The warmest of welcomes to you as you feel and express great concern for your daughter while also feeling your own frustration (completely understandable).
Definitely hard to know what's going through our child's mind or how their brain's actually working. It's not until everything becomes clear that you think 'It all makes complete sense now'. Until then, not a lot makes sense. For my own daughter (who's 23 now), it was her eyebrows that had to be perfect for secondary school. She's always had extremely fair eyebrows, which gives the appearance of her not having any. They had to be perfected with an eyebrow pencil. While her brother was always on time to leave the house for school, we'd end up sitting in the car waiting for her for at least 10 minutes. I pride myself on being a fairly zen mum but she would seriously test me. While she had a number of challenging traits, it wasn't until a couple of people added up her traits to possibly equaling ADHD. She went and got tested a couple of years back and ticked a lot of the boxes for an official diagnosis. Btw, she eventually overcame the eyebrow issue by dying them 😁
Not suggesting ADHD but just what certain traits represent. The perfectionism, for my daughter, is about managing the feeling of 'the stress of something not being perfect'. If it's perfect, in her mind, the relief is like a high or offers a much needed sense of calm or release from stress. For your daughter, perhaps what she faces is not 5 hours of perfecting her hair but 5 hours of stress instead. I imagine the closer it gets to leaving for school, the more stress she feels until it becomes unbearable. In that case, relief comes in the form of giving up and not going to school but then another problematic emotion comes up based on not going to school (maybe a sense of guilt or anger with herself). Emotional regulation, which includes managing feelings and developing greater levels of self understanding, can definitely be challenging to achieve.
Whether there's something going on at school that's leading your daughter to face these challenges or it's more to do with the way her brain ticks, it can be hard to know. I really feel for you. Btw, I can relate to offering my daughter strategies for managing only to be met with angry words of frustration on her part. Often she'd say in anger 'You just don't understand'. It's true, I didn't. I didn't fully understand back then the true impact of her inner dialogue, the frustration she experienced, certain obsessive compulsive traits and the reasons for them, a lack of much needed focus on school work (based on her not wanting to feel those challenges) and the list goes on.
At the end of the day, while we can be diagnosed with a certain brain state and face the challenges that comes with that state, it's important to also acknowledge who we naturally are. If we're a natural born 'feeler' or 'sensitive' (someone who feels or senses everything so easily) that kind of ability needs to be mastered, otherwise it can feel like one heck of a curse at times while feeling completely out of control. I should add that with both my kids, what led them to seek a diagnosis was based on the fact that their brain was making life hell in some cases and they wanted to know why. My son's diagnosed with level 1 autism. Could be a different approach with your daughter, 'Do you want to go and find out why your brain's making your life feel like hell at times? Aren't you curious'. Maybe triggering her to feel a sense of wonder or curiosity could be a way to go.❤️
