Faith in Crisis

Why Me Lord?

My face was red, veins popping out on my neck, and my hands were clenched in a fist as my eyes beheld the destruction.  He had done it again!  While I was outside to check on the laundry I had hanging on the line, my four-year old son, Jeremy, had plucked the petals off my silk flower arrangement.  I screamed out in anguish, “I am so tired of dealing with your impulses all the time!”  

This wasn’t the first time he had ruined my things.  He looked like a normal preschooler, but acted more like an animal than a human being.  His hands and teeth could destroy the best constructed toy in seconds.  Every day I found another mutilated toy; I wanted to cry.  It was not until our son began kindergarten that my life had a new perspective.  He was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).  

All the “not normal” things he did as a baby now made sense.  He screamed with urgency when he was a baby, not the gentle crying of his sister three years later.  Each night my husband, Mark, and I, played musical beds never knowing where we would end up in the morning, as Jeremy did not sleep through an entire night until he was three.  Naptime was a joke-thirty minutes; hardly enough time to clean up the dishes in the kitchen sink.  

Jeremy could not sit still to read a book.  He would knock over his stacked blocks only after two blocks.  Forget the playpen-an escapee on the loose!  Sitting for any length of time was not possible for him.  

Preschool also proved to be a disaster; at least the first preschool.  Jeremy would stand for story-time, never sitting with the other children in the circle.  Arts and crafts were never to be admired at home because they were cut up before he ever finished the project.  Jeremy’s anger was intensifying at home.  He was resisting more and more to what I told him to do.  I had to constantly watch to make sure I didn’t get hit with a flying object whizzing by my head because he would pick up a toy and throw it in anger.  Without even knowing it, I had placed my son in a preschool environment where he could not achieve success, and he was acting-out his frustration towards me.