Unsettled

It's late April, and our weather is still very unsettled.  Every day brings something unexpected - we have wind, rain, hail, sun, all within the space of an hour or two.  Yesterday the sun was shining beautifully, the mercury rushed up to 75 degrees, but the wind was howling like November.  After the long difficult winter, we need spring to settle in so we can all relax. More than the weather is unsettled, too.  I've been fretting about a dear friend and her teenaged son who are going through some very difficult times.  For some while now, he's been having emotional problems, and they are culminating in some very painful circumstances  for the whole family.  My friend is such a good mother, such a caring, responsible person, with all the same hopes and dreams we all have for our first-borns.  And yet I'm fearful that those will never be realized, and that life will always be a struggle for this boy of hers whom she loves so much.

Although they haven't gotten a definite diagnosis, Dr. Becca's five-cent's worth is that it's  Asperger's Syndrome.  The signs are all there, and if I think about it, have been there since he was small.  Obsessiveness, lack of eye contact, difficulty engaging with other people, outbursts of anger.  Now that he's a teenager with the tumultuous changes inherent in that stage of life, all these symptoms have converged to create havoc in the poor kid's head.

My dear friend tries so hard to be practical and upbeat while maintaining a grip on reality.  Yet when she refers to her son as "my boy," the catch in her  throat makes my mothering heart ache.  So when I awoke again to another day of heavy, wet, oppressive skies and then heard the sound of pouring rain pounding the roof, I couldn't help but shiver a little.

Unsettled.

How about you?  Is your world on an even keel these days, or are you feeling unsettled too?