One day back in Colorado, during the earplug phase, Lucas was hideously pissed off at something––a not unheard-of situation, since he's got a touch of his father's short temper in addition to the elevated blood sugars that come with his type 1 diabetes––and I took him outside to help clear his head. I've always found this helpful, even if all it does is give me more space around myself and force my body to notice other things than my own welling emotions.

We had a fenced-in backyard and a small stretch of river rock bordering it. He wanted to destroy stuff (an emotion I understood more fully than I could ever tell him), so I took him over to the rocks. 

"Here," I said, putting a rock in his hand. "Throw it at the fence as hard as you can."

Did it work? I'm not sure. Maybe I got some of the anger out, but in the end I felt like I was only teaching him how to take his anger out on something else than its object. 

Anger is an energy, I've been told. It has to come out somewhere, doesn't it? Am I on the right track in teaching my kids to redirect it somewhere, or teaching them something horribly wrong? Merely reinforcing the habit that helped destroy my father, and has done its best to destroy me?

P.S.: I've asked the kids if I could interview them for the labyrinth on the subject of what they do when they get angry. Their answers: "Not really" and "No." Guess that settles the question.