Life has become a series of task checkboxes and schedules.

I swore I would never live this way, or be the sort of parent to have “scheduled kids.” Yet aside from holidays (which are themselves scheduling nightmares), we have one to five things on the calendar every single day, and are ruled by the clock.

One of the things on my to-do list that doesn’t have a date attached is writing these updates. I started this one in May, added to it in June and July, and am just getting around to finishing it now. I’m going to skip a lot of stuff, because by now it’s old news.

Two years ago this July, I met my sons for the first time. They are such an integral and pervasive part of my life now that it’s hard to believe that only two years ago, I hadn’t yet even seen their faces or learned their names. We celebrated the anniversary by going to Medieval Times.

Nicky remembers our first meeting very well. The night before our anniversary, he told me that he’d never had a real daddy or a real home before me, and that he had been waiting for me “so very long.” He wanted to know why kids go to orphanages, and why it takes so long for them to find families. He remembers a lot more than he used to say he remembered. In the past couple of months, he’s told of picnics, a field with sunflowers, the color of the couch in the apartment where he and Zack lived before being abandoned, and a handful of other disconnected memories from when he was less than five years old. He still swears that he doesn’t recognize the photo of his birthfather, and says he doesn’t know any of his other Ukrainian family. Yet he has these fragmented memories of his “other daddy” that crop up from time to time.

I’d always suspected that Nicks either didn’t want to remember, or didn’t want to talk about his memories. When I asked him to remember something happy, he was stumped. So I asked him to remember someone—anyone—being nice to him. The best he could offer was that Wolfga, another child his age at the orphanage, was nice—except when he was biting, kicking, or stealing Nicky’s food.

It’s hard to imagine a boy with a soul as sensitive as Nicky’s enduring the trauma of being abandoned and treated cruelly; it’s even harder to believe he could emerge from those experiences unscathed, with his sensitivity and caring intact.

Zack is not Nick. He remembers nothing at all from before the orphanage, and has only conflated and invented memories of the orphanage itself. For all practical purposes, Zack’s memories start on the day we met. Yet he has nightmares several times a week. He wails, kicks, screams out “No!” or “Stop!” without waking up, breathes hard for a few minutes as if he’s terrified, then settles back to deeper sleep. Waking him during these episodes doesn’t help, and asking him later to remember is effectless. Whatever pursues Zack operates from the pre-verbal part of his brain, and we may never be able to identify, let alone exorcise, the demon.

We recently survived the Great American Family Road Trip—for most of June, we took a tour of the old west. We saw Carlsbad Caverns, White Sands, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, the Grand Canyon, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, very strange rocks in Utah, potato farms in Idaho, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Mt. Rushmore, Hot Springs, family in Denver, Pike’s Peak, and lots of pavement. It was a nice, relaxing holiday, and a chance for me to spend twenty-four hours a day with the boys for several weeks straight.

For some reason—perhaps just being away from home for so long—the trip sparked some of Nicky’s old anxieties. Or perhaps the anxieties are always there, always operating just under the surface, and he’s good enough at hiding them that no one knows. But whatever the reason, the old fears resurfaced several times during the trip. At Yellowstone, when I went down to the car in the middle of the night for a business call on my cell phone, Nicky woke and convinced himself that I’d driven off and left him forever. He was sobbing so hard when I got back that he couldn’t even see me or hear my voice. I had to hold him for several minutes before he regained enough control to tell me what was wrong.

Zinn

I have coined a word: Zinn. Zinn stands for “Zack Is Not Nick,” and if I remind myself of zinn ten times a day, it’s not often enough. The boys approach everything in life from different angles, and respond to different kinds of parenting.

Whereas Nicky wanted parenting very badly, Zack wanted to be in charge himself. Some of that independence no doubt came from his distrust of adults—after all, in his short life, the main lesson he learned from adults was that they couldn’t be depended on to provide discipline, love, clothing, food, or even corporeal persistence. While Nicky was waiting for someone to love with his whole heart, Zack was waiting to be on his own.

It’s still hard for Zack to accept that he’s not in charge. I constantly have to pull him back and make him follow instead of lead, both figuratively in daily activities and literally when we’re walking somewhere together. He hates the discipline, but the odd thing is that he’s overall a much happier boy when I’m consistent about it—the tantrums mostly disappear, he’s more affectionate, he listens better, and he shares food and toys with less trauma. When I forget to rein him in, he thinks he’s getting what he wants, but he becomes progressively less satisfied with everything in life. Whether he understands it or not, deep down he knows that he needs structure and control.

My default approach to parenting is affiliative. I like being right beside a child as he learns something, either teaching it or learning it with him. I see negotiation as honest communication rather than battling for control. This is exactly the wrong approach with Zack. For him, a negotiable boundary means there must be a real boundary somewhere further on, and there’s no point in stopping until he finds it. For him, a parent who expresses sympathy is weak, not to be trusted. After all, if I can’t even control him, how can I possible control his world? My challenge with Zack is to teach him that I mean what I say even though I won’t slap him around the way the orphanage workers did.

Zinnishly, Nicky needs to learn the exact opposite lesson. He obeys me not out of some sense of duty, and not because he believes me to be in charge, but simply because he wants to please me. Let there be no mistake: I have two strong-willed children. Nicky can be just as stubborn as Zack, and just as bull-headed. It doesn’t show as often because most of the time he goes along with whatever’s happening. But put him in a situation where what he wants is at strong odds with my instructions, and he’s actually more likely than Zack to go his own way and damn the consequences. He has the grace to look ashamed when caught, but it’s just an act. For all that Nicky is compliant, obedient, cheerful, and responsive to direction, he’s his own boy, with his own mind.

I started this update with a note saying that I wasn’t going to be long-winded and introspective. Sue me. I know, I should write a book. Find me the time, and I’ll get you the book. In the meantime, I’ll be more journalistic.

After the Yellowstone trip, we poked around the house for a couple weeks, then packed up again and headed north to Nebraska. The boys have a rich intergenerational assortment of relatives in corn country. Aside from Grandma and Grandpa, we have Uncle Jeffy, two great grandmas, a great grandpa, and various cousins, uncles, aunts, great uncles, and great aunts. Our visits to Nebraska have turned into an annual pilgrimage of sorts. I suspect it would be worth my life to suggest skipping it. The boys absolutely adore Grandma, and she always has a wide range of cool activities planned for them. The entire Nebraska family has been so kind to us. They instantly took the boys into their lives and hearts, and provide wonderful examples of what “family” means.

School started obscenely early, on the 9th of August, and both boys are doing wonderfully. Nicky is now in second grade, and Zack is in first. They each have made new friends, reaffirmed old friendships, and are well-matched with their teachers. Nicky is reading quite well now, and is ahead of his grade level in math. The only thing holding him back is, as expected, language—specifically vocabulary. For every fifty terms and concepts he learns, his peers only have to learn one in order to stay ahead. Despite his brilliance, it’s going to be a long slow curve for him to catch up. The biggest sticking point, as always, is context. It’s hard to score well on reading comprehension if the story contains references to words he’s never encountered. For example, he had real problems learning the nursery rhyme “Rock-a-bye Baby,” because he had no idea what a “cradle” or a “bough” was. He knew both things, of course, but not the English words for them. Who would stop to think that a bright, highly-verbal, eight-year-old without a perceptible accent might not know the word “cradle”? In every conversation, Nicky misses at least half of what’s being said, but no one can tell.

No surprises here. But a language thing that was a surprise surfaced over the summer. To explain, I’m going to have to go off on a tangent.

For the longest time, my kids refused to use names for other kids. They didn’t ask for names, and, when told names, didn’t remember them. At the playground, Zack would call out, “Hey, boy!” to another boy, or, “You! Girl!” to a girl. For months, the family down the street was “Two girls and a boy” instead of Ashley, Jessica, and Seth.

It was cute, but dysfunctional. I started hounding them about names. At the playground, I made them introduce themselves and ask for names. When they called someone else “Girl” or “Boy,” I made them go back and find out and use the correct name.

If it had been only Zack, I might have concluded it was a memory thing. Zack has a very odd sort of memory, and I can’t tell how much of his problem is lack of attention and desire, and how much is genuine oblivion. In January 2006, we were at a restaurant waiting for our table, and another little boy introduced himself to Zack.

“My name’s Andrew,” said the four-year-old. “What’s your name?”

Zack blinked at him, said, “Wait a minute,” then went to find Nicky. He tapped Nicky on the shoulder to get his attention, and said, “Nicky, what’s my name?”

Nicky didn’t seem surprised or confused by the question. “Your name is Zack, Zack,” he said.

Zack nodded, went back to Andrew, and said, “My name is Zack.”

I watched this sequence with a kind of stunned disbelief. It wasn’t so much that Zack might blank on a name that took me off guard, but that he blanked on his own name and didn’t seem distressed by it. And why wasn’t Nicky surprised by the question? Had he heard it before?

Nicky also has an odd memory when it comes to names. After two years with me, he can still remember Wolfga from the orphanage (the boy who bit him often), but didn’t know the names of most of the adults at the orphanage even while he was living there. He and Zack called any adult female “Auntie” and any adult male “Uncle.” If I used a name, they could usually tell which adult I was referring to, but wouldn’t use the name themselves.

At the orphanage, Nicky and Zack called each other by their last name—something they shared in common in a place where they had nothing of their own and nothing in common with the other children—but they called the other children “Boy,” “Girl,” or (only sometimes) a first name. At some orphanages, like at some schools, the adults refer to the children by their last names, but not at Nicky and Zack’s orphanage. So where did they come up with their aversion to names for other kids or adults, or their insistence on using their last name for each other?

Of course Zack’s memory problems aren’t limited to names. Now that he has no choice but to learn and use names, his quirks show up other places. In April 2006, at 7:25 a.m., I told him to get ready for school. He immediately put on his shoes, found a jacket, put his backpack by the back door, and finished getting ready by 7:28. I said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“Where?” he demanded.

Normally I’d answer the question, but that morning I was curious to see if he’d really forgotten what he was doing while he was doing it, or if he was just asking the question to make noise.

“Where do you think, Zack?”

“I don’t know.”

“Today is Monday. You got up when the alarm went off. You got dressed. You ate breakfast. You put on your shoes. You put your backpack by the door. Where do you think we might be going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Zack, where do you go every weekday? Where do you take your backpack in the mornings? We get in the car together, and I take you some place in the morning, then I pick you up in the afternoon.”

“I don’t know!”

“Could it be school, Zack?”

“Oh, yeah! School!”

So, did he really forget? Is it neurologically possible to forget if all other signs indicate his brain is working properly? Or maybe, just maybe, did he forget the word while remembering the thing?

At the same time that Zack has trouble remembering his own name, or where we were going as he was getting ready to go, he had no trouble remembering things that never happened. He can remember these imaginary things with a great deal of detail, and over long periods of time. Oddly enough, the details change very little as he tells the stories over and over, although sometimes the stories do grow in the telling. He killed a bee at the orphanage, and he punched a wolf in the snout, and he may have killed a bear. He remembers a monster that walked around the orphanage very clearly, and while he originally cowered in terror when the monster stalked the halls, in later versions of the story he punched the monster.

Nicky also remembers things in great detail, although it’s much harder to individuate his fabrications and confabulations from real memories. He remembers the same monster at the orphanage, but he also remembers Wolfga’s name. A big revelation to Nicky over the summer was that adults can lie. He was sure what he saw at the orphanage was a monster because that’s what the orphanage workers told him. Now that he understands that sometimes adults are mean, and sometimes they don’t tell the truth, he’s much less sure that he saw a monster. Now he thinks it may have been a man wearing black clothes.

Around the same time that Nicky figured out the adults at the orphanage lied to him, he started saying he wanted to go back to Ukraine. It took me a while to put the two things together—and in fact, I didn’t put them together until Nicky did it for me by explaining. He wanted to go back to Ukraine, and specifically the orphanage, so he could punch them.

Enough of the tangent. This is about memory, not memories, and it’s about language. Put your detective glasses on and see if you can figure out what’s coming.

One of the most frustrating things the boys have done ever since coming home is to respond to statements or instructions with nonsensical questions. I’d say something like, “Put this in that carton,” pointing at a carton an inch away, and they’d say, “What carton?”

Me: “We’re going to the grocery store.”

Them: “What store?”

Me, sighing: “The grocery store.”

Me: “Put the American cheese in the cart.”

Them: “What American cheese?”

Me, rolling my eyes: “That American cheese, right there, in your hand.”

And so on, with every single thing we do. It got very hard not to scream at them, “Open your eyes! Look around! Pay attention!”

Then one day, the answer hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks: They don’t use the word “which” very often, and they still avoid articles and stative verbs. So the translation of “what carton?” into English is not “which carton?” but “what [is] [a] carton?”

I confirmed my hunch by monitoring which things they said “what” about. Sure enough, they only said it when they didn’t know the word. If I told them to put their clothes away, they never said, “What clothes?” but if I told them to put their shirts in the drawer, they might well say, “What drawer?”

If they used either stative verbs or articles reliably, the misunderstanding would never have started, let alone survived for more than two years. “What a carton?” is mangled, but clear; “What is carton?” is even clearer. Yet the absence of both parts of speech made the glitch transparent. It would have been easier if they still spoke with thick Russian accents, which would cue the listener to apply different grammatical rules, or if the implied quotation marks were audible: “What ‘carton’?” is unambiguously pidgin, and with a pause and inflection change, perfectly understandable in any context. Yet that’s asking far too much sophistication. Like the singing horse, the miracle isn’t how well it sings, but that it sings at all.

Which brings us neatly to the next thing: Zack is doing splendidly in first grade. I was very afraid he would refuse to rise to the challenge. Everyone who’s worked with Zack knows that he’s bright, perhaps brighter than Nick in some ways, and fully capable of almost anything if he would just try. Unfortunately, he got all the way through Kindergarten without trying very hard at all; at the end of the year, he was performing at the pre-school level in most things—almost exactly where he was before a year of Kindergarten. Although he made a tremendous amount of progress in some areas, his language awareness, math skills, and general ability to solve problems was more like a four-year-old's than a six-year-old's. Not because he couldn’t do better, but because he wouldn’t.

After six months of struggling with him over learning the days of the week, I finally lost my temper, plonked him down at the table, and told him he wasn’t getting up again until he knew all seven days, by jesus, in order, and now! Guess what? It took him about ten minutes to learn the names for the days of the week, and within an hour had reached 95% accuracy picking them out, reciting them, or saying which was first, next, or last. If I had to place a bet, I’d wager he’d never really bothered to look at the names, or try to memorize them. His approach, until he had no choice, was the same approach he used for everything that didn’t come easily to him: Do just enough to get the adult to stop bothering him, and for goodness sake, don’t remember any of it.

Yet still, he had trouble remembering things that he wanted to remember, too, so it wasn’t all just obstinacy. For whatever reason, whether language, speech, or neurological deficit, memorization is tough for Zack. Some of it is clearly behavioral, both innate and learned, but not all. As Kindergarten drew to a close, I very seriously considered having him repeat the grade.

The arguments for and against repeating a grade are numerous, contentious, and annoyingly irresolvable. Although one can usually make a good case either way, the ultimate question is whether the child will benefit more from the repetition than he’ll be hurt by being held back. For Zack, I decided no; if I didn’t give him a chance to fail, I wouldn’t be giving him a chance to succeed, either. First grade, I figured, would make or break the boy.

Accordingly, we spent a good deal of that Yellowstone trip playing language games in the car, working on vocabulary, doing speech exercises, and using flash cards. Zack made progress, but not much. I found myself mentally comparing his attention span to that of a butterfly, and concluding the butterfly was the clear winner.

If I could be cuter, I would, but I can't.

So, in appropriate scientific fashion, I confounded the variables, and introduced multiple changes at once. This gives me the satisfaction of never knowing which thing made the difference, and gives you the opportunity to read my endless drivel of speculation.

I hauled out Zack’s old diagnosis of ADD, and put him on meds. At the same time, I let him start first grade and told him, point blank, that if he didn’t work hard, he’d go back to Kindergarten while all of his friends went on to do older-kid stuff.

The result? Zack is actually doing better at spelling than Nicky did at the same point in first grade last year. He’s doing well in every other area of school, too. Like Nicky, he’s far behind his peers, but—zinn again—he doesn’t find that a sufficient motivation to try harder. The threat of going back to Kindergarten was a strong motivator, and there’s no doubt that the ADD medication helps, too. The first day he took it was also the first time in his entire life that he colored inside the lines. Until that day, his approach to coloring was to scribble back and forth over the entire page. Now he draws figures with the correct number of appendages, has vastly improved penmanship, and can follow multi-step directions as well as anyone else his age (assuming he knows the words being used).

To top it off, Zack is finally making substantial progress in his speech therapy. Spelling was tough because he heard words as units rather than individual phonemes put together; now he can hear them, reproduce them, and sound out words. The sounds that had given him so much trouble – /s/, /th/, and /z/, mostly – are still difficult for him, but now he can make the sounds and be understood. The days of “chklool buttch” for “school bus” are behind us. I don’t think we can attribute his speech progress to the ADD meds, but they probably helped a bit. For Zack, being ready to do something is fully half the battle. He was ready to tackle the hard sounds finally, and did. And as with most things, he found that if he only tries, he succeeds.

I spend too much time in these updates talking about problems. The thing is, it’s easier to document challenges and trials than to say, over and over, “We had a perfectly wonderful day. Nothing special happened.” But you know, most days are perfectly wonderful, and nothing special happens, unless you count being perfectly wonderful as being special. In that regard, we have a very special life.

I'm so cool!

This last weekend, I took the boys to Houston to tour the Space Center. We got to touch a moon rock, see real capsules that had been in space, and see thousands of exhibits I would have killed to see when I was a boy. I don’t think any generation after mine will ever be space-crazy in quite the same way. For Nicky and Zack, spaceships are as ordinary as any other mechanical marvel—cool, interesting, a bit exotic, but an expected part of life. Me, I’m with Walter Cronkite—I’m tempted to tear up a bit when I think of Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

After the Space Center, we went to Galveston and kicked around the beach for a while. On the way back to Dallas the next day, we stopped at the Texas Renaissance Festival in Plantersville, just north of Houston. Yes, we got wooden swords and turkey legs. What kind of Renfest would it be without those?