Jekyll and Hyde

My chest is constricted, my throat is closed, I am so past crying, it's a little alarming.

A. threw a rake at me today in anger and frustration. It hit me in the back. Left a cut. Blood on my shirt. It has been a while since he has thrown anything. I wish in these moments that I were a big, burly man. That I could grab him by the scruff of the neck and get in his face and scare the shit out of him.

I feel, instead, like a weak-willed woman, too frightened to stand up to her abuser.

But what do you do when this abuser is your child? Bigger than you, and not yet a man? When it is your heart, out of your body, staring at you, fuming? When you know that his bi-polar disorder and lack of treatment for the past 7 years is partly to blame? When the urge to hold him and get him through it is stronger than the urge to fight back, to call the police, to do the things you probably should?

I get stuck in the guilt trap. In the place where I beat myself up with the "shouldas." I should have insisted he stay on medication after the first diagnosis when he was 6. I should have handled these behaviors different from the very beginning. I should have...

But the fact is this: My boy is troubled. Troubling and in trouble. And some days I feel scared and hopeless. On these days, it's hard to remember the brilliant, quirky, eccentric, interesting individual he is. On these days, fear consumes me, and I see him in jail, or alone, or dead, or addicted to drugs and alcohol.

On these days, I feel completely alone. These things are impossible to explain. How does the afternoon start with A. asking to rake leaves for money, to throwing the rake at me, to threatening suicide, to sleep?

He will wake up emotionally hung-over, but pretty much done. And I am left with whiplash and desperate calls to counselors and doctors.

I am grateful that we hit the crisis we did a month ago so that we can finally get some help. But I am angry and frustrated that it took that. What if it's too late?

I guess, though, that it is like anything else. Left foot, right foot, repeat. Left foot, right foot, repeat.