A mother’s post about drawing a heart on her young son’s wrist went viral.
Liz Petrone wrote about her son on Facebook, explaining that his anxiety had become severe for no apparent reason.
“Maybe it’s the way the seasons shift, a little at a time so slowly until it’s not slow at all anymore and it’s become cold so fast that you swear you inhaled the warm air of early fall and you exhaled in a foggy smoke of breath into the holidays,” she wrote.
“Or maybe it’s just that he’s been asking me every single morning since he started school in September: ‘Mommy, is today Christmas?’ and forever I’d just laugh and say oh no baby, we have a ways to go, except now that’s not so true anymore and the anticipation is so much I think he might spontaneously combust.”
Petrone said that one day, her son cried as his school bus was pulling away from the bus stop. She attempted to comfort him from outside of the bus, reaching her hands out to him as the bus drove farther away.
“The next morning we sat at the bus stop together and I pulled a pen from my coat pocket. I grabbed his wrist, kissed the blue of his veins where the blood we share flows through his veins, and drew this heart,” she wrote.