Who am I to question the psychologist?

15 years in classrooms & I still couldn't keep two dyslexia terms straight. I kept digging anyway.

It was 9 PM & I was lying in bed trying to understand the subtypes of dyslexia.

Orthographic mapping. Orthographic processing. I kept reading the difference & I could not keep them straight.

They never taught me this. Not in fifteen years in classrooms. Not in my certification to teach students with dyslexia. And yet I had this nagging sense that whatever lives in the gap between those two terms was the thing—the reason my child hasn’t responded to years of dyslexia-specific reading instruction.

If anyone should feel equipped here, it’s me. I’m an educator. I ran reading intervention for years. I know what structured literacy is supposed to do & what it looks like when it’s working.

And still, lying there at 9 PM, unable to keep two terms straight, the pull was right where it always is: I don’t know this. So it must not be mine to figure out. Let the experts figure it out.

I’ve been advocating for my child’s health & developmental needs since they were 6 months old. It takes a kind of energy, mental bandwidth & patience I didn’t know I had until I had to find it.

And there have absolutely been times I chose to defer. To wait for something to take hold. To not be the overbearing parent—the one who’s also an intervention specialist, who would really prefer they collect & analyze the data more meaningfully than they do.

Because here’s the line I’ve had to walk: my role in that room isn’t expert. It’s mom. And those two things want different postures. The expert in me wants to run the assessment. The mom in me just wants someone to tell me they’ve got it.

So I’ve spent years learning when to let the second one win. The second one won easiest wherever I didn’t know the territory yet. Sometimes deferring was the right call. Sometimes it really was a season to wait & watch.

This wasn’t one of them.

I saw the same instinct most clearly somewhere other than my own life.

A friend sent me a voice memo last week about a job offer. She was thrilled & underneath the thrill was a lot she didn’t know how to navigate. She was leaving the public sector, where her whole career had run on fixed pay bands. She got what the scale said she got. Now, for the first time, someone was essentially asking what do you think you’re worth and she didn’t know how to answer, because she’d never had to.

She’s more than capable. And still, the unfamiliar showed up & her first instinct was to make herself smaller. To wonder if asking for more would make her look naïve, like she didn’t understand how things worked over there. There was a part of her ready to just accept the offer. To stay unexposed.

I didn’t need to become an expert in negotiation to help her. Neither did she. We sat down & worked through her actual situation—not generic advice, but the few things that mattered for her: her qualifications, the sector she was walking into, what someone with her background could credibly ask for & why. By the time we were done, she wasn’t guessing. She made her ask with a steadiness that wasn’t there before.

It isn’t a personal flaw, what she almost did. It’s what we were raised on. The moment something unfamiliar shows up, we shrink back to polite, deferential, careful—and call it being reasonable.

I know the pull because I was sitting in it that same week.

Even the educational psychologist doesn’t have the answers I’m looking for. She even told me, plainly, that she wasn’t the expert on the underlying perceptual & imagery processes that might explain why my child hadn’t responded to two structured literacy programs.

I could have left it there. Let her write dyslexia, cause unclear & accepted that the why was simply out of reach. That would have been the polite version. The reasonable one.

Instead I looked deeper & added a speech-language evaluation—because the 9 PM sroling had shown me which questions to ask.

I’m still in it. I don’t have the answer yet, & I won’t pretend I do. But we’re going to get the specificity we’ve been missing, not because I matched the credentials of the psychologist or the speech-language pathologist, but because I refused to let not having them be the reason I stopped asking.

It isn’t the edge of where we’re allowed to go. It’s just the edge of what we already know.

If there’s something like this in your life right now, a thing you keep circling but haven’t pushed on because it feels like it belongs to someone more qualified you don’t have to figure it out alone. That’s exactly what my 1:1 sessions are for.

And if you’re a paid subscriber, submissions are open this week for A Little Less Stuck, a reader-submitted essay series where you send me the thing you can’t get clear on & I work one through in a full essay—anonymized & free for everyone to read. Scroll down to this week’s voice memo for the details.

Talk soon,
Erin

P.S. I had more to say about the worry running underneath all of this…that pushing for more makes us too much. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can hear my thoughts below in this week’s voice memo. 👯‍♀️