Because on paper, it’s very simple.
Just get them into school.
I sometimes forget that we’re apparently just meant to be calmly getting our children an education.
Like it’s popping to the shop. Milk. Bread. Fully supported, legally compliant schooling experience. Back by lunch.💁🏻♀️
Because on paper, it’s very simple.
Just get them into school. Just follow the rules. Just make sure they attend every day, on time, emotionally regulated, hormonally neutral, and functioning like a small autonomous office printer.
And if they misbehave now, don’t worry. They won’t be sent home. They’ll be placed in an isolation booth.
Which sounds terrifying until you remember a large number of autistic kids are like… oh.
Quiet. No social pressure.
Left alone to do my work.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Somewhere along the way, we decided children are robots.
They do not menstruate. They do not need the toilet at inconvenient moments. They certainly don’t need to go without announcing it to thirty peers and a laminated pass system designed to shame them out of bodily functions.
And parents? We have endless time. We luuuuurrrrrve paperwork. We thrive on filling out the same form twelve times in slightly different fonts.
We are absolutely fine being told just get them into school as if that sentence hasn’t already eaten three years of our lives and that we haven’t already tried that suggestion!!
What people without lived experience never quite grasp is that this isn’t reluctance.
It’s not laziness. It’s not overthinking.
It’s chasing EHCPs that magically don’t exist until a tribunal forces someone to admit they were wrong.
It’s being gaslit politely, professionally, repeatedly.
It’s watching parents drag themselves through appeals they somehow win almost every time, because shockingly, the law still exists on paper even if no one’s following it in practice.
They want the kids in.
They don’t want to support them.
They want bums on seats.
They don’t want to hear who those bums belong to.
Or what those children & young people, actually need to survive the day.
So yes. We laugh. Because the alternative is screaming into the void. 🕳️
Because the hypocrisy is so consistent it’s almost comforting now.
Because being told to follow rules by systems that don’t follow their own is objectively absurd.
Dark humour isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a survival skill.
In Solidarity,
Lizz xoxo
