I don't get much sleep anymore. Not that I have really slept for years. And I suspect I may never sleep again. Not really. Not the sleep of peace. Then again I don't know that many of us get that kind of sleep but a few times in our lives, if at all. Perhaps the only time you ever really sleep peacefully is when you have nothing left to worry about. And I don't think that happens until it is almost the end.

I wonder if my good friend John Gides is having that kind of sleep. He sleeps most of the day and night now. Doctors have rediscovered cancer, this time in his shoulder blade which has reached around to his clavicle, almost like it is choking him. He sent me an email today, because he is too weak I suspect to muster the energy for a phone call, telling me this. He told me that it was no big deal. That it wouldn't be taken care of until he returned to LA in August. That all that was needed was a little radiation and maybe a pinch of chemo. Nothing to worry about, he said.

But "Nothing to worry about" is like saying you are just going out for the paper or a pack of cigarettes. It is like saying "I'll be right back." And you never come back. Two years ago I listened to John rasp in my ear as non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and lung cancer ravaged him. Two years ago he was prepared to die. And once you are prepared to die, even if you live, you are never the same again. You have come to terms with the ultimate fear. There is nothing else. The Rubicon is crossed. John is still prepared to die. He just doesn't say it anymore.

I don't sleep because these late hours are the only hours when I am not on the line. Susan can fall down in her tracks as soon as Bodhi or Jani is asleep. I understand that. Her body needs that. It is like getting a new cell phone and impatiently waiting for it to charge the full eight hours before you use it. If you pull the phone before its first full charge is complete, the battery will never be capable of a full charge. As the days go past, your battery will run down faster and faster, until you can only get a minutes off before the battery dies. I guess my point is that Susan's battery can carry more charge than mine. My battery life is much shorter because I don't allow myself a full recharge. Honestly now, I go through the days a little light-headed. Sometimes, as I get out of the car, it comes over me in waves, like nausea, and I have to steady myself against the side of the car before I can go around the other side to get Bodhi or Jani out.

I get maybe three to four hours a sleep a night. I have a process after which ever child I am on duty with that night goes to sleep. First, I let my mind go blank. I check to see if the Angels one, if Lebron James is still a petulant child because the Cavs didn't make the Finals, if the Vikings have finally signed Brett Old Man Farve. Then I might go to airliners.net and look a pictures of planes and airports that I probably will never get to. I look at photos of tiny runways in the Caribbean. It is as close to a vacation as I will ever get. It also gives me something to talk about with my father as commercial aircraft have always been the only language we speak. As a kid I admired his AmEx and Preferred Status which allowed him to escape to any part of the world he wanted to. I envied him that. I no longer envy that, but despite his best efforts, Dad cannot understand what I live through. But he can understand Boeing 777's and Airbus A330's. We talk about flying a lot.

He looks at these aircraft with an engineer's mind. I see them as magical pumpkins. In third world countries, countries that Westerners vacation in, kids press their faces up against chain link fences and watch planes taking off, dreaming of New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas. All the places that they will never get to see because they will never make it to the other side of the fence. Watching the plane rotate off the runway is the closest they will ever get. Sometimes, though, in desperation, they sneak onto the tarmac and cram themselves into the wheelwells, not realizing that they will either be crushed by the rising landing gear or freeze to death at 35,000 feet.

I asked a friend tonight, whose ex-husband can wash his hands of his schizophrenic daughter when he needs to, how. How do you shut this off? Because I can't. That is why I tried to kill myself last week. Because I couldn't shut it off. She had no answer for me, but I think that running away from a child with mental illness is like trying to stow away in the landing of a airliner bound for the First World. They aren't going to make it. In their exhilaration they run full pelt across the tarmac, seeing their goal, thinking only of the future, only to realize too late as their body crystallizes at 50 degrees below zero that their is no escape. If they still have any consciousness as the landing gear doors open and they plunge, frozen stiff, into the backyards of people living by Heathrow or JFK, they realize that they ran away but there is no escape. There is no dream. There is only the hear and now.

Susan and I are not going to try and grab on to the skids of the last US chopper as it lifts off from the embassy in Saigon. There is no point. I don't want to be there when the sailors push the Hueys off the decks of the aircraft carriers to make room for the huddled masses who have fled. No, we are going to stay here and face the oncoming NVA, led by General 400 the Cat and Colonel Wednesday the Rat. We are going to stay and try to counteract the re-education process going on inside Jani's brain, counteract the paranoia, counteract the voices who play with her and make her promises they can never keep because they don't exist. I stay, and Susan stays, waiting for the day when Jani wakes up lucid and finds herself abandoned by her "friends" like 18 the girl and 24 Hours.

But we are learning that we cannot fight this enemy head on. We cannot cluster bomb the shit out of her psychosis by carpet bombing her body with anti-psychotics. We cannot defoliate the jungle or lay down napalm. Like an insurgency within her mind, Jani's delusions are the Viet Cong hiding inside the village of her mind. We can't burn the village. So we have to fight this war differently. Without action. We have to lay siege to Jani's mind, surround it, try to cut off supplies to the psychosis, and wait. Just wait. And that is what we do. We don't even really do time outs anymore. There is no point. Jani can't learn from her mistakes. So when Jani freaks out, we just wait. Wait it out while she screams and hits and cries. We have evacuated the locals. Bodhi has been airlifted in my arms or Susan's arms to safety. Susan and I are the long green line evacuating Bodhi in the face of Jani's onslaught. This is why neither Susan nor I can take both children at the same time under ANY circumstances. One child, one parent. Always divided.

This morning, at Denny's, Jani went to take a sip of orange juice and the lid came off. The cup slid sideways and orange juice poured into her lap. Jani screamed and began pulling at her pants like they were on fire. My immediate thought was "oh shit, we are in a public place." I hadn't bothered to check if Jani had properly dressed herself and too late I realized she had no underwear on. Now I was sitting beside a six year old girl who looks older trying to strip her pants off in public. We were shielded by the table but she had already gotten her pants down to her knees and was bare-assed against the vinyl. I immediately reached down and grabbed the top of her pants before she could get them completely off and held on for dear life. I tried not to look at those around us, knowing all too well what this must look like to the uninformed.

Jani was crying and screaming that she had to get her pants off and I was trying to hold on to them so she couldn't get them completely off. Because if she got them completely off her legs would be free and I would get kicked in the face as I tried to put them back on, she would scream and run out of the restaurant, exposed to the world. I would be then forced to chase down my half naked daughter until the cops arrived and arrested me (what other conclusion could they draw other than I was trying to molest my daughter over a Grand Slam at the local Denny's?) I didn't try to reason with her either, for that was pointless. Nobody likes to spill something on ourselves but most of us still prefer being a bit wet to stripping off in public. Jani, when psychotic, does not think about social mores and public indecency. In her warped mind, being wet is more indecent than being naked. So I just hung on. I looked desperately around for the waitress. I needed towels.

Luckily, after dropping off coffee to a childless couple the next table over, the waitress finally brought paper towels to the father with the half-naked girl. She proceed to take them one at a time, daintily, and wipe off the table. The table! Screw the table! I grabbed the whole lot and started shoving them down Jani's pants, trying to separate her skin from the feeling of wetness, thinking that maybe if I stuffed her pants legs with paper towels I could get her to pull up her pants and walk out with me. It was a desperate gamble but it was all I could think of. I was alone. You know, in all my troubles with Jani in public, not once has anybody ever offered to help me. They just assume that Jani is a brat and I am a lax father who doesn't discipline. Why does everybody attribute failure to laziness?

My plan worked but not how I had intended it. The paper towels down her legs were more uncomfortable for her than being wet, so she pulled up her pants and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not that things were right as rain again. She complained of being cold by screaming "I'm cold" with her eyes closed and her head raised to the ceiling like she was possessed. So I clutched her to me and tried to finish my pancakes.

Later, she refused to come into the dog park with me. When I tried to push her, she walked through the middle of a bunch of grown men playing soccer (you can imagine how that went over-soccer is a fucking religion to these guys. You could piss on the Virgin Mary and they wouldn't care as much). I got Jani out of the soccer match, not without frustration, and not without her tripping herself up in the net, but she still wouldn't come into the dog park not because she was being obstinate but because she was "cold." There is the thinking disorder. I can't listen to you because I am cold. Before I would have left her alone (because I could still see her from the dog park) but I will not do that anymore. I don't trust her and the last time I left her alone I had my second brush with DCFS. So I just waited. I thought "Okay, we have nowhere we have to be. Honey can whiz and poop on the soccer field. No big deal." I waited, making small talk to Jani while she cried and rolled on the grass. Eventually the Thorazine I had given her 20 minutes earlier kicked in and once again she was fine. But you see that the only reason we are functioning with Jani is because the parent with her does not try to live a normal life in any way. There are no errands, not going to the store, no keeping to a schedule, no working. Jani is so unpredictable that the parent on duty with her must devote all available resources and be willing to just hang out while she freaks out and not give a damn about the soccer players who are staring. Just wait. Just hold the line. Or the pants.

I can only buy groceries and run errands when I have Bodhi. Same with Susan. The parent with Jani can do only one job and that is to try and get Jani through the day.

Today we met with the WRAP team again. This was the supposed to be a little break for me but Jani took one look at the six people in her place and ran out. So I had to take off after her. I had to keep working to get Jani to engage with those who are supposed to know how to engage a child. They know how to engage a child with behavioral problems. Those kids can learn. They do not know how to engage a psychotic child who can't learn from her past mistakes, can't alter behavior.

Joanna at WRAP was confident that by the time I return to work at CSUN in August that many of Jani's behaviors will be under control. I am not so confident. This is not a "Dr. Phil, save me from my insolent teenager." This is psychosis. You know the saying "Psychotic is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results each time?" It's true. You could give Jani a million time outs. You could beat her black and blue. You could offer her the moon or condemn her forever. It doesn't matter. Jani may feel awful for that moment, but expecting her to be able to logically resist the most illogical mental illness known to man is like expecting you to lift the Rocky Mountains and twirl them above your head.

I had to leave with Bodhi when Jani became convinced that Bodhi had her toy (even though his hands her empty) and started hitting him. I took Bodhi, put him in the car, put on the AC, and stepped outside to smoke and calm my nerves. On the way out, I passed the WRAP team, who, all-smiles, told me Jani was asleep now. They were so smug and self-congratulatory. But five minutes later Susan and Jani pull up behind me in the line for the ATM. So much for Jani falling asleep.

I no more believe that WRAP can "fix" Jani's behaviors by the time I return to CSUN for fall than I believe they can get her to sleep. And so I end tonight not knowing how much longer I can work. I already have nothing emotionally to give in the classroom anymore, but I don't know how much longer I can even show up to teach. How can Susan handle both kids, even for 90 minutes, while I teach? How can I do anything at all outside the hours that Jani is in school? If you want to offer me a class from midnight to 2am I will take it. But since those don't exist at CSUN, I increasingly fear my teaching days may be numbered.