On Thursday I came clean about what was going on with my son.  It wasn’t really a matter of “coming clean” as it was the right time to write about it.

Tyler no longer sleeps in bed with me but occasionally he will spend a night.  Now that it doesn’t happen every night I can enjoy it more and treasure the fact that some day he will not even want to live in this house!

We had turned out all the lights.  Usually if I can get Tyler into his “sleepy position” he will go out like a light.  He was still playing in the dark.  I had just gotten a Hello Kitty from the Build-A-Bear Workshop for my birthday. “Mommy, I think you are going to be mad at me.”  “Why, honey?”  “I was playing with Hello Kitty and by accident her slipper came off.”

“That’s no big deal”, I said, turning on the light to fix Hello Kitty’s slipper.  “I would never be mad at you over something you did by accident. Now, let’s go to sleep.”  “Is Hello Kitty mad at me?”  “Oh, no I’m not mad at you”, I said, in my best Hello Kitty voice.

A few minutes later we were laying in the dark and he asked, “Mommy, if I kicked you in the stomach and punched you in the eye, would you still love me?”

I think God or perhaps my dad in Heaven was guiding me as a parent because I came up with the quickest and best answer I could.

“Honey, I wouldn’t want you to do those things, and I might get mad at you if you did that, but, I would still love you.  You are my son and there is nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you.  I love you more than anyone else in the world, and I always will, no matter what.”

I hugged and kissed him.

There’s not too much more to write about after you write something like that.  Tyler knows that the feelings of aggression he has towards me are wrong, horrifyingly wrong, but he still has them.

Knowing that my son has that self-awareness, that he lives with this pain…it is almost too much for me to bear.

Except that I will bear it, because he is MY SON and I WILL always love him.