I want to tell you about the day I sat in a school parking lot for forty-five minutes.
Not because something dramatic had happened. Because too much had happened — quietly, slowly, over a very long time. An IEP meeting that morning that went exactly nowhere. A note in my child’s agenda about their tics disrupting the class. Again. A waiting list email in my inbox — our assessment appointment pushed back another four months.
And I just sat there. Engine off. Kids inside. Unable to figure out how to go in and be okay.
If you know that parking lot — if you have your own version of it — then you’re exactly who this channel is for.
Who I am, and why you won’t see my face
My name is Dr. Wren. That’s not my real name, and you deserve to know why.
I’m a doctor. I’m also a mum. On this channel I share things that are deeply personal — about my kids, about navigating the Canadian system for my own family, about the parts of this journey that don’t make it into clinical conversations. Staying anonymous lets me do that honestly. It means I can talk about my children’s diagnoses, their hardest moments, their identities — without taking away their right to tell their own stories someday, on their own terms.
My credentials are real. My story is real. My kids are real. I just won’t be showing you my face.
The families I want to reach are families who are already used to protecting themselves. Who have learned to be careful about what they share, and with whom, and why. Being faceless isn’t a wall between us. It’s a signal that I understand why walls sometimes need to exist — and that I will never ask you to lower yours before you’re ready.
The gap I kept hitting
I have raised kids with ADHD. With Tourette Syndrome. With learning disabilities. With Developmental Coordination Disorder — the condition that makes your child the one who still struggles to catch a ball in grade five, whose handwriting becomes a source of shame so gradually you almost don’t notice. A gym teacher once told me my child “just wasn’t trying.” About a child who was trying harder than anyone in that room could see.
I knew something was different about my child before any professional confirmed it. Most of us do. So I searched — and got results from three years ago, American blogs, British forums describing something close enough to be painful and different enough to be useless. Nothing about a two-year public assessment waitlist. Nothing about what a four-thousand-dollar private assessment actually costs a Canadian family. Nothing about IEPs in a system that’s provincial, not federal.
And then our story got more complex. My child started telling me things about themselves. Things that didn’t have a waitlist. Things that required something completely different from me — less research, more listening. Less strategy, more staying.
I went looking for a Canadian parent who had been through both — neurodivergence and gender diversity, in the same kid, in this system. I couldn’t find her.
Not finding her is exactly why I’m here. If that parent didn’t exist, then maybe I was supposed to become her.
One more thing, before anything else
None of this is happening in a vacuum. It’s happening to you. The waitlists, the meetings, the phone calls from school, the midnight googling, the parking lots — all of it is happening to a person who also has a nervous system. Who also has a limit. Parental burnout in this community is real, it runs deep, and it is almost entirely invisible — because the system only ever talks about the child.
You are not an afterthought here. You are half the reason this exists.
▶ Watch: Why I Started This Channel (Our Story)
You don’t need to have it figured out to be here. I don’t have it figured out either. But we are going to figure out more of it together.
Everything here is for informational purposes only and isn’t a substitute for care from your own physician. You already knew that.