I walked down the sandstone steps into the playground, scanning the crowd of school kids.
My 10-year-old son had left his lunch on the bench at home. Considering food was the highlight of his day, I knew it was imperative I get it to him.
It was a new school — he'd only been here half a year — and I was curious to see him on school turf.
Parents were usually told to just "drop and drive", but I had a simmering dread. I knew he wasn't happy in this place.
I found my son standing in a corner of the courtyard outside his classroom. A younger girl was standing in front of him, talking earnestly. He looked deeply uncomfortable.
Was she angry at him? Was she talking about something he didn't understand? Was she simply crowding him?
As I got closer, he spotted me.
"Muuuuum," he said, clearly embarrassed. He saw his lunch box in my hands and quickly turned his back so I could pop it in his backpack.
Then he turned back around, his eyes swollen with tears.
"Are you OK?" I asked.
"Just go! Go now!" he yelled.
Feeling helpless, I left. It was one of the last days my son ever spent at school.
Parenting a child that doesn't want to go to school
My son had been struggling at school for years — it wasn't just the change of school that was getting to him.
Getting him out of bed on a weekday had become really tough.
He was tired. He felt sick. He had a sore throat.
When he wasn't able to convince us to let him stay home, we'd get calls to come and collect him by lunchtime. He had a headache, a tummy ache, a sore foot.
Then we started getting calls at recess time. He'd jammed a finger. Bumped his head. Tripped over.
After a while, he stopped pretending. Class was too noisy. The teacher was too angry. The kids all ran away from him. Art was hard. Chapel was weird. The bus trip was too long.
Our mornings became full of uncertainty. Would we convince him today? On the days we did, we'd arrive at work late and then sit there wondering: How was he going? Would they call? How would he be at the end of the day?
A sick day a month turned into one every week. Soon he was missing more school than he was attending.
School refusal becoming more common across Australia
"School can't" is a familiar concept to most by now. It's been the subject of a recent Senate inquiry and came up at the Disability Royal Commission.
A recent poll revealed nearly 40 per cent of Australian families have dealt or are dealing with it.
My son toughed out six years of school.
By the end, we had bribed, punished, rewarded, counselled, urged, forced, therapied, medicated, cried, fought and cuddled him to class.
I've never seen a kid so driven, so determined. But getting out of bed in the morning for him is difficult.
His most productive time of day is in the afternoon. He's sensitive to noise, smells and light. And he has a crippling phobia related to public toilets.
The school offered noise-cancelling headphones and suggested he take sensory breaks. But he didn't like the headphones and he refused to take the breaks.
Like many autistic kids, he doesn't see the point in learning things that don't interest him.
He likes to create boardgames. And maps. They're extremely well planned (not so well executed as he always runs out of space for his thousands of ideas).
He wants to create an app. He's learning to edit videos.
And while he does like people, he doesn't cope with being surrounded by more than 20 of them on a daily basis.
The dilemma I face as a parent
I still remember the last day my son went to school. It was in September. The final straw was a school camp.
He won't tell us exactly what happened, but we know he had difficulties with the other children sharing his room.
At the end of the day, even if we could have got him back to school, how effective was it going to be if he found it too noisy to learn, about things that didn't interest him, and among peers who wouldn't play with him?
Is repeatedly sending your child to a place that makes them sad, or confused, or angry, really the right thing to do? And if so, how are we, as parents, expected to deal with that?
To find a way forward, I joined several Australian Facebook groups, dedicated to homeschooling, E-schooling, de-schooling and unschooling.
I'd gone into this world expecting to connect with the "hippy" set — parents who educated their kids in the bush, at the beach, anywhere in nature.
What I found was thousands and thousands of families who educated their children in a variety of ways – from nature-based play to playing computer games, creating TikTok videos to building Lego, going to the library to making PowerPoints.
Most of these Facebook groups boasted tens of thousands of members. Some administrators said requests to join were coming in so fast they couldn't keep up.
For now, we're in limbo
As the school year comes to an end, our family remains in limbo.
We've passed the trauma of not being able to get our son to school.
I no longer wake up at 2am, in breathless panic at having a child who doesn't do what every "normal" Australian kid does.
We still get the daily text messages from school about his absence. For a long while, each one felt like a little pinch of failure.
Now I laugh reading some of the outrageous replies other parents like me brag about sending – "she got recruited by NASA", "they've joined the circus".
My son's not OK without school. He's better but he's not yet OK. Knowing he's missing something he's spent his whole life hearing is vital for success causes him a lot of anxiety.
But he does prefer his T-shirts to his school uniform. He also likes Minecraft much more than art and craft.
And for now, he doesn't have to worry about forgetting his lunch box.
Alison Costelloe is a video producer working with ABC News in Tasmania.
ABC Everyday in your inbox
Get our newsletter for the best of ABC Everyday each week