There is possibly nothing worse than watching your child go through something and you have no idea how to help them.
That is where we are right now.
Watching my son go through a tumultuous roller coaster of frustration and violence, unable to voice the root of his problem. I am a bystander. I bear the bruises of tantrums, the deep circles of stress and lack of sleep under my eyes. I am tired. I am frustrated. I feel like I have no voice.
The worst is the endless cycle of phone calls. Trying to find a professional that will accept our insurance, that will accept his level of autism, that will actually see us. Dead end after dead end after dead end, doing all the rights steps but going nowhere.
The good days are few and far in between.
I'm still writing. I would go crazy if I didn't. It is slow. With many starts and stops. Many words scribbled out and deleted. There are many moments of staring at the screen, throat tight, panic humming high. It has been a relentless assault on my psyche for the past couple months. I have taken to writing shorts. There is a sort of therapy in short fiction, finding a beginning and ending in a small burst of words. You accomplish something. You create.
But I am still stuck in many ways. I want to help my son. I have spent many nights holding him, rocking him as he screams and screams and screams. It is heartbreaking. It is damn hard.
We will get through it. We will get through.
