I was woken up this morning by someone’s emergency somewhere. A line of emergency vehicles sailed past my house with sirens blaring. Fire trucks I think. I buried my head deep under my pillows and pulled the comforter over my head. I wasn’t ready to be awake.

It briefly passed through my mind that whoever was the source of these emergency vehicles rushing around our hazy small town morning probably would like to be sleeping peacefully too. I felt a tinge of sorrow pass through my stomach. Then I remembered that there was a time, not that long ago, when the sound of sirens would have set my teeth on edge from the surge of adrenaline that sound immediately invoked. Back then, my son was in his “angry phase” (as he calls it). He was certainly angry, but there was more going on and it took four years of a good fight to finally land on the doorstep of the right therapist and a novel treatment called neurofeedback. Things are better now. Now I can hear a siren and feel a little irritation, and a little sympathy. Back then, a siren might be followed by a phone call; “Your son is hurt”, or “Your son is in trouble”.

Those years taxed my adrenaline system so much that I started to have responses without any triggers. I would wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and terrified of something that wasn’t there. I tried meditation, therapy, and finally drugs (prescribed of course) to quiet my body’s physical response to danger that had gone haywire. It was understandable. My beloved child was drowning in a dark pond with a rescue team standing all around watching, shaking their heads and telling me they were out of options. They didn’t know what to do. It was up to me, but all of my attempts to save him only served to make him duck and dodge and go under faster. He was like a wounded wild animal, biting and thrashing against the approach of salvation.

So as I listened to the sirens fade into the morning on their way to who knows what personal despair, I could feel some sadness for a stranger that tragedy had visited, but my body was ok. It didn’t rise to fight. I knew my son was downstairs sleeping and he was ok. That was then, this is now.

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