After a pretty fantastic weekend, everything came to a crashing halt yesterday. I got a call from the school, from a teacher who meets with the kindergarten class once a week, because Ian had an all-out tantrum. When faced with the decision to go back to class or to call me he chose to have the teacher call me, but then he refused to speak to me. In speaking with her the most poignant sentence was, "I raised three boys myself and I know boys and tantrums. However, this is something else entirely."

I cried at work. I locked myself in the file room and just sobbed.

I am not a crier; in fact I think I've cried in front of my husband twice since I've known him, and I've cried in front of my mother once. I am not a crier because I feel that it makes me seem weak (but I think it makes other people strong. How weird is that?), and I won't put myself "out there" for anyone. However, when I am really angry I cry... and apparently I cry when I am so scared and lost that my heart breaks.

I picked him up after school. He was embarrassed, but he was honest and told me the story, complete with the part about seeing the principal (who I'm sure was doing an "assessment" to see if the problems were stemming from home) and about the temper tantrum he threw prior to the one that warranted a phone call. I was in the middle of trying to get a time-line for the events when I noticed that he had on different pants then the ones I sent him to school in.

My son wet his pants on the playground.

Well, that was it for me. I have never, ever felt like I did at that moment. It was somewhat surreal in that everything became so clear, so necessary, but I also felt hollow and sick at the same time.

The short version is that he is no longer going to the after school program he was in. I have a therapist coming to see him on Wednesday afternoon, and I am going to be spending the next few weeks in a frantic search/quest for a new job, or a new way to do things, or begging for help. I have to find a way to make this work because I don't have an alternative. This is the way it has to be whether it kills me or not.

Yesterday served as a reminder for why I'm working so hard to be home with my kids and to do everything I can to make that goal a reality as soon as possible.

After a day of court hearings I was really looking forward to picking Ian up from school, hanging out together to do his homework before his concert, and then having some nice family time together.

Well. It started out with him saying, "I got a yellow today" when I picked him up from school. I opened his folder to find a note from his teacher that basically said that his behavior has declined the past 2 weeks and that she is very concerned. We have a conference scheduled with her to discuss everything, and she wanted to know if there was a change in his medication that could be causing the explosive episodes.

By the time we got home he had completely fallen apart. He reminded me of the days when he was 3 and had such a hard time with anger, something I thought was a distant memory for us all. He sat in his room screaming, throwing things, and saying such violent, angry things that he actually scared me. The worst was when he told me "I want to poke your eye out and hurt you!" and then he put his hand on my face. There was a lot of screaming (the kind of screaming when a person is so mad there aren't words to express it anymore), trying to slam the door on me...

I managed to stay firm while I was in his room, but when he finally calmed down enough for me to safely leave I stood in the laundry room and cried.

I just don't know what to do. I am very aware that he feels totally out of control about something, but I'm not sure if it's an event that caused this, or if he's feeling completely overwhelmed about everything in general, or if he's just being a terror because he really does have some sort of ADHD issue. I tried to get him to talk while we were working on his homework later, but kids are so cryptic that it's hard to find the truth they're eluding to. There were some things that were said that have me worried, but I don't know if it's because of what was actually said or what I'm reading into what I heard.