Gaslighting
The institutional pastime of reversing cause and effect. Gaslighting, in this project, refers to the way schools and support systems invert responsibility—telling families their distress is overreaction, their trauma is misinterpretation, and their child’s collapse is an individual failing. It is the coordinated strategy of denying harm while demanding decorum. This tag collects writing on the scripts, tactics, and bureaucratic tools used to discredit those who remember too well.
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The cost of masking: What we lose when children perform wellness
This evening, I walked my son down the street toward the place where his father was waiting to pick him up. It was an ordinary hand-off on an ordinary day, except I carried that soft, watchful question I always carry now, held quietly in my chest until the timing feels right. I asked if he…
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Parenting through gaslighting and grief
In the early days, our relationship was luminous, almost feverishly bright with attention and agreement and what I understood then as love—its intensity, its precision, the way it seemed to reach for every part of me, even the parts I kept hidden, even the ones I feared were too strange or fragile to show. I…
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Maternal scream: embodied rage in a system that punishes and smiles
This rage didn’t appear in a vacuum. It was not spontaneous. It is the inevitable consequence of a system that harms children while demanding that mothers smile back. It is what happens when a process is engineered to fail your child and then punishes you for noticing. They built the conditions. You simply refused to…
