As I sit in this dark, dusty hallway, groups of sweaty, costumed characters squeezing by me, some carrying juggling pins, others hoisting unicycles over their shoulders, I wonder: how did I get here? How at the age of 47 did I end up in the back of this hot, crowded circus theatre with clowns, acrobats, and daredevils pushing into my sensible self?

The answer, of course, is fairly simple: I am here because I am a mother.

My son is nine-years-old. He is bright, creative, funny, sweet, and sensitive. He also has more letters attached to his name than a government agency: ADD for attention deficit disorder; OCD for obsessive compulsive disorder; UPJ, which once meant an obstruction that resulted in surgery to repair a damaged kidney.

These letters come with other words, too: anxiety, depression. Ironically, while these letters and words are supposed to define him, they're also useless to him: Dyslexia renders letters, sounds, and the words they form unrecognizable to him.

What all of this means to him and to me, his mother, is that a sizable chunk of his life, and therefore my life, is spent waiting. We spend hours in waiting roomsforever waiting to see psychiatrists, psychologists, speech therapists, reading specialists. Always waiting for the next diagnosis, the next new drug, the next new plan.

I often wonder what I would do with my life if I didn't spend so much of it waiting. I think I would write a book, perhaps some sort of a travel guide to this city's best and worst waiting rooms. I can tell you that the most expensive doctors (i.e., psychiatrists) have the crummiest waiting rooms, filled with greasy old magazines and equally greasy and old children's toys.

Waiting for your child can be a lonely business, unless you're lucky enough to find someone with whom to share the wait. Some days I talk with Biancashe is as stunned as I am that her 9-year-old son does not yet know how to read. Other days I watchI especially enjoy watching the large man who visits the doctor with his three kids. He scoops up the little girls onto his wide lap and reads to them; he kisses his big boy's "owie". His obvious adoration of his children and is peaceful to view. On days when I am feeling sorry for myself, I think of Barbara, whom I met in the speech therapy waiting room. This particular waiting room, with its dim light and non-existent acoustics, would rank at the very bottom of my travel guide. Yet Barbara has been sitting here, waiting, twice a week for nearly a decade. I will never complain again.

David knows none of this. He is a happy child who hops out of the car and races to play with a friend as soon as we pull into the driveway, released from the latest waiting room. He is what my friend Margaret calls a little Bohemian boy, one who loves to draw, paint, dance, and perform.

And so in addition to signing him up for appointments with specialists, I sign him up for circus theatre. Being a clown is his newest path to Nirvana and I am not one to stand in his way.

Which is how I ended-up here, at a circus performance packed with hordes of running and hollering childrena situation that, for David, is a huge anxiety-laden stew. As he clutches my hand, I know I am not going anywhere anytime soon. And so I sit, in this sweltering hall filled with pint-size performers, and wait.

When David sees the misery on my wait-exhausted face, he leans into me. Sorry, mom, he whispers.

I am embarrassed by his apology, chagrined to be discovered.

That's OK, buddy, I say. Whatever you need to feel comfortable, that's what I'll do. And I mean it.

As I wait, I remember the mother I once read about, long before I had children. That mother waited outside of her daughter's classroom every single day, pretending to be a teacher's aid, cutting out letters and stapling paperswaiting simply to be there if her epileptic daughter had a seizure. The daughter was terrified of those seizures and it gave her comfort to know that her mother was there, always waiting. I cried when I read that article, finding it at once beautiful and unbelievable. How could anyone love a child so much that she would spend every day of her life waiting?

Of course, that was before I was blessed with David, my beautiful little clown.

Now I will wait, in doctors' offices and dusty hallways, for as long as he needs me. I am his mother, and this is what a mother does.

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