The room became suddenly quiet. Thirty mothers and daughters looked my way

Shira tumbled into the kitchen, clutching an olive green envelope. “Mom? I have a surprise.”

She pursed her lips, widened her eyes. The poor kid—an irrepressible drama queen—looked like she would pop. “A party for Mommies and children!” she finally burst, extracting the invitation with a stage-worthy flourish.

I scanned the text: A Tu B’Shvat mother-daughter crafts session on Sunday. Aha.

Quick! My good-mommy voice exhorted. Pretend this is exciting!

“That’s great!” I croaked, eliciting all of the thrill I could muster. “We’ll make something really nice together!”

I thrust the invite into Daniel’s hands that evening. “You look like you’ve been handed a court subpoena,” he noted.

“You think it’ll be okay?” I asked, ignoring his attempt at comic relief. “Will we get through the event without hysterics?”

Daniel chewed his tongue thoughtfully. “Yeah, she’ll hold it together. You know Shira,” he added. “In public she’s Miss Personality. It’s only with family that she lets loose.”

He was right: Shira had two personas. For the most part, I was grateful she suppressed her explosive side in school, at the playground. But the reality was also isolating—her teachers would look at me strangely when I described her problematic behaviors. Her friends’ mothers would stare blankly when I vented about endless vacation days. Silently, they’d convey: maybe it’s a problem in your parenting? I’d stifle the urge to scream It’s not! There’s something much deeper here! then wonder why I bothered seeking support.

This time, though, Daniel was wrong. Sunday came, and the crafts session—assignment: create a sequined fruit basket—started off innocently enough. But then Kayla's daughter, Danielle, used up all the yellow sequins.

“We can use gold ones,” I suggested brightly.

Shira’s face clouded over, her lips set in a thin line. Danielle snickered. “Bananas aren’t gold,” she whispered to her friend, just loud enough so Shira could hear. Shira—using every ounce of self-control not to get physical—looked down at the project she'd been working on with such intensity, and shoved it off the table, steaming.

Keren’s 14-month-old son, who’d been crawling around the floor, exultantly seized the shiny new toy. Before I could pluck it away, he’d yanked off the black velvet covering, inducing a shower of sequins.

“MO-MMY!!!!” Shira shrieked. Her last vestiges of self-control depleted, she grabbed Danielle’s basket and wreaked similar destruction. Danielle’s shrieks joined the chorus.

“How dare you!” Kayla shouted irately, her $500 sunglasses clanking onto the floor. She wrested the basket out of Shira’s hands—today it was Passion Fruit on her fingers, I noticed—and put a protective arm around Danielle’s shoulder.

The room became suddenly quiet. Thirty mothers and daughters looked my way.

Stop assessing Kayla’s nail polish and do something.

“I think we need to calm down,” I said firmly, springing into action. “Shira and I are going to take a walk. Then we’ll figure out how to fix the projects.”

I prodded a squirming Shira out of the auditorium.

Hashem, let this be a kapparah, I thought, my face burning.

“So how’d it go?” a cheerful Daniel wanted to know. We were on our way home in the car.

“Well,” I said slowly, mentally commanding him to read between the lines, “we had some frustrations. But in the end we thought of good solutions, and we’re coming home with a beautiful project. Tell you about it soon.”

Mentally, I messaged him: I was humiliated in front of 30 women.

But then I stopped and questioned myself. I was embarrassed; there was no denying that. But, strangely enough, other emotions began to surface. Was that…relief? Validation?

“You handled that really well,” one mother told me after calm had been restored. “Did you take a class or something?”

“Parenting is so insanely hard,” another mother shared sympathetically. “But you didn’t lose your cool.”

It wasn’t just the approval that felt so good. The show was over. Every person in the room had seen Shira at her worst; I no longer had to continue the illusion, smilingly accepting compliments about her charming behavior and sterling people skills. My friends and fellow mothers now had an inkling of what I dealt with, daily.

True—they also now knew she wasn’t typical. But was that so terrible? It was the truth.

Shira was not a “special-needs” child. But, as Daniel and I were increasingly internalizing each day, she undoubtedly needed something special.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 475)