I distinctly remember one of Mom’s friends who always said, ”Be careful what you pray for because God will answer. I prayed for patience and God gave me twins.”

Since I’ve already established the fact that I am one of those, it should come as no surprise that in my mid-twenties I began praying for patience. It truly was the one thing I felt I got the short end of the stick on. So, I began praying for patience a few months before Terry and I got married.

When we had been married about six months, Terry looked at me and said, ”Let me tell you something, if you and I are going to have kids together we need to do it soon. I am not going to be a sixty-year-old man raising a teenager.”

So, that settled that and within a few months, I was pregnant.

Overall, the pregnancy was easy. We had a slight hiccup when I was around thirty weeks and they discovered I had placenta previa. It’s actually how we found out that Alex was a boy because they had to do several ultrasounds to make sure the placenta moved up; otherwise, a c-section would be needed. Fortunately, it moved and Alex came the natural way.

He was an easy baby. He wasn’t fussy. Slept through the night before he was two months old. He was quite the rambunctious toddler and required a lot of adult supervision because he was like a little Houdini, and could wrangle his way out of any contraption including his ultra-expensive car seat.

But then, after Amy was born, he turned into a ball of fury. At times, he was uncontrollable and unmanageable and the problem was you never knew when he would fit into these fits of rage. We tried the normal punishment like timeouts and spanking. They were not useful or productive. Most of the time, it only made him angrier. In fact, there were times, I literally had to sit down on the floor and hold his hands and feet until he calmed down.

This was not easy for any of us and especially not me. I was also going through a terribly rough time because my endometriosis had kicked into high gear. Physically and emotionally I was spent.

I had a friend who encouraged me to get on Zoloft. I did heed her advice and that helped me. It didn’t help my child.

Finally, I convinced Terry and the Pediatrician that he needed to be assessed. I had been reading about bipolar and was certain that was our culprit. Through the same friend who suggested Zoloft for me, she also gave me a recommendation for a renowned child psychologist at Duke.

We got our appointment set. Beforehand, they asked me to write everything I could recall about the four years of his life including my pregnancy and his birth. By the time I was finished, it wrote like a novel. (Maybe I should have kept a copy)

Prior to seeing the doctor, I had picked up a book called Parenting with Love and Logic by Foster Cline, MD, and Jim Fay. Terry and I had already started implementing some of their ideas and they were working. It also was helping with the other three children as well.

After our four hours long appointment, the doctor concluded that Alex had high- level anxiety and slight ADD, which he said required no medication. He told us that consistent discipline would achieve the best results for him. (He had literally observed us with Alex for two hours before coming in to meet with us) I told him about the book. He said it was one that was on his recommendation list.

He surmised that the anxiety was an onset of my almost tragic birth of Amy because that’s when the noticeable change happened. Due to the fact, I almost lost my life, when Terry brought him to see me I was lying in a bed with a very swollen face from all of the fluids. Then when Amy and I came home, I couldn’t pick him up for three weeks. People were in and out helping me but the most I could do for him was allow him to crawl into my lap. He was only sixteen months old and could not verbalize so it came out as anger.

Once we began fully implementing the idea found in the book, our lives changed substantially. I learned patience in a way I never thought I would and there was a complete sense of freedom in teaching my children to make choices. The main premise of the book is to teach children in order for them to become independent. That is the ultimate goal.

Now, I wish I could tell you that I am always patient but that is not the case. I still ride that struggle bus. What I can tell you is that when I prayed for patience and God gave me Alex one of my life’s most precious gifts.