I think I'm a bad mother, not in the way people say it for reassurance, and I need to say it somewhere that isn't a therapist's office.

My daughter is nine. She is a difficult kid. Diagnosed, medicated, in OT twice a week, the whole apparatus. And I love her and I also dread her. I dread the sound of her waking up. I sit in my car in the driveway after work for ten or fifteen minutes before I go in, every single day, and I have done that for about three years.

Last month she had a meltdown in a grocery store and an older woman looked at me and I said, out loud, in front of my child, "I know, she's a lot." My daughter heard me. She didn't cry. She just went quiet and held the cart. She's nine and she already knows how to make it easier for me.

I think about that in bed. I will think about that for the rest of my life.

Here is the part that makes me a coward. My wife is better at her than I am. She's patient in a way that looks effortless and probably isn't, and I have let her take more and more of it, and I've let myself believe that's just division of labor. It isn't. I'm hiding behind her.

Everyone in our life says we're great parents. My mother-in-law says I'm a saint. The pediatrician tells me I'm doing everything right. And I'm sitting in a parked car every day at five-fifteen counting to sixty.

I'm not asking whether I should feel guilty. I feel guilty. I'm asking whether anyone has come back from this. Whether you can be a parent who dreads her own kid at nine and not be the reason she's in therapy at thirty.