I'm sorry, the doctor can't see you right now.

I don’t know what is scarier--having the school call and say that my son needs to be hospitalized again because of the severity of his behavior, or the hospital saying they don’t have any beds available.

It’s at times like these when I just sit in my kitchen chair, look blankly at the wall and wonder… what did I do so wrong that this is what our lives have become? 

I must have done something wrong.  Something to either cause this or even deserve this. You know, some sort of cosmic retribution.

I thought we were doing all the right things.  But maybe I wasn’t strict enough.  Maybe I was too strict. I bought him too much stuff, I guess.  Or, I didn’t buy him enough stuff, the right stuff.

I shouldn’t have been so focused on keeping my house clean. (I’m no neatnik but I will admit that I like my house to be somewhat picked up. It’s my own perseveration. I look at the pictures in Dwell magazine and just sigh.) I should have spent more time one on one with my son.

I pushed too hard.  No, I didn't push hard enough.

I knew we should have tried that hyperbaric oxygen therapy.  Run different blood tests, tried more medicine, better medicine, more alternative medicine.

I should have gotten him together with more of his typical peers.  Oh, we did the dyads and the triads, various social skills groups and the like, but I should have done them more often, more intensively. So maybe he could model good behavior.

Maybe I should have gone to more conferences, read different journals, subscribed to different listservs, done more therapy. More ABA, better ABA, more therapists, different therapists, more OT, more Speech.

I should have worked harder, done something more, something different to help my family. 

I shouldn’t have taken that job. I should have stayed home and focused, focused, focused.  If I hadn’t been spending 40 hours a week trying to raise money to send Baltimore inner city public school students to college, that would have been 40 more hours a week to spend trying to help my own child.

I simply just do not know how we wound up here, how I could have prevented it, and what to do to fix my son.  Just tell me what we did wrong, and we’ll fix it.  We’ll fix it.  We have to. 

We have to fix it.