Promise You Won't Freak Out
_{by Doris A. Fuller and Natalie Fuller with Greg Fuller}

It’s no small wonder teenagers claim parents are “clueless” about what’s going on in their kids’ lives. Adolescents hide clues like squirrels approaching a hundred-year winter, and parents are natural victims of their own high hopes. In the long and often hard toil through the teen years, secrecy and silence can be irresistibly appealing.

And then . . .

And then the school counselor telephones to say our high school junior has cut the last two weeks of English class. And then the mall calls to say our middle-schooler has been picked up for shoplifting. And then Mom opens the door of her darling daughter’s bedroom in the middle of the night and finds the darling’s boyfriend snoozing at her side. And then Dad discovers the empty beer keg stashed in his adored son’s trunk.

There are a thousand And thens waiting to ambush every parent of a teen. They range from the benign to the life-threatening, but every last one shares the capacity to alter the course of children’s lives and plunge parents into regret and self-doubt.

When teens reach an And then moment, they can be maddeningly blasé. Of course! They already knew what they were up to! It is the parent who is shocked by discovery and left reeling with Why didn’t I see this coming? and How could I have missed the signs? not to mention the utterly baffling, What in the world do I do NOW?

In Promise You Won’t Freak Out, high school junior Natalie Fuller, assisted by her college junior brother, Greg, authors a unique teen's-eye view of how garden-variety teenagers think and act on behaviors ranging from blowing off homework to stealing to sex. Mom/Doris gives the survivor account of the sometimes clueless but never speechless mother trying to guide her teens safely to adulthood.

“This book is a comedy,” the Fuller3 promise on the book’s first page. “Not a comedy in the Seinfeld ha-ha-ha sense but a comedy in the Shakespeare All’s Well That End’s Well tradition.” Happy endings can be hard to imagine in the years between 12 and 20, but Natalie, Doris, and Greg believe they are not only possible but probable if everyone involved can just manage not to freak out.