Welcome to IEP Season!

Let me set the scene for you.

You’re sitting in a conference room that smells like dry-erase markers and mild anxiety. There’s a laminated agenda in front of you with approximately forty-seven line items. Across the table sits a row of very well-meaning educators who are about to use the phrase “grade-level expectations” no fewer than twelve times in the next hour. 

You are there to fight for your kid.

You have notes. You have highlighters. You have a coffee in a travel mug that you are gripping like it is the only thing tethering you to this earth. You pull your coffee a bit closer as the first acronymed person (AP, LLSP, ARD Facilitator, OT, the list goes on) calls the meeting to order.

Welcome to IEP season, friend. Pull up a chair.

If you are raising a child who thinks differently -  who learns differently, processes differently, moves through the world differently - you know the particular exhaustion that comes not just from the parenting itself, but from constantly having to explain your child to a world that wasn’t quite built with them in mind.

You know what it’s like to sit in meetings and translate how they exist in this world that really wasn’t made for them. To say, “Yes, but here’s what you don’t see at home,” over and over again. To leave a school conference simultaneously grateful for the people trying (or ready to call your lawyer as there’s usually no in between there) and heartbroken that it still feels so hard.

And, because we say the quiet things out loud around here, you might also know the sneaky guilt that creeps in when you wonder: Am I doing enough? Am I asking for too much? Am I the problem?

Let me be really, really clear. You are not the problem. And you are absolutely not alone.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud.

Here’s what nobody tells you when you first start walking this road of advocating for a kid you love:

The system was not designed for your kid. That’s not a character flaw. It’s just a fact. Most school systems, most workplaces, most social structures were built around a fairly narrow definition of “normal.” Sit still. Stay quiet. Learn this way. Test this way. Be THIS way.

And your kid? Your kid is doing something far more remarkable than fitting in a box.

Your kid is figuring out how to exist authentically in a world that keeps handing them the wrong instruction manual.

That takes more courage than most adults I know have on their best day.

I used to dread the IEP meetings. I used to go in bracing for battle, come out emotionally wrung out, and spend the car ride home oscillating between righteous anger and overwhelming grief.

Some days I still do. 

But somewhere along the way, I also started to notice something: the parents who showed up to those rooms, the ones with the highlighted notes and the cold coffee and the hearts wide open, were some of the most fierce, creative, hopeful humans I’d ever encountered. 

We are a specific kind of people, aren’t we? We learn the acronyms. We research the accommodations. We become fluent in a language we never asked to speak, because our kids need someone in their corner who won’t back down. (Cue Tom Petty’s classic song, TYSM)

That’s not just parenting. That’s advocacy. And advocacy, it turns out, is just love with a really organized binder. (I write about that here).

Thinking Differently.

Can we talk for a second about what “thinking differently” actually looks like in real life? Because from the outside, it can look messy. It can look like meltdowns in parking lots and homework that takes three hours and a morning routine that requires the precision of a NASA launch. (Hey, Artemis III crew, I’m available for consultations!)

But from the inside and from where I’m standing, it also looks like:

A kid who sees patterns nobody else sees. Who asks questions that stop you cold because you genuinely don’t know the answer. Who feels everything so deeply that the world is simultaneously harder and richer for them. Who, once they find their thing, goes all in in the most breathtaking way.

Different is not a consolation prize. Different is its own kind of extraordinary.

It just sometimes takes longer for the world to catch up and see it.

So if you’re in the thick of it right now, if you’ve got an IEP meeting on the calendar, or a phone call with a teacher you’ve had seventeen times, or a child who came home today and said “I don’t fit in and I don’t know why”, I want you to hear this:

You are not failing your kid. You are finding your kid. Meeting them where they are, over and over, even when it’s exhausting and confusing and nothing looks like you thought it would.

That work matters more than any standardized test score ever will.

And the next time you’re sitting in that conference room with your travel mug and your highlighters, know that there’s a whole community of us out here who have sat in the exact same chair, felt the exact same things, and made it out the other side: a tad more caffeinated, a bit more battle-worn, and a whole lot more certain that our kids were worth every single moment of the fight.

Hope and courage always, friends.

Now go refill your coffee. You’ve earned it!

Love you, mean it, friends.

Have an IEP story, a victory, or a moment that made you feel seen? I’d love to hear it! Drop it in the comments or come find me on Instagram. This community is better when we show up for each other.