Emotions (part 3)

By the time the assessment paperwork arrived, I had cried every day for a week. I was a mess. I was grieving and sad, emotional and overwhelmed. I called my therapist during this time, and at the end of our conversation she kindly said "Betsy, this is not a crisis." She was right, but it felt like it was. Her words were stark, but comforting nonetheless.
Aidan was getting sad faces every day at school. I was feeling like such a failure as a mother. I felt that I had given him these problems. Aidan had inherited them from me, then because he was a preemie, his odds were even higher. I had the thoughts of "If I could have held him in longer, this may not have been a problem, statistically speaking" (yet another reason it was my fault). It was an awful time for me. One night as Kevin and I talked about Aidan he suggested that what he was doing was intentional. I was feeling particularly overprotective and I exploded in anger at his insinuation. It infuriated me. Halfway through the conversation that night I sobbed at what all this meant for me, what this could mean for him. I explained to Kevin the pain of my past reminding me so harshly in the behavioral problems of my son. He understood.
One day during this time as we walked to school Aidan noticed a grave in someone's front yard-someone's beloved pet was buried there, and they had used stones to make a cross in remembrance. Aidan noticed this grave, and on the way to school stopped to examine the gravesite more closely. I watched him think, then heard him pray out loud for God to help him get a smiley face in school that day. I stood there dumbfounded and overwhelmed , and it was then I realized that there really was a problem. My son was praying to do well, and still could not. That moment replayed in my head, over and over and over. It was that moment, the watching and listening to his prayer that made me sob when I thought about it later.
I thought about it a lot.