Hashem had mercy on me. I clearly wasn’t ready for this step, and somehow Chezky had mercy on me as well. The next few days were easier, even as we were taking the necessary steps, making appointments and filling out the forms necessary for an extended hospital stay.

But as Chezky slept though one night and then the next, I began to breathe a bit easier. Maybe it was all a freak occurrence? Maybe he was really fine now, and we could put all this behind us. Was I myself being delusional? All I knew was that I was desperate to avoid this next step, and not stable or rational enough to be able to think it through clearly. So as the days went by with small increments of improvement, my breathing steadied, and I slowly began dropping the appointments and forms in the hope they’d become obsolete.

And when Chezky sweetly sang Ani Maamin during the Shabbos seudah with no mention of when, who, and how Mashiach was arriving, I knew we’d turned a corner. We’d merited personal salvation.

“Ma. Chezky didn’t sleep last night.”

The words plunged into my gut like a samurai sword. It was ten months since our last ordeal. Life was fine. Stable. As stable as any household with an ASD teenager. I’d recently accepted a new project at work. My youngest was going to full-day kindergarten. My oldest was making noises about shidduchim. Life was good.

But those words threw me headfirst off a cliff. Within days we were sucked into the maelstrom of mania.

This time Chezky was after Arabs, wanting to join Yad L’Achim, sure there were missionaries lurking under the floor in our dining room. He turned my kitchen upside down searching for knives (which had been hidden from the onset), and screamed about killing every Arab.

Within 24 hours I had the process for hospital admission running full force. But we’d been bumped down the totem pole, and I was pulling every string I had to get us back to priority. I knew this was my fault for not acting on this last year, but I still couldn’t comprehend how we’d woken up once again from fair weather to freaky storm, all within hours. This couldn’t be happening.

At eight p.m. the next day, I heard Chezky screaming from his room. I ran to see what was happening. Chezky took one look at me and leaped over me (Over me? Around me? It seemed like he literally leaped in frenzy over my head), down the hall, and out the back door. He was holding the phone and yelling into it, “Save me! Save me! I’ve been kidnapped by missionaries!” As I tried to approach him, his screaming intensified. “She’s coming closer! The missionary! She’s coming to get me! You have to come save me!”

Nothing. Nothing in the world could have prepared me for that horror — that Chezky now thought I was the enemy itself. When he was young he had night terrors, and I found it terrifying that I’d want to comfort him but he’d look right through me, not seeing me as he shrieked in his half-stupor state. But now — now he was awake and conscious; he was seeing me. But not me. I was the enemy. There was hate and fear as he backed away from me, calling desperately into the phone for help.

My husband picked up the other line and realized that Chezky actually had Yad L’Achim headquarters on the line! The dispatcher was confused; he did not know how to react to this phone call that was clearly desperate but didn’t fit his protocol. My husband couldn’t speak on the line for fear of upsetting Chezky even more. So he dialed Yad L’Achim on his cell, trying to explain the situation and asking if they could send an ambulance with a psychiatric team. I stayed in the yard with Chezky, but kept a distance so he wouldn’t do anything rash like jumping over the fence to the street two floors below.

And then, just like a year before, the fight suddenly went out of him. I watched his body sag, from in-flight to fatigued fright. He slumped onto the patio, softly sobbing. “Mommy,” he said, his voice so weary, “Mommy, are you there?”

We canceled the ambulance that night, but we weren’t waiting any longer. I’d learned my lesson and I was determined to have Chezky in the hospital within the week.

And then Covid hit.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 844)