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Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

50. Time’s Up

Posted in ADHD, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , , on July 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Come on. You know why. Remember where Kenny was when the day hit its halfway mark in fourth grade? Just a few months ago? That’s right. That was him—metaphorically swinging from the hypothetical chandeliers. To paraphrase Popeye, he’d had all he could stand, and he couldn’t stand no more. His sensory filter was overflowing. His neurons needed a nap.
He needed time to absorb the morning’s worth of experiences. No amount of threats or promises, checks or x’s, medication or meditation could make it possible for him to sit in any classroom through three more hours of school. Even here. Even now.
Ding! Time’s up! Great class or not, this was his limit.So where are we? Home. At last. With Kenny. After all, this is Kenny’s story.To simplify life for all the grownups involved, Kenny is staying with Henry and me at our house during the school week and going back to Annie’s on weekends. There’s a lot to keep track of: medication, transportation, communication, behavior modification, and education coordination with the “home and hospital” aide whom the school system has provided as Kenny’s official tutor.

I think I’d better start keeping notes.

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45. Work and Luck

Posted in ADHD, Family, I.E.P., Special Education, tagged , , , , on June 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

So Kenny’s finally caught a real, official break. He’s one of the lucky eleven. And, as for us, his grownups, we’re pinching ourselves. We can’t quite believe our luck.Really? You call this luck? Because it sounds like a whole lot of people put an awful lot of thought and hard work and effort into making this happen.
Absolutely true. But. We’re lucky that dedicated advocates came before us and paved the way for this program to exist. We’re lucky we live in a place where they school system had the funding to pay for it. We’re lucky that Kenny’s case was assigned to a caring and experienced I.E.P. manager, who was willing and able to negotiate exactly the individualized education plan that this individual child needed.
And more luck: very few people have jobs as flexible as mine—freelancing, working from home, making my own hours. Our daughter, Annie, Kenny’s mom, was a widow, a single mother with a full-time job, plus two other, littler kids, besides Kenny. There was no way in the world that she could have picked him up in the middle of the day and brought him home for afternoon lessons. But I could take time off in the middle of the day. That was lucky.
When you’ve got a kid like Kenny, you can’t help thinking about how easily things could have tipped the other way. And what happens to other kids like him when that happens.

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43. So what happened?

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , on June 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

How long did it take? Did it cure Kenny’s ADHD?Well. We kept it up for a little more than a year. And, no. It wasn’t a cure. He still gets overstimulated and “loopy,” as he calls it, sometimes. Let’s be real. This is behavior modification, not magic. And he’s still Kenny.
But, on the other hand, there’s this. He met the most important goal. Now, because of behavior mod, he knows something that he never knew before. He knows that he can control his impulses, at least some of the time. Most of the time, in fact, when things are quiet and his medication is working right.Kenny knows his whole family learned this together. And, here’s something you can tell just by looking at him, by being with him: now he feels, deep inside, no matter what, that he’s good.

“Hey, buddy, you dropped your jacket the floor.”

“Okay. I got it.”

“Good job, man!”

“Check!”

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42. Lucky Numbers

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , on June 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I have to say that in some ways, we were very lucky. Kenny loves numbers. What does that mean? I think I can best explain it with a little story. One day, when he was in first grade, Kenny didn’t want to go to school. He ran into his bedroom, slid under his bed, and refused to leave. Here’s how I got him out: I told him he could hold our yardstick on the ride to school. I held out the yardstick, and he crawled out from under the bed. Really.
All the way there, he read me the numbers that were printed on the yardstick, and by the time we arrived, he’d calmed down enough to walk into school by himself. Reading the numbers soothed him. I know. I don’t get it, either. I was an English major. But it worked for him. And since this, on one level, at least, is a system whose performance is tracked numerically, statistically, that made it easy to get our behavior mod routine off the ground right away.
That’s why he loved it when we sat together on his bed in the evenings, grooving on his totals, calculating his percentages to the decimal point. That’s one reason he bought into the whole system so quickly. He was a natural number cruncher. Other kids with different interests would undoubtedly need different incentives. But with Kenny, lucky us, we had him at the word “count.”Even with Kenny’s enthusiastic participation, though, it wasn’t always easy to keep up with the system, believe me. Sometimes, when I was distracted or overloaded or rushing to get somewhere, I’d forget to mark down a check or an x, or several, and I’d have to try to recap the lost time later. Sometimes when other family members gave me their cards, I mislaid them or forgot to add them in. My records were not perfect. But all in all, they were pretty accurate. Or at least accurate enough.

We made up some modifications as we went along. There were some transgressions, like hitting, that would earn him an automatic x. On the other hand, if he did helpful things on his own, without being asked or reminded, he’d get a double check.

Sometimes he’d take a look at his card to see how he was doing mid-day. Or to make sure he’d gotten credit for all his prompt responses. Or to find out if he’d really gotten an x for something he’d hoped I’d overlooked.

Eventually we came up with a list of rewards, too. Kenny could use five earned checks to “buy” lunch desserts, for instance. Or, for twenty, he could “buy” an extra hour of computer time. If he really saved up a lot, we might take him out for ice cream or buy him a new lego set.

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41. Checks, X’s, and the Other Label

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Education, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , on June 21, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

The problem is, if you’re a kid like Kenny, whose neurons make it impossible for you to override your first impulses and do what your grownups expect of you, and instead, just act loony a lot of the time and get yelled at and punished, while your sister and brother are going with the program—if you’re a kid like that, you get a different label: bad.
Obviously, Kenny never woke up in the morning and said to himself, “My plan for today is to be bad.” That would be ridiculous. No one had to tell us that he wasn’t being “bad” on purpose. No one  had to tell his teachers that. But that didn’t keep him from getting into trouble. That didn’t keep us or his teachers from getting exasperated with him.That didn’t keep him from starting to feel, deep down, that he was. Bad.You can see why it felt so powerful—earth-shaking, tear-jerking, really—when Kenny proclaimed, “I’m turning my day around!” When, all of a sudden—after all those years of things going wrong for him—he’d figured out how to make things go right! Ta-da!

And how’d that happen? Behavior mod, man. And not just any behavior mod. Behavior mod that—sing it—accentuates the positive.

The checks tell Kenny, “you did that right.” They “catch him being good,” to use the phrase of the moment. That’s the big thing about this form of behavior mod (and I’ve got to believe there are many others out there): it’s positive. Yes, the kid gets x’s when his responses don’t hit the mark. But the checks are the main event. The checks are the currency that earns him privileges and treats. The x’s? Really, they’re just not-checks. The basic function of the x is to give the kid incentive to get checks next time around, instead.

And then there’s the goal. Okay, let’s think about that. What exactly is the goal here? It’s certainly not punishment, though it is discipline in the broad sense. As in self-discipline. And it’s not just one goal. It’s a progressive set of goals. On the most fundamental, mechanical level, the goal is for Kenny to comply with a request, an order, a command, within five seconds.

The next goal is for him to accomplish that most of the time.

From there, it’s just another step to the first big change: his own awareness that he’s gained the ability to direct his own behavior. When the kid can say, “I’m turning the day around!”

That’s how you know the kid is feeling good. He’s having a good day. And here’s the brass ring: he knows that he’s the one who made that happen.

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40. Doing What Comes Naturally

Posted in Behavior Modification, Education, Family, tagged , on June 19, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I’ve known kids who just naturally figure out how to be “good.” How to figure out what they’re supposed to do, and then do it. They get praised. They get appreciated. The “good” behavior gets reinforced. It’s not like they’re perfect or have perfect lives, of course. But they get it. They know what to do. It’s a gift.
And here’s something else. Have you ever noticed that, once you’re past a certain age, maybe 25 or 30 or so, without even realizing it, you’ve developed a kind of amnesia? You can remember the events of your childhood, but you can’t really remember what it feels like to be a kid? It’s a weird thing, but it happens to just about everyone.
What I’m getting at is, one of the things about kids is that they live in the present, in the moment. Whatever is going on in their lives is, to them, just what life is. Those kids we were just thinking about—the ones who naturally “get” how to do what they’re supposed to do and feel pretty good when they’re doing it? They’re just doing what comes naturally—to them.
(Quick disclaimer here: Yes. Nature, nurture; environment, heredity. It all counts. But after spending more than a few decades among humans, I’m pretty certain that everyone is born with a basic personality, an individual nature—and that’s what the nurturers and the environment have to work with.)Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, those kids, the ones we think of as good, don’t ever wake up saying, “My plan is to be good today.” They’re just going through life, moment by moment, being who they are. It’s the grown-ups—the amnesiacs—who give them that label: good. It’s a useful label to have, by the way. It can take you far.

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39. Turning the Day Around

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , on June 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I made an appointment to meet with Kenny’s teacher, Mrs. Hart. Dr. Block had told us that we all had to be consistent for this to work. “All” would definitely have to include her. As nice as she was—and she really was an exceptionally kind, understanding and flexible teacher—I wasn’t optimistic that she’d be able to work the checks and x’s into her already very complicated school day. But I described the method to her, and she seemed willing to give it a try.
When I picked Kenny up from school a couple of days later, the first thing I noticed was that he’d gotten another time-out that morning. Sigh. But then I saw that Mrs. Hart was actually keeping track of his behavior moment-by-moment, index card in hand. Bless your heart, Mrs. Hart! All hands are on the deck! Check!
Check for us, anyway. After we got home, Kenny himself was very antsy and uncooperative. X. X. X. His behavior didn’t seem to be modifying very effectively. He didn’t seem to be listening at all. I got angry. “I am very angry at you!” I said to him. I told him to go into the other room and give me a few minutes by myself. He did. Check.He had a dentist’s appointment that afternoon, and in a few minutes, it was time for us to leave. “What was that all about?” I asked him, when we got into the car.“I was nervous about going to the dentist,” he said.

“Well, next time it would be a lot better if you’d just say you were nervous about the dentist,” I told him. “I can’t promise I can help you to stop feeling nervous, but at least you won’t be getting into trouble.”

So why am I going into all this detail about one afternoon? Because, starting at that moment, he transformed into Mr. 5-Second Compliance Man, racking up check after check for the rest of the afternoon.

Around supper time, I told him to do something, and—as he was doing it—he proclaimed, “That’s a check mark! I’m turning the day around!”

Forgive me if I don’t say anything for a minute and just take that in.

Kenny. Is turning. The day. Around. He’s turning a hard day into a good day. This is something he’s never been able to do before. We thought he didn’t have a clue about how to do it. It turns out, though, that the problem was really that he didn’t have the tools. But now he has checks. He has x’s. He has a grownup standing nearby with an index card and a pencil. And with those tools, he can do what he’s been told to do in just five seconds! He can do it over and over! He can do it enough times to be able to turn this big old battleship of a day around and set its course for a completely new direction!

How do you think that makes him feel? All you have to do is look at him. That’s right. He feels good.

And, really, that’s the whole point, you know?

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38. The Behavior Mod Squad

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , , , on June 15, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I could see what Dr. Block was getting at. Even if the teachers gave the kids hourly assessments, he said, it wouldn’t be often enough to make any impact on their behavior at all. The link between cause and effect had to be established immediately—within five seconds—to have any value, to make any difference, to keep the signal moving from one neuron to the next.
“There’s only one way behavior mod won’t work,” he said. We all nodded expectantly. “And that’s if you’re not consistent. Whatever Kenny’s doing, whoever he’s doing it with, he has to be getting the same feedback from everybody, in exactly the same way.”We understood. We had pencils. We bought a 100-pack of index cards. We put them into our pockets. The Behavior Mod Squad was ready for action.
The first step, of course, was to tell Kenny about what was coming down the pike. And, as everybody knows, if you have something important to discuss with a kid, the best place to do it is in the car. So I brought it up with him on the way home from school.“Remember when we used to do 1-2-3 Magic when you guys were misbehaving?” I asked.“Yeah,” he said.

“Remember when we used to give you points and gold stars for good behavior?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” he said.

“Well, today we had a meeting with a new doctor. And he gave us some new ideas,” I said.

“Mm hm,” he said.

I described the checks and the x’s and the index cards. I told him that Mommy, Pop, I, Baba, Grandpa—all of his grownups—were going to keep track in exactly the same way, so that he’d get credit for his all checks, no matter who he’d spent the day with. I told him that every night, we’d count up his checks and x’s for the day and write them all down on a chart.

And then, at the end of each week, we’d total up the numbers for all seven days and figure out which percent were checks and which were x’s. Dr. Block had told us that most of his clients got their kids to buy into this plan by making up a scale of rewards they could earn with the checks they’d accumulated.

I was about to start in on that part of my pitch when I realized that Kenny was on board already. He was already grooving on the statistical record-keeping aspect of the process. The personal-best aspect. So I didn’t even mention the redeeming-your-checks aspect. I decided to keep that in reserve.

Something told me that a time would come when I’d need that later.

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36. And then what?

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , on June 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Wait! What about the lesson he was supposed to learn? Don’t I at least have to explain what was so bad about what he did, to try to keep it from happening again?
Excuse me. Has lecturing ever worked for you before? Not for me, either. Think about what just happened. He misbehaved. He immediately got a time out. No muss. No fuss. No distractions. Just cause. And effect. He got the point. That’s behavior modification at work.
So, no. There aren’t any follow-up lectures, no post-magic ranting. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. A script: 1, 2, 3. It was so simple that Jamie, the littlest, understood it, and he was only two.
Sometimes the kids would even joke with us. “We’re gonna count you!” And we’d laugh and say, “Good! I want to go to my room for 45 minutes!” Ha ha.
It was so remarkably effective that we shared it with friends. Unfortunately, it didn’t always work as well for them as it had for us. “I counted to three,” one dad told us, “and then she still didn’t do what I said. So I kept on counting till I got to ten, and then I had to spank her.” So much for improvisation.
It only works if you stick to the script. If you can do that, it really does help to lower the chaos level in the house. Not to mention the wear and tear on your vocal cords.
It’s great. As far as it goes. Which is solving the problem of what to do when your kids are small  and doing things you don’t want them to—or not doing the things you do want them to. The title of the book sets the limit of 1-2-3’s effectiveness at twelve. Kids age out of it.
Beyond that, the way Annie and I used 1-2-3, it only addressed half the issue: the problem half. Sure, we all naturally give our kids pats on the back, hugs, praise, and the occasional reward. But mostly we do it on an ad hoc basis, when a job is especially well done, when grades have gone up, when we’re in a good mood, when something catches our eye as we’re hurrying by. As parents, our default seems to tilt more toward eliminating the negative than accentuating the positive.
Add to that the fact that you can’t do “magic” in school. You can’t keep sending kids to time-out for eight, nine, ten minutes at a stretch when you’re trying to teach in a classroom. You’d never get anything done.

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35. Gold Stars, Freestyle Yelling, and Magic

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , , on June 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Needless to say, Annie and I had tried reward schemes before. Gold stars, points, special treats. Also punishment. The ever-popular, “If you don’t cut that out right now, I’ll (fill in the blank).” And, “Go to your room, and don’t come out till I tell you to!” Also freestyle yelling. Always so productive. And guaranteed to make you feel effective as a parent.
Then, when the three kids were still really little, Annie and I discovered 1-2-3-Magic, a very basic behavior modification system, described in the book “1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12,” by Thomas W. Phelan.
Is there a parent out there who’s never given their kids the count? “I’m going to give you till the count of five, and then I’ll (fill in the blank)!” Parents have probably been giving their kids the count since they had to do it in Roman numerals. What makes this count “magic?”
Funny you should ask. I’ll tell you what. Here it is: You tell your kid to do something. If he says no, or if, after maybe ten seconds or so, he keeps on doing what you’ve told him to stop doing, or if he just ignores you, you say, “One.” If he continues, you say, “Two.” If he keeps it up after that, you say, “Three.” That’s when he gets sent to his room for the number of minutes that’s equivalent to his age in years. For instance, six years old equals six minutes. The math is simple.
And here’s the key, the “magic,” if you will: Unlike the usual, extemporaneous count, brought on by the chaos of the moment, during which you’re frantically running through a mental inventory of potential consequences—while simultaneously yelling at your misbehaving children—unlike that, this method is predictable. After you’ve gone through it once, everyone knows the score.
Your kid knows exactly why he’s getting a time-out. He knows exactly how long his time-out is going to last. And when he’s in his room, he doesn’t have to do, or not do, anything in particular. He can, for instance, play with his toys. In other words, he can calm down. When his six minutes are up, you open the door. He can come out or stay in his room, his choice.
That sounds pretty good, right? And get this: At that point, the event is over.

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34. Tick Tock

Posted in ADHD, Behavior Modification, Family, Homeschooling, tagged , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Hey, buddy, you dropped your jacket the floor.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi.
Five Mississippi.
Still waiting?
How many seconds does it take before your kid turns around, finds his way back over to the place where his jacket detached itself from his fingers, and then hangs it on its hook by the door?That’s essentially what Dr. Block asked us at our first appointment.
By us, I mean Kenny’s full posse of grownups, the gang of five—Annie, my mother, my father, my husband, and me. And by Dr. Block, I mean the behavioral psychologist whom the neuropsychiatrist, who evaluated Kenny last summer, recommended that we consult about behavior modification therapy for our boy.
That’s right. Only us. Just the grownups. We’d assumed that, since it was Kenny’s behavior we were there to discuss, that Dr. Block would be eager to meet him. Not so. It was the grownups’ behavior, Dr. Block assured us, that needed to be modified. A little surprising. But okay. Here we are.
After introductions all around, Dr. Block asked us each to take a guess. How many seconds does it usually take for Kenny to respond when he’s told to do something? We went around the room. Everyone gave a number. I was last to answer. “20 seconds, maybe? If at all?” Dr. Block made some notes on his pad. Then he described the plan.Here’s what he told us to do:

1. Tell Kenny to do something. Not a pair of things. Not a sequence. One thing: pick up your jacket.

2. Start the clock. One Mississippi.

3. If he complies before you get to Five Mississippi, you make a checkmark on the index card or pint-size notebook  that you’re conveniently carrying in your pocket for just this purpose.

4. If you get to Five Mississippi before he complies, you make an x.

There are some additional details, but that’s the nuts and bolts. A check or an x. Five seconds.

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31. The Pretty Good Year

Posted in ADHD, Childhood Trauma, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , , on June 1, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? You know what this all meant, right?
Yes. It meant that, in terms of emotional development, he wasn’t disabled. He was delayed. Developmentally delayed. That has a whole different meaning from developmentally disabled. That means, given time, given care, he can develop; he can grow.
I wrote up an assessment of the semester, and Annie, my mother and I presented it to his principal, along with a proposal: “What Kenny calls ‘pretty good,’ his grown-ups call an amazing success, unexpected progress, tremendously encouraging—the first year we could say any of those things.
And that being the case, the next step feels so clear to us, you could almost trip over it. This ain’t broke. So let’s not try to fix it.
This is better than not broken—it’s working. For the first time, something is working. Let’s hold on tight. One more year of this can only be good for him—not just ‘pretty good,’ but food for his soul. This year, doing school this way, Kenny has had good days and made measurable, observable progress. We, his family, are able, and more than willing, to continue our active, cooperative role in his daily education.”
In June, after school let out, we took Kenny to be evaluated by a well-known neuropsychiatrist who specialized in gifted ADHD children. She attributed his social and behavioral difficulties to developmental delays, as opposed to emotional disturbance. Even better, she expressed enthusiastic support—in writing— for our hybrid schedule, mornings at school, afternoons at home, to continue through fifth grade.

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30. Eureka!

Posted in ADHD, Education, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , , , , on May 27, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

It happened naturally. He was home. We were on our own. So we did what came naturally—we did things the way they worked best. He got to take some breaks. To have some quality time with his legos. To fold some origami boats out of paper and sail them in the creek. To go to the nursery and pick out some flowers and plant them in dirt back home. To lie down on the rug in front of the fireplace and read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” when he got tired in the afternoon.
He was doing the same work that the other kids were doing at school. But he got to do it at home. In a whole different way: One-on-one. Not too many distractions to filter out. With breaks. With snacks. With hugs. Petting the dog. Holding the cat. You know—the way he needed to do it all along.
He got to hear, “You did it!” “You worked hard!” “I had a good time doing that with you!” More than once. Every day. And—what a concept—it worked.Whoa there. Slow down. That sounds way too pat and peppy, like those articles we used to read.
Let me clarify. When I say that it worked, I don’t mean that he’d suddenly been promoted from Private Goofball to General Good Judgment. It was nothing like that. His changes would probably have been invisible to you, if you didn’t know him well. But for us, they were loud and clear.
He smiled a lot more. He was less withdrawn. He chatted more easily. He cuddled up close when we read together. When we took him back to school occasionally for special party afternoons, he played games with the other kids and didn’t act up.He even got better at doing his schoolwork. When we started, he had to dictate all his written answers to me; he wasn’t able to formulate his thoughts in writing. By the end of the year, he could go over the work he’d dictated and edit it himself as he typed it onto the computer. And while I’d be lying if I said that he enjoyed his work, he was actually completing his assignments and getting good grades. And he knew that. He was happy to be getting good grades. He was happy not to be getting into trouble.

When I asked him at the end of the year what he thought about it, he said it had been a “pretty good year.” Pretty good. That sounds pretty ordinary, right? Not for Kenny. Kenny hadn’t used any kind of the word “good” to describe school in a very long time. But he’d said it now. Eureka.

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29. But Guess What

Posted in ADHD, Family, Homeschooling, Special Education, tagged , , , on May 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

You know more than you realize. I’m not kidding.
Here’s how I know. Because we knew. We just didn’t know how much we knew. And how much what we knew—mattered.
We knew he’d always done best when he could work one-on-one with a loving grown-up. We knew he needed detailed direction, and he needed to take breaks when he was trying to get something done. We knew that, in spite of the fact that he consistently represented himself to the world as Doofus the Goofball, he was really brainy. And sensitive.
We remembered how he asked us to read to him about infinity and anti-matter at bedtime, when he was five.The big thing—the key—was this: We didn’t know how to use what we knew. Until. Until we fell into it. Until, by chance, by luck, by amazing good fortune, halfway through Kenny’s fourth grade year, when, to avoid having to expel him, his school gave us official permission to bring him home halfway through the day.
Just for the afternoons. But that was just enough. Just enough time to catch up with himself.

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28. Puzzles

Posted in ADHD, Family, tagged , , , , , on May 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

When Kenny was really little—one-and-a-half, two, three—he loved puzzles. I’m not talking about those baby puzzles with three or four pieces. I mean jigsaw puzzles. Real ones. With fifty, a hundred pieces, or more.
He’d dump the pieces out, turn them over, and then just start picking them up, one by one. Then, pausing just a few seconds to size up their shapes, he’d place them methodically, rhythmically, exactly where they belonged.
You could think of Kenny as a puzzle, too. A very complicated, very interesting jigsaw puzzle. Thousands of pieces, including some that don’t seem to fit together at all. His deep concentration and his wild impulsiveness. His tenderness and his flashes of frustration. His insights into complex subjects and his utter confusion about things that everyone else in the world seems to understand. And the way he’s transformed by his medication: from infantile reeling, rolling and crowing to that kid sitting quietly over there in the easy chair, teaching himself how to do magic tricks from a book.
Between Annie and me, we’d lived with him every day of his life. But there were still so many things about him that puzzled us, that mystified us. Just figuring out where to look for answers to all our questions was like solving a puzzle.
Okay. We knew Kenny had ADHD. He’d been diagnosed. So we started there. We read articles about ADHD. We looked it up online. Most of the stories were peppy. They had graphics in bold, upbeat colors. They had happy endings. They sounded nothing like our lives. Nothing like those predictably unpredictable moments when, all of a sudden, just as you’re thinking everything’s finally under control—the goofball pops out of the cake!
Like the flip of a coin. Order/Chaos. And Chaos wins the toss again! Quick! How do you feel? You feel like… like… you just don’t know what to do! That’s how! Sometimes the feeling hits you so hard that you actually say it out loud. Sometimes you yell it. “I just don’t know what to do with you!”

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