By Eulea Kiraly
Your son is lying on the floor, crying. His pants are wet and covered with mud. He is dirty and miserable and you are helpless to make it better. He has pushed you away, so you sit here in the corner of this empty lobby as hospital staff try to soothe him.
Sometimes he howls, sometimes he whimpers. He fights imaginary monsters and pulls his shirt up over his head so he can’t see them. Every now and then he goes limp – spent – and you hold your breath that he might finally collapse into the blessed release of sleep. Because that has evaded you all for days. The last sixteen hours have been like this – broken only by fitful hours of nightmare-filled naps. Your son is exhausted. In some small hour of this morning, he crawled out of bed and started wandering. In the grey dawn you found him sitting in the sodden park, staring at his fat, naked toes. Quiet and numb, he looked up, “Help me, Mum.”
Over the past few weeks, you have cultivated sufficient detachment to be the problem solver – the provider of food, and clean clothes, and gentle steerage away from the dangers outside your home. But as you sit here in this cold, fluorescent-lit room, that detachment begins to disintegrate. There is your son – an awful embodiment of agony – not some long-haired, lean-faced gentle-Jesus-on-the-cross, but a big, blubbering baby – his bald head wrinkled as it was the moment he first drew breath, the purple birthmark livid, his face twisted into a mask of incomprehensible suffering.
And then the tears come. As you become I, the tears come.
Because I cannot pick him up and comfort him. Because he is not a “terrible two”, but forty-two. Because he is a veteran, because he has an ex-wife, because he was sexually abused as a child. Because he lost his job, because he lost his fiancée to Covid. Because for more than twenty years he has had diagnoses of acute anxiety, adjustment disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, chronic depression, major depression with psychotic features, obsessive/compulsive disorder/ paranoia, psychosis, schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, and PTSD.
Because maybe, in this safe place, I can answer his plea, “Help me, Mum.”
Eulea Kiraly is a second-year Master of Fine Arts candidate in the Creative Writing program at the University of Central Arkansas, where she served as the managing editor of the Arkana Literary Magazine in 2024-25. Before shifting her focus to writing, she worked as a teacher in Arkansas prisons and as a theatre director and community arts facilitator in Canberra, Australia.