Just because we seemed to have a really bad day yesterday, just because everyone came unglued, including the one who is supposed to be the role model, doesn’t mean life as we know it, is over.

I could have just sent everyone to their rooms after supper, or been a retaliatory brat after the resentment expended yesterday. I could have thrown up my hands and walked away, but one thing stopped me.

Mr. Non-Verbal, the one who may have Asperger’s Syndrome, he certainly has something, the one who uncharacteristically changed into clean clothes to talk to me after my second hissy fit of the day, yes the one who politely waited for the Mental Health worker and I to complete the paperwork on another child, he took me aside and shamed me.

“Mom, you don’t know how many nights I sit up and wonder what’s going to happen.”

How can that be? How can a child, after five years, still wonder? Doesn’t he listen to my exclamations and declarations of love? Doesn’t he see me providing for our family, sometimes against a great deal of odds?

Am I a dolt, or what? How can I still, after two decades of parenting tough children, how can I still be so thick? I was the one yelling I wanted to quit yesterday, I was the one pushed to the edge, and I was the one who melted down the most it seemed.

My 27 year old daughter, Master’s Degree in Social Work, happily married, home-owner, expectant mother to their second child will be the first to tell me how insecure she still feels finishing up her own second decade as my daughter; possessing that great, deep profound fear that I could still send her back to Texas.

Are you kidding me?

That astonishes me, yet I believe her. She’s trying to help my big mouth and my thick head to understand how primal these fears and insecurities are in children. This never goes away. Fortunately she has an understanding husband who can deal with this as well; it spills over into every aspect of life.

Last night, I ordered a dozen pizzas at $5 apiece, rented the movie The Pursuit of Happyness and, when it was too dark for me to continue trimming the honeysuckle that grows rampant over fences, plants, houses and my animals, we watched this sad, thought-provoking, ultimately happy movie, all twenty something of us. I know that today there’ll be questions about homelessness, mamas leaving, and the enduring factors of hardship, hard work and perseverance.