There are days that I feel like giving up! Work. Family life. My commute freaking sucks. And giving up, seems like a great short term solution.
This has been a tough week. Work has been nuts. I’ve been working 65 – 80 hours a week. The commute has been close to 3 hours a day. The work load has just been crazy, to the point that I’ve walked to the line of no return and have struggled to walk back from that. The thought of giving up, crossed my mind multiple times.
And then on top of all of that, there has been struggles all week with school. Multiple support calls. A new change to medication. Multiple melt downs over the loss of taking away electronics. At some point, after 3 hours of melt downs, I was ready to give up and throw in the towel.
Being a parent is hard. Being a child with ADHD is hard, if not harder to be honest. As a parent, I can recognize and understand certain facts, but a child, may not have that ability. And this week has stretched me thin and challenged me in many regards as well. But I thought about giving up.
I need a break. I need to sleep. I need for my son to be better, not in the sense that there is something wrong with him because he has ADHD. But because he isn’t able to control his emotions and out bursts.
Rarely do I get a break. Rarely do I get to sleep a full night, either due to work or kids or stress or because the day ended in the letter “y” or all of the above. And I can’t tell you how many times at 4:00 a.m. that I’ve thought about throwing in the towel and giving up.
And then something amazing happens. Something almost unexplained or something that as a parent, I like to think of as grace. I get a glimpse of the moments that my son is calm and playing well with other kids. Where he is socializing appropriately and not causing a scene or having an outburst. And it is in those moments, where he will apologize for his behavior, tell me he loves me and holds my hand, that I realize, that I am not giving up.
I can not give up on my son. I will not give up on him. I know that he is trying like hell and sometimes, damn it sometimes he just can not help it. I see it. I see he tries to stay focus, long after his medication is out of him and he can not stand still. I see that he is trying to do 2 tasks, when he can only do 1 at the time.
I love my son. I love him more than he will ever know. And he will never know the struggles that we have gone through, the financial expenses, because it doesn’t matter. I will sacrifice everything, to give him what he needs, because I am not giving up on him. Not now. Not tomorrow.
NOT EVER!