“Let’s Face It, You’re Good Looking”
Autism blues and breakthroughs
The only thing more explosive than my son’s rage is his joy.
What’s he mad about?
Communication.
He has autism and an auditory processing disorder. These make for a steep and treacherous climb up Conversation Hill. He gets frustrated.
Angry.
Enraged.
When the rage is over, he’ll sometimes point to his head and say, “Autism.”
I’ll say, “I know,” which is Star Wars for “I love you.”
Back to that mad joy of his:
He scream-laughs, stomp-dances, waves his arms, shakes his fists, and cries out things you wouldn’t understand:
“I like my sandwich HOT!” and “Ridiculous! Ridiculous! Ridiculous!”
This is a family joke. I was at Subway once, in line behind a guy who looked like Santa Claus, the kind of Santa Subway would attract: out of work, alcoholic, hooked on reindeer meat.
Santa wanted the “Steak Philly.” When he got it, I guess it didn’t feel hot enough in his hands, so he shouted,
“I like my sandwich HOT!”
He followed this up by constructing a long chain of “Ridiculous!” and whipping it around.
Back home, I told the story, and the boy loved it so much it became an expression of great joy for us.
We get good news, we say, “Ridiculous! Ridiculous!”
“Guess what?” Mindy says. “We’re having pizza tonight!”
The boy and I turn into wiggle dancers and criers: “I like my sandwich HOT!!!”
I call him “the boy” because he’s my son, but he’s a man. Evidence:
He’ll be 21 this July.
He’s taller than me.
His skull is much bigger than mine because he was gifted with the head of an adult male movie star.
He’s handsome, and everyone knows it.
The other day, he and I were talking about good looks, discussing them in light of Sawyer’s social defense:
Remain as quiet as possible.
He believes that the moment he opens his mouth in public, his communication struggles will give away that he’s “different.” From hard experiences, he’s learned the world doesn’t like different. It surrounds it and tries to squeeze the difference out like doctors executing boils, or the world turns away, erasing difference with the blindness of its backside.
“You get quiet around people,” I said.
He agreed.
“And I’m sorry, but you’re very handsome.”
He agreed.
“Here’s the trouble: When good-looking people are silent, everyone assumes they’re snobs.”
“They do?”
“A hundred percent. We assume quiet, good-looking people think they’re better than everyone else.”
Does Sawyer think he’s better than everyone? He might. Mindy and I certainly do:
He’s way nicer to people than they’ve been to him.
His sense of justice puts America’s to shame.
He’s politically incorruptible: He believes all people are equal. More than that, he knows it.
The fact that Mindy and I feel the same way about Sawyer is pretty impressive, considering I’m a stepparent.
Because Mindy is connected to Sawyer biologically, she couldn’t stop loving him even if she wanted to. I, on the other hand, can stop whenever I want. I just choose not to. Does that make me, the only one of us who actually has free will in this regard, a more impressive parent?
You decide.
Every semester, Sawyer takes one of my writing classes. He’s not there to learn anything from me. He’d tell you as much. He’s not interested in being a writer. He is interested in the college community. His great dream is to have friends, kindreds he can invite into his mind-world. Therefore, even though it scares him terribly, he throws himself into the cruel/kind chaos of people.
He sits in the front row, dead center, and waits for me to say something he can use to make people laugh.
When he first started coming to class, he would roast me using sharp little quips, which I didn’t like. But whatever. It got him talking, made him comfortable. Over time, however, he left the Dan roast behind, and now we work together, sometimes achieving a nice, funny back-and-forth that he enjoys.
The other day in class, I was feeling sentimental. I said something like, “I don’t do this job for the money. There’s no money in teaching. I’m in it for the vacation time. You guys could be bubonic Satans and I’d still head to work, whistling. I don’t care how evil or stupid you are; I love summer vacation more.”
My students know when I say things like this, I’m really saying, “You guys are the reason I love this job.”
But Sawyer’s not a subtext man, not a hidden-message dude. So, he sat back and enjoyed listening to me insult everyone.
by author
But I slipped and revealed my big fat heart: “You’re all the best. I love you guys.”
Sawyer jumped right in: “But you love me more, right?”
A fine volley.
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I love you the most.” I pointed at the students. “They could all die; it wouldn’t matter. At all. I wouldn’t even be sad. But you, son, you can never die.”
“Good,” he said.
“I can’t stress enough how meaningless everyone in this room is compared with you.”
Sawyer laughed. Some of the higher-functioning students laughed with him.
It was a good day.
Sometimes, Sawyer has many good days in a row. And yet, the rage is still there. The pressure.
It’s building.
The boiler is filling.
I’ve got anger, too, of course. It grows out of daily frustrations, minute-by-minute social wounds. But I release my anger a little at a time every day through exercise, sighs, teeth grinding, farts, and imagined intellectual arguments in which I defeat my enemies so soundly that they physically attack me and break on the rock of my muscles, of course, then they accidentally call me “Dad.”
Sawyer doesn’t release his anger like this. He keeps it locked away until he can’t.
After he blows up, creating an opening big enough to allow the freight train of anger to fly out of him, howling, shaking the ground, the wound closes and heals over so seamlessly you’d never know it was there.
by author
As I said, communication is a trigger.
He’ll touch the side of his head and say, “Autism,” but sometimes, he’ll say, “Communication.”
“I know.”
“Why is talking so hard?”
We talk about it. He does his best to explain how he feels, what it’s like to be him, but putting it into words is more than difficult; it’s exhausting. He would say, “Impossible.”
I listen. He cries. We work through it.
And it might be a day, maybe ten days, before the rage train returns.
Mindy and I do our best. Sawyer does his.
What’s so difficult is that he can’t tell us what’s really going on. He might say, “It’s empty! Everything’s so empty! I’m done. It’s BROKEN!” We know what he means. Generally, we know. But not specifically. Not down to the fingerprints of the thoughts and feelings that have him in their stranglehold.
One bit of debris flying our way from explosions of feeling is always the question, “Why?” A good question, and he’s right to ask it. It’s the question. But all we can say is, “I know.”
We know life is hard.
We know you’re mad.
We know life can feel empty and broken. People can feel empty and broken. You’re done; we get it. You want to be done with all of it. This makes sense in a world like ours.
The world can be a horrible place.
Life’s not fair.
But sometimes, friends and neighbors, it is.
Sometimes, you discover something.
A game changer.
A discovery that actually helps.
by author
Don’t worry, this is not where I talk about gluten.
And I’m not going to say, “We’ve discovered Sawyer is a mathematical genius! We’ve been pelting him with number puzzles all day, and he always comes up with the right answer! No calculator! No hesitation before answering! We’ve started selling tickets! It’s so wonderful to discover that our autistic child has value!”
Nope, I’m going to talk about technology.
Specifically phones.
Texting.
Sawyer’s very good at texting. Texting for Sawyer is a little like Thor’s hammer for Thor.
Remember what Odin said: “That hammer was to help you control your power, to focus it. It was never your source of strength.”
Sawyer’s source is the great well of who he is, a well with a complexity at the top that makes sharing himself with others seem impossible.
He can’t just fill the bucket and draw it up. Imagine a well plugged by the Gordian Knot.
But the phone is an extremely versatile bucket. A magic bridge of a bucket. The Bifröst (we just watched Thor: Ragnarok, so that’s what’s going on here).
Or maybe the phone is a spider. The invisible webs fired from its butt port at near light speed are nimble and maneuverable enough to get through the well-top tangle and draw out the treasures of Sawyer’s deeps.
The Very Short Story Of The Discovery Of This Game Changer
We were weathering a rage storm the other day. Words weren’t working. Even the most gently delivered and carefully ordered words seemed to infuriate him further.
I gave up.
“Talking is making this worse,” I said. “Let’s stop talking. Here…” I took out my phone and pointed at it. “Text me everything you’re thinking and feeling.”
Before this, we’d only used texting for meme and emoji delivery, for saying, “I’m on my way home. See you soon,” and “Come quick! Blossom’s eating Tom’s puke!” Blossom’s our dog, and Tomboy is one of our cats. She’s the puker. Blossom’s our janitor. Sawyer thinks this little cycle of life is hilarious, so I’ll text him down from his room whenever it happens. We’ll watch Blossom work, and we’ll sing, “I like my sandwich HOT!”
It took me a minute or two to convince Sawyer to walk away from our verbal battle, but he did go. He flew to his room on winds of Dan hate, as they say, and I sat with Mindy on the downstairs couch…
And waited.
And waited.
And then…
The texts started rolling in.
It wasn’t an avalanche but a back-and-forth. He’d type something and wait. I’d do the same, and I loved watching those three little dots that told me he was typing. Crafting sentences. Folding his gigantic feelings into words. Working his way from his primal brain back into his prefrontal cortex, that executive command center, Captain Sawyer on deck!
It took him only a few moments to express what had frustrated him, the thing that got us into the battle of ten minutes ago: just a communication mix-up, a misunderstanding. We sorted it. Then he dove for the deeps.
He wanted to share with us that his pain isn’t shallow. It has roots. It’s old.
He took us to the cruelties of high school, middle school, and elementary. He did the thing we’ve always wanted: He got specific, telling us stories we’d never heard before…
He had a teacher in elementary who imitated him in a mocking way.
Another teacher told him, “You’re never going to get any better.”
A different teacher sent him to the principal’s office over and over, whenever Sawyer expressed frustration. He said he never knew why he was being sent away. It scared and confused him every time.
by author
He told us every day is a struggle.
That it isn’t fair how hard he has to work to communicate with people, to reach out and make meaningful contact, to do more than make little jokes and hope for laughs.
He let us know he’s incredibly tired.
Tired of trying.
Of being in the world.
Being a grownup.
He said he wishes he could go back. All the way to early childhood, before school, before he discovered that nothing in our world was made with him in mind, and that people aren’t patient. They’re cruel. People make fun of those who suffer. They pretend they don’t exist.
Mindy and I read Sawyer’s messages and were blown away again and again by his ability to do through texting what he hasn’t been able to do through speech.
“Dan!” Mindy said.
“What?”
“He’s a writer. Your son is a writer.”
“He has been listening,” I whispered.
“What?”
“In class. I thought he wasn’t listening. But he has been! All I ever wanted was to be the greatest writer in the world, but to find out I’m the greatest teacher, too?”
“Let’s try to remember who we’re celebrating right now.”
“Of course. Yes. You must mean our child.”
The boy typed on and on, and we learned and learned.
The gifts of texting:
The pressure of pressing faces and eyes is removed.
You can see the words spoken to you.
You can read them again and again, as many times as you need to.
You can think as long as necessary before speaking.
Sawyer was communicating beautifully.
“He is a writer,” I said, which for me is the same as saying he’s a Jedi. I imagined him using his text powers to reach beyond me and Mindy, to his friends, to the world, a world that has tried to convince him he doesn’t matter and should turn his back on himself. Drop into darkness.
“Never,” he writes. “I’ll never turn to the Dark Side. You’ve failed, World. I am a writer, like my father before me.”
To be clear, I’m not saying Sawyer is suddenly a better writer than I am. That would be impossible, because Sawyer is alive and a human being, and I’m currently the best living human writer.
Which prompts you to say, “You’re not as good at writing as you think you are.”
Which prompts me to say, “No one could be as good at writing as I think I am.”
No, I’m not saying Sawyer is a writing savant. And if you just lost interest in him, go to hell. All the way.
I am saying thank God for that asshole, Alexander Graham Bell. Thank God for Martin Cooper, father of the handheld cellular mobile phone. Thank God for Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert, who invented SMS (Short Message Service) in ‘84. Thank God for Frank Canova, inventor of the smartphone.
And, “Dear God, thank you for the iPhone. In Steve Jobs’ Name, Amen.”
I’m grateful we’ve discovered this help for our Hollywood-headed wonder man.
It’s not everything, but it’s way more than nothing, and I believe it’s the way forward for Sawyer.
He recently told us he’s desperate to share his anxieties, fears, angers, and sorrows with people other than Mindy, me, and his therapist.
In other words, friends.
Now we can tell him, “Sawyer, you’re gifted with the power of text. Use it.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready.”
“You’re ready, but start small. You don’t have to tell people everything right away.”
“I’m scared.”
“When has that ever stopped you before?”
He smiled and said, “You’re right.”
“I know,” I said.
Mindy beamed at Sawyer. She beamed the way only biological mothers can. What choice did she have?
Me, on the other hand, I beamed without the encouragement of biological tyranny. I beamed as only a good stepfather can…
I beamed because I wanted to.
by author
YAY SAWYER!! LOVELOVELOVE
Yup! I hear you on that