I heard it first in a call from the school psychologist, called in to get to the bottom of an 8-year-old’s acting-out behavior in the classroom two months ago.

But I heard it again in a face-to-face debrief meeting with his current teacher and the school principal and the psychologist, and it’s the weight of those ugly words, “I’m not as happy as I used to be” and “Nobody ever listens to me” and “I never seem to do the right thing,” collected during an interview between my son and the psychologist, that burn my eyes and the back of my nose.

I try to blink the tears away before all those other calm-and-composed women notice, but I can’t do it, because it’s my boy, 8 years old, and this was not supposed to happen.

Depression was not supposed to happen.

One of the women runs off to get tissues, and I wonder if it’s bad enough to make my eco-friendly makeup run, because it’s easier to worry about the way a face looks than about the way depression looks.

These hormones, I say, with a little laugh.

And even though I’m eight months pregnant, it’s not the hormones, not really.

It’s a little boy’s words.

No mama expects depression in the boy she has loved and adored and cared for and watched and played games with and read to and hugged and kissed, every chance she got, for the last 8 years.

And yet, it is here.

///

Once upon a time in this mama’s child life, there was a boy who exploded with anger, who never wanted anyone to see him cry, even though he was a sensitive boy, who worked hard, from a young age, to break free from the grip of darkness.

But there was a reason.

Because there was a dad missing from those most formative years, and how does a boy learn to be a man when there is no father to show him?

There was a missed-one who called sporadically, making promises that he hardly ever kept, and the boy believed them all, because he loved the one who had left, and every time a promise stood broken, the boy crawled deeper into himself, and darkness gained another foothold.

There was a mom forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet, and there were three moves in three years, three starting-overs, three make-new-friends challenges, three learn-how-to-survive-now changes.

One day, when the boy was 11, he complained of burning pain in his stomach, and a mama took him to the hospital, and doctors found ulcers eating up the belly of a child.

His mama called in the troops, a counselor and his teachers at school and the family he loved.

She did her part.

But depression is a tough disease to beat.

///

I know this. I am terrified of it.

I saw the way depression could twist a temper and send it flying out of control. I saw the way it could whisper irrational solutions into the heart of another child. I saw the way it could send a body to bed for days on end.

Sometimes forever.

And now, here is my boy, facing this monster.

And he comes from a different background than the boy of my youth, but there are still so many pieces in the puzzle of anger-turned-inward.

There is his intelligence, high above his grade level so he feels cast out and different and, much of the time, alone.

There is his introversion in a house of four, going on five, brothers, where he is hard-pressed to get a word in edgewise, where he can hardly ever find a place of his own, where he is the oldest and looked-up-to and sought-after one in this tribe of boys.

There is his intuition and his sensitivity and his boredom in a traditional classroom and his dreams and his expectations and his behavior and his big emotions and his inability to do anything acceptable, at least from his perspective, and it’s no wonder we are here.

It’s no wonder he has fallen into this pit.

I am scared to death that he will not be able to find his way back out.

///

One day that once-upon-a-time boy was riding in the backseat on the way to a counselor’s appointment.

He was 11 years old, and he already felt crazy, misunderstood, damaged, and this trip proved what he had known all along.

There was something wrong with him, something no one could fix.

What if no one could fix it?

He faked it through that counseling appointment, like he always did, and he knew what he needed to do next, so he climbed into the backseat of the car, making his plan.

They came to a bridge they’d crossed an hour ago, the one he’d marked as The One, and that boy tried to open the back door and throw himself out.

And maybe he wouldn’t have really wanted to kill himself, when it came down to it and he opened the door and saw the asphalt screaming by and thought about how much it would hurt first, but it didn’t matter, at least not that day.

Because a mama had seen that look in his eyes, and she recognized it, and she made sure to lock those doors before they got 100 feet down the road.

The boy tried and tried, but he could not open the door, and a mama’s love reached right over the back seat and wrapped him in warm tendrils so he finally, finally, finally stopped trying.

///

It was hard to see it, what that psychologist found.

Because my boy didn’t stay in bed all day, and he didn’t lose any of his boy-energy, and he didn’t cry endlessly or isolate himself or lose all interest in life.

He just had a short fuse, and he exploded in anger and he acted impulsively when that anger got the best of him.

There were days when he would open wide and let a mama and daddy see straight to his soul, where he wrestled with thoughts like no one really liked him and he didn’t belong in this family and he should have never been born.

And then there were days when he sat happily with his brothers playing a game of chess or Battleship or Jenga, and he would crack jokes and smile widely and laugh until his stomach hurt.

There were other days when he clamped tight, and he sat listening to an audio book for hours on end and immersed himself in creating detailed Twister Man comics and bent over his desk putting together and taking apart and putting together again all those Legos.

It didn’t seem all that unusual, but we weren’t looking for depression.

This is the kind of thing that can smack a parent in the face and heart and deep, deep down in the gut.

Because there was another boy who fell into the pit of depression, pushed from behind by a broken family.

And we’re not a broken family, but we’re all broken parents, and what if we caused it? What if our boy never quite recovers because we are still here? What if healing is too far for our love and support and acceptance to reach?

How do I keep him from doing what those others of my past have done?

I just don’t know. Maybe I never will.

///

No one else was up the night I was reading in the living room and he slid past me into the bathroom that could never be locked because the door didn’t close all the way.

He was 18, I was 17. It was another year when a dad had disappeared, just after a call had come telling us he’d been in a work accident, trapped under two tons of equipment. There was the call and then there was nothing, for months on end, and we did not know whether he was alive or dead.

It was a year when a boy would graduate and life waited and he did not know if he was up to the challenge, even though he was brilliant and talented and could have grabbed any job he wanted.

It was a year when a boy would be leaving, growing up, becoming a man, and he just didn’t think he knew how.

He was holed up in the bathroom for 45 minutes, and then he walked back out with tissues around his wrists that he tried to hide.

I didn’t make a sound, but I couldn’t breathe there on the couch. I tried to shake off the uneasiness, tried to concentrate on the open book in my lap, tried to settle what I had seen.

Those tears came hot and thick, though, because I knew what he’d done, what he’d attempted, and hadn’t I tried it myself a thousand times, in more subtle ways, starving myself, going whole days and weeks without eating not just because I wanted to be thin but because I wanted them to watch me wasting away, so they knew how much it hurt to be me?

It was the easiest way for me to die.

Something about depression wraps around an ankle and never lets you go.

///

This is not what I want for my son.

Two months ago, at the height of his behavioral issues at school, his daddy and I found a counselor for him.

Every week he sits in a room full of toys and he plays and talks and maybe, just a little, heals.

And yet today, when I am sitting in that school room, with all those women who don’t know him like I do, I listen to them talk about helping him through transitions with a timer and providing him a cool-down place for his big emotions, but all I can hear are those words on repeat in my mind.

My son is depressed. My son is depressed. My son is depressed.

What if?

What if he doesn’t beat it?

What if there are darker days ahead?

What if there is suicide?

All those questions can tie a mama in great big, tight knots, but they are the wrong questions for this day, today.

The question today is what can I do to help my son?

It’s a question without a simple answer.

Spend more one-on-one time with him. Pursue a hobby together. Understand and accept and fully embrace him, without trying to change him.

Sometimes part of beating depression is teaching an 8-year-old boy what to do with his anger, how to rise above it, how to feel it and not be afraid of it, how to crawl all the way through it and stand back up on the other side.

If all we’re told is that our anger is unjustified or wrong or unacceptable, we will do the only thing left.

We will turn it inward, and the darkness will get another grip on our heels.

He is a boy with anger huddled somewhere deep inside him, and we must do the work of digging it out, letting it out, dragging out that darkness until it meets the light.

Every day. Every moment. Every encounter.

We cannot just hope it will change. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. We cannot hide it.

Because these hearts of our children are worth more than saving face.

And so we sign him up for that extra help at school, and we show up every week to those counseling sessions, and we do everything we can at home to help heal a heart whole.

And there is Another who speaks life into the places where darkness has swallowed the light. There is Another who carries truth into the hearts of men and women and little boys and whole generations. There is Another who lifts their heads and breaks those chains of depression.

My son knows and loves this Other.

And there will come a day, I know there will, when my boy will beat this disease. IT WILL NOT BEAT HIM.

Because he has a future and a hope, and it is good and bright and beautiful.

This is enough for today.