I was staring into my medicine cabinet a couple of days ago, desperately searching for something for a headache that didn't have the letters “PM” in it. Apparently, there was a time in my life that I had trouble falling asleep, and I've been carrying around a couple of bottles of Tylenol PM ever since then. (FYI, I'm usually so tired these days that I could fall asleep while someone was punching me repeatedly in the head, so this was a very old bottle.)

We were having one of those days. And I had a headache throughout it.

In hindsight, cutting out my caffeine intake on the same day that I was asking Billy to cut down on his TV watching probably was a mistake. It created a perfect storm of tantrumming and questionable parenting.

I took a couple of old-fashioned aspirins and started wondering if there was a drug for patience. Maybe there was some magical pill out there that would ensure I would never yell at my son and experience the kind of shame I felt when he looked back at me, his big blue eyes welling with tears.

Man, I felt like a heel.

Why shouldn't there be a drug for patience? There's a drug for everything else. And if you don't mind risking stroke, heart palpitations or sleep-eating (I'm not kidding; that totally exists), your nails can be clear of fungus, you'll never feel anxiety at parties and your legs will no longer be restless.

Just as a side note: How bad does nail fungus have to be before you're willing to risk stroke? Can't you just wear closed-toed shoes? And be alive?

So here's what happened: The night before I had created this detailed “lesson plan” for the day, outlining the book we would read in the morning, the craft we would create together, the songs we would sing, and everything had the same wonderful child-friendly theme: animals.

My children adopted the theme whole-heartedly by behaving like animals throughout most of the day.

Billy started the morning off by shouting, “Please stop singing!” at me every time I opened my mouth – whether to sing or to read. He pitched an almighty tantrum at any mention of the bathroom. Then while I was retrieving a crayon from Willow's mouth, he shredded up the paper I had intended us to use on the craft. When I tried to act out a little play with a monkey puppet, he pulled it off my hand and threw it across the room. “Throw it in the garbage!” he screamed.

“Stop it!” I yelled back at him, really loudly. “Just sit down! I've had it!

He dropped to the floor and started bawling. And I wanted to crawl into a hole.

My head was pounding by the time they went down for a nap and I was feeling like world's worst mother.

Whenever I get really down or Billy has a particularly challenging day, I start hearing these little voices in my head. The drug voices. Don't worry: They aren't voices urging me to do drugs. They're the voices of the doctors who have suggested drugs for my son. For his autism.

He was two when we first visited a neurologist who suggested we try MAO inhibitors. Less than a year later, a neuropsychologist (I don't even know exactly what that is) brought it up again. Of course, she also had a clock in her office sporting the logo for Zoloft, so I took her opinion with a grain of salt.

In both cases, we had no interest in drug therapy. Actually ... I shouldn't say that. Instead, I'll say that we didn't think it was the right choice at the time. After all, he was two.

That being said, I hear their voices in my head sometimes saying, “Why don't you just try it? See if it eases his anxiety. He can't learn if he's anxious or overwhelmed and won't make a kitty cat craft ...”

Ok, that last bit I kind of made up. But I start to worry that I'm missing out on crucial learning years. That he'll be so anxious at school that he'll miss his window and never learn something important like his right from his left or how to multiply things times 2 or where north is. And someone will say, “Clearly if you had given him anti-depressants when he was three years old, he wouldn't be walking around in circles right now.”

But we've always felt strongly that as long as he was making real progress, we wouldn't resort to drugs. We're afraid that we won't really know where he stands developmentally is he's drugged – particularly while he still has communication delays. It may be different when he's older, when he can talk to us about how he's feeling but ... it just doesn't feel right.

Billy slept for a long time during that nap. I had a lot of time to obsess and worry and wonder. After almost three hours, he woke up – and he had a big smile on his face. “Good morning!” he announced with a big smile on his face when I came in his room. It was almost 3 o'clock.

He didn't cry when I took him to the bathroom. And when we got downstairs, the carnage from the abandoned kitty cat craft was still all over the floor. We both sort of stared at it.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you,” I said to him.

“I'm sorry,” he repeated back to me. Good enough.

Taking a big breath, I asked him, “What does Billy want to do?”

He started blinking rapidly, something he's doing currently when he's trying really hard to think about how to say something. He raised his cupped hand up to his eyebrow level and gestured with it, in a move we call “the fin.”

“B-b-Billy ... I want ... to go outside,” he told me.

No wonder he didn't want to do a kitty cat craft or sing a stupid song about a monkey. So we went outside.

As a prescription, a nap and a run-around worked wonders. The only side effects were a few bug bites and a pair of muddy shoes. My headache disappeared and my patience returned ... mostly.

I could still probably use that drug for patience. Until they invent that, I've gone back on the caffeine.