Vachon Imagined

My son was around three years old when he discovered the remote control.

Instant power in his hand. The ability to summon dinosaurs, repeat them endlessly, rewind them into obedience. A small plastic object that suddenly felt like control over the entire universe.

Let’s not get too technical here, because I will eventually run out of language. My husband is the tech person in the family — thank God for engineers — because some of us are just trying to find the batteries, FFS.

One day my son wanted his show. It was bedtime.

And bedtime, as any parent knows, is where philosophy meets resistance.

We had recently learned he was on the autism spectrum, so of course there was a diagnosis, a plan, structure — salvation, in its institutional form. But nothing prepares a mother for the moment when love collides head-on with overwhelm and everything in the room stops behaving like itself.

There was a point where everything escalated — not out of malice, but out of being three, out of being overstimulated, out of not having language for the end of something he wanted very badly. And I remember feeling that strange internal split parents don’t talk about enough: the part of you that is still human reacting, and the part of you that has to stay steady enough to be the container.

My husband stepped in, calm in the way only someone outside the emotional tornado can be calm. He set the boundary firmly, physically grounding the situation so it could stop spinning long enough for everyone to breathe again.

And then there was silence.

The kind that comes after a storm has already passed through the room but hasn’t yet decided what shape it left behind.

My son looked up at me, tears and confusion and betrayal all mixed together, like he was asking a question he didn’t have words for yet.

And I looked back at him.

Not as an enemy. Not as a judge. Not even as someone trying to win.

Just as a mother holding the line between love and consequence, trying not to turn either into something that would harden too early.

No speeches. No grand meaning in the moment itself.

Just the quiet understanding that even very small people learn, eventually, that actions have weight. That limits exist. That love does not always look like permission.

And later, much later, you wonder what they actually remember.

The fear? The boundary? The feeling of being stopped?

Or the fact that someone stayed in the room afterward and didn’t leave them alone inside it.

Because that part — the staying — is usually where the truth actually lives.