My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
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When another of our Special Mothers, Helen, felt overwhelmed by her son’s diagnosis and lack of progress, she started seeing a therapist. “I was completely consumed by my son’s LD,” she said. “I couldn’t make decisions — none!”
“Decisions about your son?” I asked.
“I couldn’t make any decisions. Little, everyday decisions. And I was so preoccupied that I would go to bed at night, sleep for a couple of hours, and then wake up and be up all night worrying about things that did not need to be worried about.”
“Things to do with school?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Ridiculous things, like ‘Oh, I really need to get that bowl back from her.’ Completely insane things that did not need to be obsessed about at four a.m.! That kind of behavior is just not me. I never worried about things like that.”
“Why do you think you did it?” I asked.
“I felt so powerless about the things that were happening at the school. I felt such a lack of control that I was grasping at things that I could control. But then I would get up and go through the day and nothing was getting accomplished, so the cycle started all over again. Most of this happened when my son moved to a new school in first grade. In his kindergarten he’d been getting counseling and I felt he was moving toward something, but nothing was happening in the new school. I felt helpless. I was consumed by the fact that nothing was getting done and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“And your reaction was to obsess about things you might be able to control,” I said.
“Yes. Looking back on it now, I think that’s what it was. But at the time, I just thought I was losing my mind. I knew it was insane to act the way I was acting. It was completely irrational. I was up at night, all night, worrying about things that I normally couldn’t care less about. I was miserable, and at one point I thought I was miserable because of my marriage, though that wasn’t really the problem at all. I didn’t know what the problem was, but I knew I had to do something. I couldn’t live like that. I went to a therapist who introduced me to meditation, and I joined a meditation class. At first I thought, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’ That was just not me. But I decided to try it. I was amazed by how much it cleared my mind.”
“Is that when you realized it wasn’t your marriage?” I asked.
“Yes! And also, I had to remove myself from the negative thinking of others. A friend of mine was in the same boat I was, and we were living in this negative view of things. So I removed myself from her a little bit. I had to. I was consumed and surrounded by negative thinking, and I realized I had to snap out of it.”
“You really had to be proactive about it,” I said. “You had to step up and say, ‘I need to change something.’”
“Yes. I realized I needed to change something because I was miserable, and to some extent it was affecting my marriage because I was consumed with it. This is something that might be helpful to someone going through it now. When I found out about my son's dyslexia, I talked to a neighbor who also had a son with LD and she casually said, ‘You should be careful because these things can really affect a marriage.’ At the time I thought, ‘What is she talking about?’ I thought she was a little crazy, and I thought, ‘How could it possibly affect a marriage?’ But that little remark really helped me later on when I remembered what she said. It also helped that my husband saw the whole picture before I did. At first he was in denial about our son’s LD, but then he moved right into accepting it. He didn’t go through the middle part like I did. But he also had the luxury of putting it all on me. He would say, ‘All right, you figure out what’s best,’ and that was nice because he trusted me to do it.”
