The Emergency Contact

I had a version of me in my head.

The Before-Kids version.

She had a planner. Probably colour-coded. Definitely laminated.

She packed lunches the night before, did flashcards for fun, and made sensory bins from Pinterest boards with titles like “Montessori Magic.”

She had a clipboard.

Not metaphorically, an actual clipboard. Or at the least, a planner.

For routines, reward charts, behaviour plans.

Her kids wore matching outfits and knew what “inside voices” were.

She probably ran a parenting blog with words like “intentional” and “aligned” in the tagline.

I really liked her.

She seemed capable.

In control.

Prepared.

And then - reality.

No clipboard.

No matching anything.

My eight-year-old is currently wearing a Halloween t-shirt in June and refuses to wear socks on home turf.

The toddler once bit a foam letter and it’s been missing ever since.

The only plan I have on any given day is to survive until bedtime and hopefully eat a meal that wasn’t previously rejected by someone under 4 feet tall.

It’s been six months since the big shift.

Six months since the EHCP came through and we made the leap to special school.

At the time, it felt like defeat.

Like I was giving up on the “normal” path.

Like I was admitting I couldn’t do it right.

And somewhere under all the logic and relief and paperwork, I grieved that version of parenthood I thought I was supposed to want.

But now?

Now I look at her, my baby girl, and I see something I haven’t seen in years:

Light.

She likes going to school.

Not every day. Not every lesson. She’s still her, sensitive, rigid, socks-on-strike.

But she goes willingly. She comes back calm.

She eats lunch there.

She made a friend.

She learned a new stim toy technique and spent twenty straight minutes teaching it to the cat.

She’s still loud. Still sharp around the edges. Still has days where the world is too much and I’m the one she unravels in front of.

But there’s something softer now, under the chaos.

A settled-ness.

A hum of safety.

The difference in her being is like magic.

Not flashy magic.

The quiet kind.

The kind that says: “You’re allowed to be exactly who you are, and no one’s going to make you apologise for it.”

I didn’t realise how tense she’d been until she started to relax.

And I didn’t realise how hard I was trying to become that fantasy mum until I let her go, the version of me who only existed in theory, not in this house, not in this body, not in this life.

Because the parent who actually showed up?

She’s not tidy.

She’s not structured.

She doesn’t own a clipboard and the planner she bought in January is currently under the sofa with peanut butter on it.

But she shows up.

For appointments. For tears. For school gates and long waits and fruit that has to be peeled a very specific way.

She knows the difference between a shutdown and defiance.

She translates pointy fingers into needs.

She can identify stress-poop from sensory-poop at twenty paces.

She is fluent in silence, echolalia, stim squeaks, and emotional code-switching.

She sings the goodbye song at the school gate in exactly the right cadence.

She knows which staff member can handle transitions and which one still needs to learn.

She can write a medical history blindfolded and hold her child through a full-body meltdown with one hand while texting the SENCO with the other.

She doesn’t glow.

She doesn’t radiate calm.

But she burns steady.

And her kids?

They didn’t need a blogger mum.

Or a reward-chart mum.

Or a gentle parenting guru who never loses her cool.

They needed this one.

Raw, tired, hilarious, constantly five minutes behind and still somehow holding it all together with string, snacks, and sheer force of love.

So no, I’m not the parent I thought I’d be.

But maybe, just maybe, I’m the one they actually needed.