Today I Hate Myself Because...

...ah, what a long and exhaustive list, but just one item for now.

I can't help my son.

When he's hurt, I usually don't know where he's hurting or why or how it happened. I have to Sherlock Holmes my way through and hope for the best.

And when he wants or needs something he can't get or do for himself, which is just about everything, more than half the time I have no everloving idea what it is.

He tries to tell me these things, tries and tries and tries. The longer I don't know what to do or how to help, the more desperate he gets so that soon he just starts scrolling through his words, pulls out all he's got in there...milk, juice, downstairs, cookie, potty, socks, pizza, popcicle, bed (or bread, never sure), cheese, movie (or mommy, hard to tell, and if it's movie, which one, there are hundreds), jump, pretzel, open (and I go "open what?" to which he replies, pleadingly, "open what?").

And the real bitch of it is that maybe he doesn't want or need any of these things, he rejects them one by one as I try to make it right for him, to fix whatever's wrong, whateverthehell it is. He wants something, he needs something, something that only I can get for him, and if he just starts rattling off all the words he has maybe his idiot brain dead mother will finally hit on it, like the old story of the monkey left alone with the typewriter long enough to plunk out War and Peace.

Sometimes he drags me over to the couch, stands on it so we're the same height, and tries to make me lift him up and hold him like a baby, rock him back and forth, swing him around. He weighs seventy-two pounds, seventy-two very dense, very static pounds. Sometimes I oblige him, but once isn't enough and sooner or later I have to stop. This is met with great dissatisfaction. I try to explain that if I end up in the hospital in traction, then we'll really be screwed. He clearly believes I'm bluffing.

Sometimes it's like tonight, where he screams and cries and bellows and keens until I want to ram my head into a concrete block as hard as I can so I can't hear it anymore. Tonight Grace has just about had it too, stick a fork in her, she's done, so she's yelling on top of it, trying to yell over him. Oh the cacophony. I hear myself muttering things like "Jesus have mercy" and meaning it, lapsed Catholic or not, like the atheist in the foxhole that is suddenly more devout than the Pope.  I tell her that her screaming is making it worse but she doesn't care, she's been a good sport for as long as she could and enough already so could he just put a sock in it so she can watch Spongebob in peace.

I feel the anger, the scary kind, rising up like a giant wave, and I want to explode at the both of them, but mostly at him, to scream at him to shut the goddamn fuck up. Takes everything I have not to let it rip and shake the house. Every time I take the big breath in to let out my own earthshattering kaboom, I breathe out instead, as many times as I can.

Finally got to the point where I'd exhausted the amount of times I could breathe it out and the kaboom was coming, ready or not.  Everybody'd better hold on to something.

But then I looked into his face, which I suddenly realized I'd been avoiding.

Sadness. Not bratty tantrummy squalling. Just a deep ocean of sadness.

So that weird sound you heard a little while ago that you couldn't identify? That was mostly likely my heart cracking in half.

His mouth was doing that thing it does when he's trying so unbelievably hard to sort it out himself, to soldier through, to find an answer on his own, because clearly help's not coming. With eyes grown so huge and earthen and wet they could drown me like quicksand. No wonder I didn't want to look.

My child has worked harder in his almost seven years than most people do in a lifetime. Just to manage being here, in this world, with all its inescapable assaults and insults, its intolerable mayhem. One goddamn imposition after another, as my grandfather liked to say.

Guess what, though. We just got back from the bathroom. He took a crap the size of a groundhog,  And in this very moment, I have never seen a happier child. Dancing feet, laughing eyes, singing his wordless singsongy songs. Suddenly putting his face right up to mine, eye to eye, impish and elfin and free, smiling like the sun.

Oh my Cal.