In Which Connor Breaks Down

This morning Connor was supposed to have his field day with school, but when we showed up we discovered it had been (mostly) canceled.  So we drove to Pike Place Market instead and did a little bit of shopping.  After Connor had his nap, I did a little more cleaning around the house in preparation for our friends coming in town to stay with us, which is when I made a big mistake.

See, we had this suitcase sitting in one of our closets that didn't really need to be in there.  And so I decided to move it to another part of the house, and not thinking about it at all I rolled it past Connor. 

He went ballistic.

He must have cried for about three hours.  And we're talking full-on, screaming melt-down here; he hit notes I wasn't even aware were in his range.  "No bye bye NO BYE BYE" he signed frantically over and over.  And then he demanded Jeremy, who was unfortunately in class, and when Jeremy didn't immediately appear he would break down again and sob like his little heart was breaking.

Sometimes I forget just how traumatic the events of the last year have probably been for Connor.  He's so laid-back and happy most of the time that it's easy to downplay how unhappy and scared all of the changes made him.  It's also easy to think that he doesn't really understand what happened, so it shouldn't have affected him as much.

But that suitcase triggered something-- I'm not sure if it was a fear that Daddy was leaving again or maybe that we were moving again-- and he absolutely lost it.  I held him in my lap and rocked him and sang to him, and I finally got him relatively calmed down, and then of course I had to strap him in his wheelchair because it was time to drive to the airport to pick our friends up and he completely broke down again.  He finally calmed down in the car, when it was evident that I was not, in fact, leaving him and by the time we got there he was almost cheery. 

But it's a wake up call to me that even though Connor seems to be pretty even-keeled, he was obviously deeply affected by the events of the past year and I need to be more sensitive to that.  Just because he doesn't always have the language to tell me what he's feeling, it doesn't necessarily mean that he isn't thinking about what happened and processing it in his own way. 

I'll know better next time.

~Jess