I have spent the last decade in special education classrooms. I have written hundreds of IEPs, sat across the table from families in tears, advocated fiercely for kids who couldn’t always advocate for themselves, and poured everything I had into students who needed someone in their corner.
Here is the truth I didn’t see coming: none of that prepared me for what it would feel like to be on the other side of the table.
I thought I understood what it meant to be a special education family. I didn’t. Not really. Not until it was my turn.
Two Worlds, One Person
Since August 2015, special education has been my professional home. I know the language, the laws, the timelines, the acronyms. I know what FAPE means and why it matters. I know how evaluations work, what progress monitoring looks like, and how to write a measurable goal. I have been the person in the room who was supposed to have all the answers.
And then my daughter entered the world of early intervention, and everything I thought I knew got a lot more complicated.
She has a genetic deletion. Her needs are significant. And from the moment we started navigating the system — the evaluations, the appointments, the meetings, the waiting — I realized something humbling: knowing the system from the inside does not protect you from the emotional weight of living it from the outside.
I was both people in the room at the same time. The professional who understood every word being said. And the mother who was struggling to hold it together anyway.
The Strange Privilege of Knowing Too Much
There is a strange kind of privilege that comes with being a SPED teacher navigating the system for your own child. I never had to Google what an IEP was. I never sat in a meeting confused about my rights. I could read an evaluation report and understand it without help.
In many ways, that knowledge protected us. I knew what to ask for. I knew when something wasn’t right. I knew how to advocate in the specific, strategic way that gets results.
But knowledge doesn’t make it easier to hear that your child is struggling. It doesn’t soften the moment when a report confirms what you already suspected but weren’t ready to accept. It doesn’t stop your heart from dropping when you realize the gap between where your child is and where you hoped she would be.
If anything, knowing too much sometimes made it harder. I could see around corners other parents couldn’t. I knew what certain results might mean down the road. I understood the system well enough to know its limitations.
And then there was early intervention — and I was humbled in a completely different way.
I know the IEP world. I know it deeply. But early intervention operates under a different framework entirely, and I was not prepared for that. IFSPs are not IEPs. The process, the language, the service delivery model — it was all unfamiliar territory for someone who had spent years thinking she knew exactly how this worked. I had to learn a new system at the same time I was trying to emotionally process everything happening with my daughter. I had to accept guidance and support from her early intervention team — support I was not expecting to need, from people navigating a world I didn’t fully understand yet.
That was its own kind of hard. Not knowing. Having to ask questions I felt like I should already know the answers to. Letting go of the identity of the expert and just being a mom who needed help.
The Hardest Room I Have Ever Sat In
There is something uniquely difficult about sitting in an IEP meeting when you are also a SPED teacher.
I already know what they are going to say before they say it. I know the language they will use. I know which parts of the IEP are genuinely in my daughter’s best interest and which parts reflect what the district is willing to offer. I know the difference between those two things, and sometimes that gap is painful to sit with.
I know how hard teachers work. I know they want to give more. I know that their hands are often tied — by caseloads, by budgets, by district decisions that are completely out of their control. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier when it’s your child on the other side of those limitations. It just makes it more complicated.
And then there is the thing that is hardest to put into words: sitting across the table from my coworkers. People I work alongside. People I respect. Having to set aside everything I know about the professional dynamics in that room and just be a mother asking for what her daughter needs. There is no manual for that. There is no training that prepares you for the moment when the colleague you ate lunch with yesterday is the one reading the evaluation results out loud.
Every instinct I have as a SPED teacher kicks in during those meetings. I want to jump in and rewrite the goals myself. I want to tell them exactly how to word things, what data to collect, which supports will actually make a difference. I have to sit on my hands — professionally and sometimes literally — and trust the process, even when I can see exactly how I would do it differently.
That restraint is one of the hardest things I have ever practiced.
But if I am being completely honest — and that is the whole point of this post — the hardest part of all of it isn’t the meetings. It isn’t knowing too much or biting my tongue when I could rewrite every goal in the room.
The hardest part is advocating for my daughter when I work in the same district as the people I am advocating against.
I spend every single day with these people. I eat lunch with them. I collaborate with them. I genuinely like them. And then I have to walk into a meeting and push back on them — ask for more, question decisions, request evaluations, challenge what’s being offered — and then walk back into work the next morning and pretend it’s all fine.
It is an incredibly isolating tightrope to walk. I don’t want to cause conflict. I don’t want to make things awkward. I don’t want to be the coworker who is difficult to work with because of something happening in her personal life. But I also have a daughter who deserves every support available to her, and it is my job as her mother to make sure she gets it.
No one prepared me for what it would feel like to sit in that tension every single day. To love the people across the table and still need to fight them. To be both a team player and a parent who refuses to back down. To choose, over and over again, between keeping the peace at work and doing right by my kid — knowing that I will always, always choose my kid, and knowing that choice has a cost.
The Truth About What This Life Has Taught Me
Living as both a SPED teacher and a SPED parent has reshaped how I show up in every single professional space I enter.
I think differently about the families sitting across from me now. I know that even the parent who seems calm and composed might be white-knuckling it through the meeting. I know that a parent who pushes back isn’t being difficult — they’re being a parent. I know that walking out of an IEP meeting and into the rest of your day, carrying everything that was just said, is genuinely hard.
I know, because I’ve done it.
This life — straddling both worlds simultaneously — has been one of the most challenging and clarifying experiences of my career. It has made me a better advocate, a more empathetic professional, and a more honest voice in conversations about what special education families actually need.
It has also given me a perspective I didn’t earn in a classroom. I earned it at home.
This is the first in a series of posts about my experience as both a special education teacher and a special education parent. Next up: how becoming a SPED parent made me a better SPED teacher.
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