Jackets, Joy and Wild Things

"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him "Wild Thing!" and Max said, "I'll eat you up!" so he was sent to bed without eating anything."
-Maurice Sendak, "Where the Wild Things Are."

I was hanging jackets in the closet this morning.

To me, a jacket hanging on a chair or a stairway bannister is the OCD equivalent of an unflushed toilet. You dropped it in the right neighborhood and I give you credit for not doing it on the floor, but I still don't want to look at it. So daily, I find myself hanging up jackets, jackets, numerous jackets, all in a row, all in our little downstairs closet, and today I just stood there and admired them.

The kids each have about a dozen. There are light ones and heavy ones. Special ones that match their school uniforms and some really dirty ones that look like mud and food and magic markers. There are ones that look like leopard fur and ones that look like superheroes. Justice has a hooded one that looks like a zebra and Justin has one that looks like the Green Lantern. There are new ones, Savers ones, lots of hand-me-down ones. God bless Lily, Lucas and Gavriella, their older cousins...J1 and J2 will never want for warm, cozy comfort.

And, hangers in hand, I just stood there and admired them today.

Who would have thought sixteen years ago when Adam and I were struggling with a different kind of closet - we'd one day be married and parents of two wonderful children, staring at rack so bursting with jackets you can't see past the vacuum cleaner. And now here it is. Pretty birds, all in a row. Big jackets, little jackets, becoming a family.

The kids began their medications this week, and the difference has been night and day.

If you've been following our saga, you know it's been a difficult journey to get our children's medications approved by the Department of Family Services, a cumbersome body of disorganized bureaucrats whose intentions are good, but who don't have nearly enough staff or resources to pay attention and take proper care of the far-too-many children in their possession. And like it or not (and in our case, not) our kids are still firmly under the DFS bureaucratic thumb until a judge signs on the dotted line and tells the whole world otherwise. Please God, let it be soon.

Thanks to a well-meaning but ridiculously ill-thought-out snag in the system, ADHD/ODD kids can't have Ritalin, Risperidone or other psychotropic meds anymore if they're prescribed by their plain old family pediatrician. And this is probably good, since we live in an age where most doctors hand out Ritalin like candy. And since that's the unfortunate reality, foster kids, for their own protection, are required by Nevada law to have their ADHD/ODD meds prescribed by a psychiatrist instead.

This makes little or no sense in the case of our kids, who have severe behavioral disturbances and should have been on these medications before we even met them. First of all, our pediatrician sees our kids twice a month and knows exactly who they are and how they act. She's been in contact with us, she's been in contact with their teachers. Our psychiatrist (who we waited nearly three months to see), has known them for five minutes. But, oh well, water under the bridge - ain't nobody said life is easy - and when your kids are on Medicaid and only a handful of child psychiatrists in the city take it - you do what all the other kids in the system do. You wait your turn. For three long months, you line up and wait.

But praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, December 18 finally arrived, and the psychiatrist took one look at the two of them bouncing off the walls in his office and said to us, "I have no idea how you've handled this for six months without medication. This is severe."

He rolled his eyes at the inefficient, unhelpful, unheathful system, said "this is ridiculous" to the DFS nurse who had to accompany us to sign off, pulled out his pad, and without any hesitation whatsoever, "re-prescribed" the exact same meds our pediatrician would have given us three months ago, had the law of Nevada allowed her to do so.

So here we are, and thank God and Dr. Emannuel Nwapa, we can give you a good review this week of where the wild things are.

First of all, much of the wildness disappeared. Instantly.

The children didn't disappear, thank goodness. J2 is still our funny, adventurous, daring little J2. J1 is still our stubborn, independent, confident J1. But medication, thank God, took the edge off so much of all that was hurting and hindering them, we can't begin to summarize the improvement.

Right now, for instance, it's Saturday morning. And on a typical Saturday morning, we'd have already had five name callings, four competitive fights, three wild hittings, two tearful tantrums and a partridge flying for cover straight up the proverbial pear tree. Today, sheer bliss.

Justice is sitting at the coffee table doing word search puzzles. Word search puzzles are all the rage in our house all of a sudden. They've both been doing them by the boatload. Her book ran out this morning, and she politely asked me if I'd drive her to CVS Pharmacy and get her another one. "Politely" and "Justice" usually don't go together in the same sentence around here. Now we're getting it in droves.

Justin is playing Skylanders on the Wii. For the first time ever, he's sitting there playing the Wii, without crying, without throwing the controller across the room, without tantruming when Ingitor, Slam-Bam and Jet-Vac don't shake their groove things the way he wants them to.

My sister said last night, "Do you realize it's been three days since Justin has hit me?"

"Yeah," I said, coming to terms with the incredulousness. "Me too."

We both just stared at him from across the room, quietly doing his word search. After school, he'd gone straight to the table to read me There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell, a book at least a year over his grade level. This from the kid who four days ago, couldn't slow down enough to differentiate between "ran" and "run." Now he's patiently sounding out "she jingled and jangled and tickled as well."

No hits, no kicks, no biting. Still a few sibling arguments here and there, but regular sibling arguments now...not crazy sibling arguments.

In the car on the way to school, they sit quietly drawing or doing their puzzles. They don't hit each other, they don't aggrevate each other, they don't tease each other.

"It's like a regular car ride," Adam said, amazed after the third one in a row. "You know. The quiet kind."

When they get home, they do their homework and ask for more. They volunteer for additional online homework and sit there quietly and do it.

Who are these quiet, happy children?

Justice woke up three days in a row this week with a smile on her face. Not angry. Not growling. Not insulting me and calling me names. Just happy to be starting her day. She looked around at her toys and her room and said to Adam, "I have everything I want now."

That's amazing. That's a miracle.

Our friend Judy gave us mugs last night that say "iDad" and "iDaddy," and I had tea in mine this morning, for the first time content and happy about that title, not terrified by it.

I feel good for me, but bad for them. Imagine how easy this was, and how long it's been withheld from them because of procedural red tape. How stupid the system is that made these poor children wait this long for such easily available help.

"Let it go," Cindy, their grandmother, told me on the phone yesterday. "It doesn't serve anyone to dwell on that part. Don't put any more of your energy into feeling bad for what was. You can better spend it moving forward. They're being helped now and that's all that matters."

Around five o'clock, like clockwork, the meds wear off and they become regular, old-school Justice and Justin again. They tear around the neighborhood on their new Hanukkah bikes, jump all over the house and blow off steam and energy before dinner and bed. And yes, when the last dose fades away, they still tease and scream and whack the crap of each other. We haven't lost them at all. Medication has not made them zombies. It's only helped them, for a significant part of their day, be who they are capable of being underneath.

Underneath all the impulse and self-control problems they couldn't shake any other way. Not after years of therapy and every trick in the book. Every trick in every parenting book ever written. Night and day, friends. Night and day.

And of course this is not the magic bullet. The responsible, forward-thinking part of me knows we still have plenty of road ahead, and better living through chemistry sure as hell ain't gonna solve it all. But you know what? The difference this week has been so astounding and such a relief to two exhausted dads, screw it. This week, it is our magic bullet. And anybody who thinks otherwise, well, you haven't had enough wild things in your life yet.

"The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye, and sailed back over a year, and in and out of weeks, and through a day, and into the night of his very own room, where he found his supper waiting for him. And it was still hot."

Medication is not the magic answer for everyone's child.

But for ours today, it feels like help.

It feels like hope.

And I'll take that and run with it.

"Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak ©1963 Harper Collins Publishers