The Hardest Parts

This blog is about to take a turn for a minute, so buckle up.

He scared me twice before he was ever born.

Once when I had a subchorionic hematoma and was put on bed rest at 10 weeks.

Once when they informed me he would need to be induced a week early because of excess amniotic fluid (possibly because of potential kidney problems), and the dangers that presented for hemorrhaging and both of us dying due to a uterus too fully stretched with a single baby to be able to contract properly, both during labor and after.

We made it through pregnancy and birth… but he hasn’t stopped scaring me.

He’s a boy, so he’s scared me multiple times since then. That’s normal for the average boy, I’ve learned over the years.

The time he tripped down the stairs and sliced his knee open on a toy, needing multiple stitches at just under 2 years old.

The time he was helping his baby brother learn to walk and he tripped, smashing his front teeth into the TV stand at the age of 5.

The time he lost his grip on the “fireman’s” pole at the park from 6 feet up at roughly the same age and landed flat on his back.

When he didn’t show up for school in the second grade and the school called me to tell me he was walking back home when the bus came by – that the driver had yelled out his name to get his attention (which was ignored) – and it ended up in neither one of us knowing where he was in that moment.

The time he was riding his bike, wiped out on wet pavement, and ended up taking an ambulance ride to the hospital when he was 11 because he had landed squarely on his head and a good samaritan who had witnessed it was able to call for help.

He’s scared me so many times that, as a mom of only boys, I became nearly immune to it for awhile.

He is now almost 17 and has “upped his level” considerably.

Now we are dealing with something so much more dangerous and so much more needing of help that I don’t know how to help anymore.

Stealing. Drugs. Mental health. Thoughts of suicide, acts of self harm, and only reeling himself in from those most dangerous latter thoughts because he is worried about how others would feel or react as a result.

Knowing that the only thing that’s stopped him is how “others would feel” is my only grasp on reality right now, if only because I know how that feels.

He’s always been the savior for others, which I have witnessed in him many times. He’s always been the one to listen when someone needed to talk, but never been the one allowed/willing/able to talk about his own problems or concerns.

He’s always been everyone else’s saving grace and never his own.

I need answers to questions I can’t even begin to know how to ask.

Is it that nobody has been there for him the way he needed, or is it that he needed the distraction of others so he didn’t have to focus on his own problems; so he wouldn’t have to let others in… ?

Maybe it was both.

And that’s the hardest part.

I’ve always tried being a listening ear for a child who has never really wanted to talk, and I just don’t know the reasons he’s unwilling to do so.

The not knowing why… the not knowing how to help… those are always the hardest parts.