My beautiful boy.

I am a mother.

I have been a mother for over 6 years.  I am a mother twice over.  Yet, I am a different mother to each one of my children.  Each one needs me in a different way.  I feel I love each of my children equally but differently. My second child is 'easy'.  Younger, less complicated, less demanding, 'easy'.  My first; always a challenge, complicated, demanding, hard bloody work sometimes.

I find it hard.

He is my boy.  He is handsome, changeable, bright, stubborn, funny and defiant.  He likes lego and kung fu and music and dancing and Michael Jackson.  He has big dreams.

He finds life hard.  He has often found life so hard that he has wished his life would end.  He is 6.  If you want to know what your heart breaking feels like listen to a child tell you that they are stupid and wish they were dead.  I don't have the words to describe it.  He is not stupid.  He looks at his friends and he knows he is different.  He knows that he finds things hard that seem to be as easy as breathing for others.  He is 6.

Today, he went for a private assessment at a Dyslexia Centre and lo and behold, he has dyslexia, mild dyspraxia and ADHD.  He also has appalling short term memory. "Appalling" really was the word used.  It really is in one ear and straight out the other.  He is also above average intelligence and very bright.

I feel relieved.  I feel guilty.  I feel sad.  I feel angry.  I feel stupid for feeling so many things.

School were quite happy to just carry on labeling him as badly behaved without trying to find out the why.  There is not enough money in the pot to test all the kids that need testing.  There is not enough money to help all the kids that need help.  I know that.  I just wonder how bad things would have had to have got for him.  I wonder how bad he would have ended up feeling about himself before someone else spoke up for him, because for years it has felt like no one was listening.

I am fiercely in his corner and I always will be.  I have always known life was hard for him, I just didn't know why and I didn't know how to help make it better, but now I do.  And I will help make it better, because I think that sums up motherhood for me, whatever their age, whatever happens I am always going to want to help make it better.

I love my son.