it. You are not supposed to take their sabotage personally. They’ve carefully reviewed your complaint and found that enough energy was expended to make your child included—even though it didn’t work. They did enough. You are crushed. How can you communicate this appropriately to your child?

To the women who were punished for being correct

This is for the mothers who recognised the performance—the ones who packed cookies for the IEP meeting, hoping food might soften the edge of discomfort, or show the staff they were not adversaries. Not because they believed it would fix anything, but because they still hoped their goodwill might be reciprocated with care. Please don’t hurt my child. The women who kept showing up with offerings, even as the system failed repeatedly. The women who saw the thin veil of civility stretched over deep institutional rot and said, still, we will try again tomorrow.

A man with a tremble in his voice will mobilise a school ten times faster than a woman who has spent months writing clear, accurate reports about her child’s exclusion, who shows up to every meeting prepared, exhausted, and already grieving the betrayal she knows is coming.

A man with a tremble in his voice will mobilise a school ten times faster than a woman who has spent months writing clear, accurate reports about her child’s exclusion, who shows up to every meeting prepared, exhausted, and already grieving the betrayal she knows is coming.

You dig deep to try to motivate your ex-husband to say the things you need him to at great personal cost. You know he thinks you are the cause of the drama at the school. You try to appeal to his love for his children, so he’ll say what needs to be said. You hire consultants to say the things that need to be said and you spend hours, lost in the eddies, finalising reports, trying to get the ABA language stripped from the documents.

There is no proper tone that will make your child safe and welcome. There is no ideal level of composure that will make the system humane. The scrutiny placed on your advocacy is directly proportional to its truth.

You are not excessive, nor irrational—you are a woman forced into fluency, crafting each sentence with painstaking precision not to convince, but to withstand scrutiny. You are responding to real harm with the only tools allowed to you: evidence, policy, and a voice softened past recognition. And it costs you. It coils in your chest, in your gut, in the knots of your shoulders. But you speak anyway, because silence would cost even more.

This is for the woman who was called uncivil for refusing to watch her child be erased. The mother who was told that if she didn’t like it, her child could leave. The advocate who wrote a hundred emails and was met with strategic silence. Ghosted.

You are not alone.
You are not wrong.