I lived the experience for decades before I ever had the word.
For 25 years, I lived in the classroom. I earned three master's degrees along the way, all chasing the same question: how do people actually learn?
And for most of that career, I lived with unnamed ADHD and worked twice as hard as everyone else as a student, a teacher, a partner, and a parent, and I didn't know what I was doing wrong or why handling the little things seemed so much more difficult for me than for everyone else. At 40 I finally had a name for how I learned and how I lived: ADHD.
That diagnosis was preceded by my daughter's diagnosis and followed by my mother's diagnosis, and it changed how I saw everything — my own childhood, my parenting, and my family across generations of us who were living with ADHD without ever having the word for it. Suddenly the years of "why is this so hard for me when it isn't for everyone else" made sense.
When I was diagnosed, the doctor said to me, "Wow, look at how successful you are, all without support and medication. Can you even imagine how wildly successful you would have been if you had been diagnosed as a child?" It was such a double-edged sword: I was proud of how successful I was, but there was so much truth to it and regret in the "what could have been if I had just reached my potential."
That late diagnosis is why Rise & Shine exists. I built the resource I wish someone had handed me — one that treats ADHD as something to understand and design around, not a problem to manage or a behavior to correct.
What I bring
- 25 years of classroom experience as an ELA teacher
- Three master's degrees
- Lived ADHD experience — diagnosed at 40, after decades of not knowing
- Multiple generations of ADHD in my own family
How I work
Whether we're redesigning a homework zone, coaching a family through a hard morning routine, or sitting in a Round Table with other parents who get it — the approach is the same: understand how your brain actually works, then build the systems and support around that truth. Not around what's supposed to work for everyone else.
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