"My Brain and My Bones Aren't Connected"

He was so smart, so very smart. Inquisitive, observational and persistent: three words that when you look them up in the dictionary you'd see his face. Not only family and friends said so, but the teachers at his school took notice.

He knew something was wrong. Certainly when a child gets told multiple times to do the same thing, by different people, the child knows something is not right. Well, not always. Some kids, I've seen, it doesn't seem to phase. But not him. He didn't want to get in trouble at school any more. He was tired of being constantly corrected. "Mom, my brain and my bones aren't connected," he would tell me at only six years old.

No, this wasn't an excuse. I knew these words were different. Believe me, I had heard a mirage of excuses come from his mouth, some so far fetched they were funny. But this was different. He was hurting. His head and his heart felt like they were being stomped on because he had so little control.

"How smart," I thought, for him to realize that his brain actually was not connecting to what his bones were doing. For a child to have the internal perspective to realize that things were not clicking the way they should, the ability to verbalize exactly what was going on in his body, at such a young age was quite impressive. But that was not enough for him to achieve self-control. He knew why, he just didn't know how to connect the two.

He wanted help, he wanted to do better, to not have people upset with him. But how? Being his mom it was my job to exhaust all efforts to find out how. We had to find the exact way for him to connect his brain and his bones. What a smart little boy.