A Waiting Room, A Meltdown, and the Kind of Help You Don’t Expect The waiting room had that strained kind of quiet—the kind that isn’t calm, just held together. Then the fire alarm cut through it, sharp and sudden, and everything I had been managing carefully with my six-year-old son, Marcus, came apart at once. He dropped to the floor, overwhelmed, screaming in a way that wasn’t about defiance or fear in the usual sense. It was something deeper—his body reacting faster than anything I could reach. I moved through the steps I knew by heart. Headphones. Weighted blanket. My...
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