You may never have heard of Liz Petrone before but after you read this story, she will be your new hero. She went on facebook to talk about her son, who was feeling overly anxious and she couldn’t put her finger on why. As it turns out, her story about her son quickly went viral.
“Maybe it’s the way the seasons shift, a little at a time so slowly until it’s not slow at all anymore and it’s become cold so fast that you swear you inhaled the warm air of early fall and you exhaled in a foggy smoke of breath into the holidays,” she wrote.
“Or maybe it’s just that he’s been asking me every single morning since he started school in September: ‘Mommy, is today Christmas?’ and forever I’d just laugh and say oh no baby, we have a ways to go, except now that’s not so true anymore and the anticipation is so much I think he might spontaneously combust.”
She said that her son started crying one day when the school bus was pulling away from the bus stop. She was outside of the window, reaching out as the bus drove away in an attempt to comfort him.
“The next morning we sat at the bus stop together and I pulled a pen from my coat pocket. I grabbed his wrist, kissed the blue of his veins where the blood we share flows through his veins, and drew this heart,” she wrote.
“‘I know it’s hard sometimes out there,’ I told him as the bus pulled up to take him away. I want you to look at this heart every time it feels like too much. I want you to look, and I want you to remember that no matter what happens out there someone is here waiting for you to come home. Someone loves you.’ He crossed the road, climbed the bus steps, and I watched this time as his face appeared in the window.
“I waited for him to see me, to smile or wave or even to cry, but he never even looked at me. Instead, he looked at his wrist. know it’s hard out there a lot of the time for a lot of us. I know the holidays can amplify that and so can the cold and so can the dark. I do. But maybe what we all need to remember is just that simple. Maybe it’s not a fix, not by a long shot, but it’s a comfort just the same, and comfort can go a long way when you know someone loves you.”
It wasn’t long before the post went viral. Many mothers were thrilled with the way she was able to comfort her child, even when they were far apart.
“This is amazing….share it as far as it will go,” one Mad World News reader commented on the site’s Facebook page.
“Beautiful! Great idea,” another wrote.
“Good mom! Nice story,” another added.