Samuel was horribly cranky this morning.
Actually, he wasn’t simply cranky, he was cranky on steroids.
It may come from several sources: a lack of sleep because he has been wracked with anxiety lately, a lack of sleep because his chapped lips are bothering him, a lack of sleep because he is anxious about being anxious. I am not sure of the genesis, but I do know that for the last two mornings when I went to wake him he was wide awake.
I have no idea how many hours he is sleeping.
I emailed his teacher to let her know.
Samuel would not be successful if it wasn’t for her and for me, working with him as a home-school tag team.
I wonder if he feels stress because of the approach of Valentine’s Day. Last year this caused him sadness because he felt no one in his class liked him enough to give him a valentine. I remember the time we spent preparing the valentine cards. I remember he forgot them and I delivered them to school so they would be distributed. I remember the bag of carefully prepared cards returning in his backpack.
I remember Samuel being unwilling to talk about it.
I remember him crying daily in school.
This morning I thought he was tired enough to offer him a day off from school to rest. His face fell, immediately, “I don’t want to skip school!” he growled. “Look, you made me cry!”
My empathetic tears stayed perched behind my eyelids.
When I cry it upsets him so I have become quite adept at holding tears back even when the salt stings me.
These are the moments I rarely share, choosing instead to share his triumphs, his loveable “Samuel-isms.”
I take a moment within my busy morning to pray for him, silently.
I close my eyes to “see” him. I pray no one is poking fun at his chapped lips. I pray he is able to focus.
I pray he can feel, even underneath his grouchy exterior, how much he is loved.
I pray for other mothers, sitting in their kitchens, their boardrooms, their minivans and behind their desks: each of us worried we will get that call we pray we won’t get. That call saying our child is suffering, that something has happened, that when we weren’t there, he needed help we weren’t able to provide.
I have two neurotypical daughters. I worry for them as well, but it isn’t anything like this almost namelessly consistent worry that lives in my gut for Samuel.
I watched him walk to school yesterday morning and a thought entered my witnessing mind. “He will change the world.” I paused to reflect on the thought.
“He has changed mine all ready.”
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© 2012
Julie Jordan Scott
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