The Button

"Three weeks for a 3 minute repair?"

Some days, autism isn't the hardest part.

It's the cleanup afterward.

Not the toys thrown across the floor. Not the tears or the ripped up art projects. Not even the meltdown itself.

It's the recovery.

It's untangling the weaponized words spoken by a little boy whose brain is completely overwhelmed. It's sorting through misplaced blame, impossible expectations, and hearing things no parent ever wants their child to believe about themselves.

"I ruin everything."

"I'm the worst."

"I wish I wasn't even on this planet."

Those words don't disappear when the yelling stops. They settle into your heart long after the house gets quiet.

A few weeks ago my son had one of those meltdowns.

It happened at church.

He became disrespectful to his Sunday school teacher, and for the first time she experienced one of his storms firsthand. When I came to pick him up, she was sobbing because she didn't know what to do.

The truth is...

Neither do I.

Not always.

I felt terrible that someone else had to now carry the weight of what I deal with.

I live this every day, and there are still moments that leave me feeling completely unequipped. So I couldn't blame her tears. I understood them.

When we got home, I told him to take a bath.

Not as punishment.

Just...to breathe.

To let the emotions settle before we tried to put words to what had happened.

While he was trying to unbutton his SpongeBob shirt, he became frustrated and simply pulled too hard.

The button didn't just pop off.

It ripped straight through the fabric.

When he got out of the bath, he walked into my room holding the shirt and the button.

His shoulders were slumped.

His eyes were sad.

"Mom... I accidentally broke my shirt."

"I'm very sorry."

I took it from him and smiled.

"It's okay."

"I can fix it."

I meant it.

But I didn't fix it.

Not that day.

Not the next day.

Or the next.

For three weeks that little yellow shirt sat exactly where he left it.

Every time I walked by, I felt something I couldn't explain.

It wasn't frustration.

It wasn't laziness.

It wasn't because sewing on a button is difficult.

It takes maybe two or three minutes.

It was because that shirt wasn't just a shirt anymore.

It had become a snapshot of one of the hardest days we'd had in a while.

It was like looking at an old photograph where you're smiling, but you remember exactly how much you were falling apart behind the smile.

Every glance at that tiny hole pulled me back into the exhaustion.

The sadness.

The fear.

The ache of hearing your child say things about himself that you wish you could erase forever.

Part of me wanted to throw the shirt away.

Not because it couldn't be repaired

Because I wanted to pretend that day never happened.

But today...

Today I picked up the sewing box.

Threaded the needle.

Stitched the hole closed.

Reattached the button.

Three minutes.

While in a bath, holding the thread and fabric above my head out of the water...

That's all it took.

Fixed.

And I realized something.

Sometimes we're not avoiding the work.

We're avoiding the memories attached to it.

Sometimes the hardest thing to mend isn't the shirt.

It's ourselves.

Healing has its own timeline.

Sometimes we need weeks before we're ready to touch the thing that reminds us of what we've survived.

And that's okay.

The beautiful thing about fabric is that once it's mended, the hole doesn't define the shirt anymore.

You have to look closely to even know it was there.

Maybe we're a little like that.

We carry stitches.

Evidence that something once tore.

Evidence that someone cared enough to repair it.

And maybe that's the lesson I needed.

My son isn't defined by his hardest day.

I'm not defined by mine.

We're both just learning how to mend what gets torn.

One stitch at a time.

"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds." — Psalm 147:3

Because sometimes healing doesn't look dramatic.

Sometimes it looks like an emotionally exhausted mother finally picking up a needle after three weeks...

and quietly believing that broken things are still worth mending.

To learn more about Brittany Parra visit:

https://www.brittanyparra.com/about-me