About
Meet the person behind the blog.
My Story
I spent my whole life building systems to keep up. Turns out there was a reason.
Hi. I’m Nicole Phommanorat.
Late diagnosed ADHD mom. Systems thinker. Wife. The person holding together a house full of kids who all needed something different from me at the same time.
In 2020 I miscarried, had a high-risk pregnancy during COVID, and lost my dad three months after Leila was born. I became legal guardian of my tween sisters and my terminally ill stepmother. Sophia was 3 years old.
In 2022 I lost my brother and best friend, Lidio. He was 40 years old. Shortly after, my stepmother passed away too.
I was drowning. And I didn’t have the luxury to fall apart. I was supporting two grieving kids, adjusting to our new normal with six kids at home, and learning pretty quickly that I couldn’t take care of anyone else if I wasn’t taking care of myself first.
Therapy wasn’t making the impact I needed it to. So I turned to a psychiatrist and got evaluated. The results came back. ADHD. OCD. Likely autistic.
I’d been building workarounds my entire life because my brain needed them. The diagnosis didn’t confirm I was defective. It explained me.
Sophia wasn’t the disruptive kid. She was the daydreamer. The quiet one. The one nobody was seeing.
We tried to work with the system. We sought evaluations through the school district and pediatrician referrals to figure out what accommodations she needed. But the same capacity struggles we saw in the classroom showed up in the school administration too. So we made a different call. We’re not enrolling Sophia or Leila next school year. We’re building something at home where we control the variables.
I started Raise & Rise because I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I want my kids to learn how their brains work. I want them to know that a math problem has one right answer but a hundred ways to get there. I want them to learn to self regulate and understand their own minds. That wasn’t available to us. So I’m building it.
Our rhythm. Not the rulebook.
What I know now as a late diagnosed ADHD mom is that so much of what felt like failure was just the wrong system. The wrong classroom. The wrong expectations. The wrong measuring stick.
I spent years thinking I was the problem. Turns out I was just running on the wrong setup. My kids don’t have to figure that out the hard way.
That’s what this blog is. It’s not a how-to. It’s a documentation of what it actually looks like to be a late diagnosed ADHD mom building something from scratch, for brains like ours, in real time. Some days it works. Some days it doesn’t. I’m writing about both.
What I do when I’m not raising humans
While I’m building this homeschool I’m also running We Thrive Collective, a business I founded to help neurodivergent entrepreneurs build systems that actually fit their brains. I’ve spent 15 years designing the kind of infrastructure that works for humans, not against them. Turns out that skill set is pretty useful when you’re building a homeschool from scratch too. I’m not just a late diagnosed ADHD mom, I’m also a founder, small business owner, and systems strategist. I’m using this skillset and my technical knowledge of building AI tools and workflows to help me build out something I couldn’t find anywhere else. A documentation system designed for real homeschool families. I’ll be sharing as I build it.
Learn more at we-thrive-collective.com
