Over the years, I’ve developed a mantra of sorts. It goes like this, “I love you. I will always love you. Nothing you do will make me stop loving you.” I use it like a protection spell. I say it to remind myself of the truth of it. I wield it to force through to the core of my son.

Grant has oppositional defiant disorder. The definition given by Johns Hopkins is chilling.

Children with ODD show a pattern of uncooperative, defiant, and hostile behavior toward peers, parents, teachers, and other authority figures. They are more troubling to others than they are to themselves.

Worse still, are the theories as to the causes. Grant’s case is severe. It is likely exacerbated by also having ADHD. Since the spring, when we got his diagnosis, we’ve been working on mitigating his ADHD with medication, which is improving his ODD. Progress is wonderful, and I’m extremely proud of him. It’s taking hard work on his part to break some of these patterns.

He has matured more slowly than his peers on average, and struggled more in school. He’s also tall (for his age) and handsome and charming. When he needs to conform, he struggles. But he has truly come miles in the past 7 or 8 months.

When he was much smaller, he’d have these dramatic meltdowns; massive tantrums, finding someone to hit or kick, screaming, tears, the whole works. He once broke both my phone and our TV by throwing the former at the latter. We’ve gotten calls from school telling us he hit another student in the head with a water bottle for no apparent reason. Afterwards, when he had calmed and the frenzy had passed, he’d cry to me, “you won’t love me now; I’m bad,” weeping into my shoulder at bedtime.

When the twins were little and I’d get frustrated with them, I’d tell them “I love you but I don’t like this action.” And I repeated that with Grant, but it didn’t reassure him or help him. So I changed what I said to him, to tell him that I loved him and would always love him. And he’d ask questions obviously designed to figure out when the love would run out. His anxiety over being abandoned is strangely high – I don’t know why that is, and all I want to do is make sure he knows he won’t be. So I told him nothing he could ever do would make me stop loving him, the core of what makes Grant, Grant. That his actions might be bad, but he wasn’t a bad person because of them. He is a loved person.

Truthfully, it’s been a long 8 years. There are plenty of days when I’m exhausted and drained by managing his disorder. It sometimes feel like walking a tightrope – you don’t always know what will set him off. It can be unfair to the twins, since they do get held to a different standard. I worry about the collateral damage to them.

A long time ago, maybe 20 years ago, I worked with a woman who’s teenage son had ODD. We’d talk about what that was like, and I remember thinking, “I hope that doesn’t happen if I ever have kids.” It sounded so hard. And she never complained! She rolled with the punches, and celebrated the victories – like when he made the baseball team at school for the first time, because he was able to follow instructions. She was always proud of him, and never shy to talk about him and what their lives were like. I really admired her. And I knew I would not be able to handle a kid with ODD myself. Of course at that point, I didn’t have any kids, and wouldn’t have been able to handle any kind of kid whatsoever, but I really didn’t understand that nuance yet.

While Grant’s made a mountain of progress – starting medication really unlocked reading for him, for example – there are days that are still really hard. Days when I just want to cry myself. But those days are getting further apart – taken in aggregate over eight years, though, when one happens it feels like a boulder, like you are right back in the middle of a sea of bad days. In contrast, his good days are really good. He is able to participate in sports and spends more time learning in school with his peers. He comes home happy at the end of the day. He’s beginning to blossom. It makes my heart sing.

These days, he could be having a minor meltdown or a great moment, and he’ll stop and look at me and say, “you love me and you’ll always love me,” and I tell him that this is so.