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endorope,   Let me start by saying you sound just like my mother ;)  Which to my mind makes you a very good mother.   Of course your son sounds very similar to me.   I have thus far been turned down by Social Security.  When I was looking for work I had huge difficulties filling in the 'times you can work' area of the application and wold much rather drive around.  I have a daughter and am divorced.  I'm 30 in a few weeks.  My apartment and my home are completely trashed out.  I miss a great deal of therapy appointments, sometimes for months...   My mom knows, just like you, about all these things.   It makes your son and I sound like twins.  If we are by some twist of fate exactly alike, let me tell you some things that I am too embarassed to tell my mother.  They are things I am embarassed to say, not because I think she won't support me, and not because I think she will dismiss them off hand, but because she is my mother--and it tears me apart because I am her son, and I want her to be safe from the world I see.   I spend most nights holding a knife and sitting facing my backdoor, listening to creatures beyond it that sound so otherworldly they stand my hair on end. I spend the majority of my days battling against the concept of suicide.  Not the act, mind you, that would be too easy.  I could just pick "to do, or not to do."  No, instead I am steeped in an endlessly circular arguement that could only be described as an existential crisis. I avoid eye contact, because, while my conversations would still start out normal enough, they end with gross facial distortions of my fellow conversant that cause me in anxiety to reel through a thousand answers to the simplest questions--and in that fear induced scrambling for an answer equitable, I usually end in saying something so obviously rediculous that it haunts me for days.   In everyhting I do, whether it is raising my daughter, or speaking to my family, there is a constant threat that if I let my guard down for even a moment, I will become the writhing screaming entities that populate my mind.   My mother has no idea.  She only knows that I, and a few other 'people' say I'm sick.  She knows me, right?  Because she has bandaged every wound I've ever had, has held me in my childhood when the monsters weren't real--and her soft touch and caring, her jokes and stories could make the apperations disappear into the mist from which they emerged.  She is my mother, and as my mother will perhaps never know the horrible horrible nightmare that lurks just beyond my apparent composure.  And well a great deal of me wishes she did, because she has a good record with fending of my monsters, the sad reality is that these are to strong for her, and I may never let her know, because I love her, that I am so haunted.   I may have been a little selfish in telling you these things.  You sound like my mother, and that has made it safe for me to confess the things I want to tell her but won't.  At the same time, If I had been your son--and he had found my mother's question, I wonder what he might have said to her that he wished he could allow himself to say to you.