Clueless

2009
Last night Cynthia, Noah and I decided to play a game of Clue. I decided I wouldn't try too hard to win so that Noah would have a chance. After a few turns around, I realized that something was not quite right. Maybe there were cards missing? Noah had mentioned at the beginning that one thing he didn't like about Clue was how many cards you had to hold, yet each of us only had 5 or 6 cards in our hands. We counted up the rooms, the people and the weapons and realized that there were cards missing! We hunted around in the Game Closet and sure enough, we found the envelope that is the "confidential case file" and in it were three cards (obviously left over from the last time the game was played). We passed out one card to each of us (without looking!) and decided to go on with the game. After a few more turns, something still didn't seem right. According to my Clue sheet, all the people were accounted for. Who could have committed the crime if we all had them in our hands? Cynthia began saying "something didn't seem right". Then I realized that maybe Nathan hadn't put the right cards in the middle of the board when we started our game. So we asked Nathan to look at the cards for us. Sheepishly he told us that he had put 3 weapons in the middle instead of one person, one weapon and one room. Ah...how had we missed the clues?! What a laugh!

Life is often clueless. Just when you think you have something all figured out, the rules change. Your granddaughter comes home from the research program at NIH in Maryland and has her worst episode ever. You realize that the time has come that you have been dreading forever, the day she must be admitted to the local psychiatric hospital. She goes to the emergency room and after five hours she is sent back home again because there is no bed for a girl child in a psychiatric hospital in the state of Maine. Who changed the rules? How can she be in the throes of bipolar mixed-state and there be no safe place for her? How much longer can she and her family hold on? Are we on a Clue board, running from the Kitchen to the Study to the Ballroom in a crazy, mixed up race to end up nowhere?

And then you find the secret passageway through the back door into the Acadia Hospital. You (as the parent) call the Access Center at the hospital and ask for an evaluation for your child to be admitted to their Day Program. It probably doesn't hurt that her psychiatrist called ahead the day before, but who knows in this Clueless game where their are no set rules. You take your child to the appointment, screaming almost all the way in, and bring her grandmother with you for help and moral support. It also helps that she can drive the car while you tend to the upset child. After all the twists and turns, she ends up admitted to the hospital and not the Day Program.

Our Cluless Clue game ended up being pretty fun--and funny! It didn't turn out the way we expected but we laughed a lot and had a good time. Acadia's hospital admission didn't go the way we planned, but she ended up in a safe place when she needed to be there.