Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  Things went a little better when Mom went into the lab or the field. Cubby accompanied her and picked up many arcane skills of the anthropologist’s trade, even before he could read and write. He could assemble a dog skeleton from a dusty box of bones, and he knew all about early American glassware from excavating Colonial outhouses and trash pits in historic Deerfield. He had no idea where we lived, but he could describe all the buildings and roads on a map of Deerfield, where his mom was working on her master’s thesis.

  On days when Little Bear couldn’t take Cubby with her, I tried bringing him to work with me. That didn’t work out very well, because I couldn’t watch him and he couldn’t stay still. An inquisitive baby was an amusing or annoying distraction at school, but there was nothing there to hurt him. The situation was very different in a dirty auto-repair shop. We knew grease was unhealthy to eat, and we were really trying to keep him clean. On the days I had Cubby I could not do any useful work because I was forever washing my hands and tending him. Cubby, on the other hand, reveled in filth. He grabbed every opportunity to escape his hamper and crawl across a greasy floor just to put both paws into a big tub of diesel fuel. He would have eaten old car parts, too, if I hadn’t caught him. There’s something irresistible about a nice, chewy fan belt.

  I was also concerned that Cubby would get squashed if he got loose in the yard. My neighbor owned several front-end loaders, and he drove the giant machines back and forth past my doors several times a day. It’s hard to see close up when you’re driving a loader, and I didn’t want my new baby getting squashed.

  Then there was my fellow tenant, Pete the Paver. I took an immediate liking to Pete. Some days, he’d come back from work with hot pavement left in his trucks, and he’d dump it steaming on the driveway by my shop and roll it onto the ground. The trouble was, if Cubby got in front of Pete’s steamroller, he’d be flattened like Wile E. Coyote.

  That made me look out for him real close.

  Before long, the need for a kid-management plan was painfully apparent. We knew there were commercial storage options, but they were costly and their quality was uncertain. We did not want to leave him with a smiling nanny only to discover that we had entrusted our kid to some fiend who chained him to a pipe in the basement and passed the day with her boyfriend upstairs. You never know with some of those places. They seem safe, until you see them on the evening news. Our thoughts returned to my mother, who liked Cubby a lot. We knew we could trust her, she was home, and she always wanted Cubby around. She had not been the best mom when I was little, but she’d mellowed with age and doted on her new grandchild.

  Also, my mother really liked Little Bear. I think she saw her as the daughter she had never had. So they made a deal. Little Bear would bring Cubby, his diapers, and his other paraphernalia over to my mother’s house in the morning. Then she’d go to school and return to pick him up in the afternoon.

  My mother was in that first year of recovery from her stroke, and Cubby’s need for constant attention turned out to be good for her. He kept her awake and active as she chased him through the house in her wheelchair. The two of them even learned to walk together. My mother had to figure out how to get up and use a cane, and Cubby had to learn to get onto his hind legs and walk. Both of them were determined to succeed.

  I can’t remember when my mother started walking again, but I can say with certainty that Cubby walked on his first birthday. It was a Friday, and his grandmother had come to our house in South Hadley. I was at work.

  He had been self-propelled for a while, but only in four-wheel drive. We had talked about using two-wheel drive, hind legs only, but Cubby had been resistant. I say we talked about it, but I really don’t know how he perceived those exchanges. We expressed our thoughts and wishes to him, but he was too little to answer in a comprehensible fashion. Still, I knew he was thinking about walking, because I’d see him pull himself up on the legs of the kitchen table, stand erect, and gaze thoughtfully across the vast ten-foot gulf of living room carpet. At the other side, the sofa offered a soft landing, but the distance was daunting. Christopher Columbus probably felt much the same, gazing across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492. Everything looks huge when you’re two feet tall.

  His birthday was the day he finally found the courage to cross the mounds and ridges of carpet and reach the safety of the couch on his hind legs only. He was standing, holding on to the table leg, when my mother held out her arms and called him from the sofa. He let go, took a step, and went. He made it all the way at a run, crashing into his grandmother with a grin and some babble. His mom and GrandMargaret—as he learned to call her—were amazed and thrilled and called me right away.

  I hoped he’d repeat the feat when I got home. I even picked him up and set him on his hind legs to activate walk mode, but he just sat back down. He refused to walk again. He must have been shocked and terrified by his success.

  The experience had given him a lot to think about. Four-wheel drive was, after all, the only means of locomotion he’d ever known. Could he leave it behind? The benefits of navigating on one’s hind legs were obvious to me. Greater speed, elevated vantage point, and the ability to use one’s forelegs for other purposes, like pushing. Two weeks passed as he crawled and pondered. Every day I’d pick him up and set him on his feet, hoping he’d take the cue. He didn’t. When I was at work, Little Bear would do the same.

  Then, one afternoon, Cubby made a decision. He started walking, then running, and he never looked back. Unless I chased him.

  One of my greatest challenges as a new dad was determining what my kid wanted or needed. Even though I got better at empathy following Cubby’s arrival, it remained hard for me to figure him out much of the time. He seemed to get distressed and yell for no reason, but I knew there must be one—I just couldn’t discern it. Things will get better once he learns to talk. I reassured myself with that platitude, but it did not really come to pass. The biggest problem was Cubby himself: Even after he could talk, he could not be counted on to reliably articulate his needs. People had always said I should take responsibility for my actions, and I assumed the same was true for him. That assumption turned out to be wrong.

  I did my best to anticipate his needs, but I didn’t get a whole lot better at it. “I’m not a mind reader,” guys sometimes say to the women in their lives. “It’s up to you to tell me what you want.” While I could say that to a grown-up, I was somehow expected to figure out a kid, even though he was more inscrutable than most adults.

  Some gestures were unmistakable. A single arm outstretched and accompanied by yelling meant, Give that toy back to me! Both arms outstretched meant, Pick me up! Arms outstretched while rocking side to side meant, Toss me in the air and catch me! At least, that’s how I interpreted it. His mom understood that expression to mean, Pick me up and rock me. Clearly there were multiple possible translations for many of Cubby’s signals, something that was an occasional source of disagreement between his mom and me. She was seldom willing to concede the priority or the correctness of my interpretations, always believing “mother knows best.”

  Then there were subtler signals, like the ones for change my diaper or I need a nap. Those remained totally invisible to me.

  It was an aggravating problem, one that gave me trouble every time I took Cubby on an adventure. If I took him on a day-long expedition, he would start out nice, but halfway through the day, he would melt down and have a tantrum. If we were lucky, he would howl a few minutes, get distracted, and become jolly again. But all too often, he would drop to the floor and lie flat on his back, spinning around and around while shrieking at the top of his lungs. That was bad, because the longer he howled, the harder it was to reset him to his usual jolly state. At times, he sank so far into tantrum that he yelled himself unconscious. His meltdowns were terrible to experience.

  Most of the time, I couldn’t stop him. Petting or comforting him did nothing except get me smacked with little fists. So I tried the opposite approach: yelling, stunni
ng him with sound, or flashing my Maglite at him as he hollered. At best, those distractions did nothing. At worst, they recharged his howl mechanism. Usually I’d carry him outside and let him yell himself to exhaustion away from public view. That was about all I could do.

  I figured he was just falling apart for reasons unknown, but I was wrong.

  “All he needs is food,” Little Bear and other mothers were quick to suggest. They said it as though it was head-smackingly obvious, but it had never even occurred to me. I could go all day without eating, provided I was distracted by something exciting; the idea that a toddler needed more frequent refueling had never entered my mind. I assumed the excitement of a train or bulldozer ride would be all either of us needed, but I was wrong.

  And indeed they were right. Stuffing food into his mouth was one of the few things that would actually interrupt a tantrum, to my great wonder and surprise. When it worked, the meltdown just stopped, and he returned to his original bouncing, happy self in short order. It was almost magical, the way his disposition changed with the ingestion of a little food. I marveled at how others could see that he was hungry, while that simple thing remained totally invisible to me.

  Where was the Feed Me sign? I could never find it.

  Even after I knew failure to feed could trigger a meltdown, I consistently missed the connection. I tried to analyze the problem logically, beginning with my own behavior when hungry. I opened the refrigerator or nosed around the cabinets. My actions were directly and obviously related to the acquisition and ingestion of food. Cubby didn’t do that. When he got hungry, he would explode at the suggestion that we should go check out a steam engine exhibit, or howl at the notion of visiting the aquarium. How could I possibly connect those tantrums to a need for food? Any logical person would see Cubby’s behavior and conclude he did not want to do what I just suggested. Hearing that he did not want to do something, I said, “Okay. If you don’t want to go to the aquarium, what do you want to do?” Many times, that simply elicited more howling and complaining. When I could not get a coherent answer from him, I was stuck. I was trying to solve a perceived activity problem, while totally failing to see the underlying need for feeding.

  The way some women can see a child going berserk and simply say, “He’s famished, let’s get him something to eat!” remains a complete mystery to me. It’s as if they see blue and I see red, and each of us believes the evidence of our own eyes. The most frustrating thing was that moms who were not even close relations could see what he needed and I could not. It was humiliating. Sometimes they would look at me accusingly, as if I should have known or as though I was being a neglectful dad.

  Why couldn’t Cubby tell me what he needed? Why did it fall upon me to remember? I finally realized that he did not know himself. He was too young to know how lack of food affected his mood. At the time, that realization was a shock to me. A few years later, when I learned about Asperger’s, my inability to recognize signals like feed me made a little more sense. There are many times Asperger’s gives me an advantage, but this was most assuredly not one of them.

  The fact is, I couldn’t see the signals. And I still can’t. All I can do is observe what others do, make a behavioral rule, and do my best to remember and follow it. For example, I could make a rule that we would set off on adventures with a timer set for two hours. When it went off, I fed him. Whether he said he wanted food or not, he needed it.

  I used that same logic to stay on top of his other needs, too. Instead of waiting for a stench or a yell, I learned to check his diaper before we set out on a journey, and at regular intervals during the trip. Like most dads, I wished there was a way to make him poop on demand, so I could get him changed by Mom before departing, but I never figured that one out. Even without that, though, my system of logic, timing, and inspection proved invaluable in keeping Cubby happy and quiet.

  Food, drink, clean diapers, and naps were the keys to Cubby’s good mood throughout his infancy. Important as those things were, though, he never learned to ask for them by name. Other children are probably the same, and the strategies I developed will quite likely work with them too. I’ll put that notion to the test at some future date, when Cubby produces grandchildren.

  Dads like me could learn a lot from successful veterinarians, who learn to read discomfort in animals. Unfortunately, I did not know any vets with whom I could apprentice, and now it doesn’t matter because Cubby is finally old enough to speak for himself. However, advancing age, awareness, and verbal skill came with their own problems, as Cubby began articulating his critical need for every toy, candy, and kid treat that passed before his eyes on morning television. I began to suspect what one grizzled old mom had told me was true: “They’re cutest when they’re tiny.”

  Now that Cubby had surmounted the challenges of walking and running, he figured it was time to learn to fly. I had been an avid aeronaut myself, until a bad crash cured me of the habit at age five. Cubby didn’t have a jet pack or wings, but he did have me, and he was quick to seize the opportunity. He even had words for it. “Baby toss,” he’d say, raising both stubby paws as high as he could. That was a signal I could easily interpret!

  I had never tossed him as a baby, because I took Little Bear’s warning about his fragile baby brain seriously. But now that he was a toddler, all bets were off, and I experimented with various tossing techniques, including the rocket launch, the sandbag toss, and the inverted rocket. His favorite was the sandbag toss, where he lay on his back in my arms, and I tossed him up and caught him in the same pose.

  I had tossed our cat—Small Animal—in much the same way before Cubby was born. The cat liked to wrestle and play, and thought tossing was fun sometimes, but he bit me on other occasions. Cubby always loved flying. He never bit when tossed.

  Rocket toss was where I lifted him under the armpits and launched him straight upward. He liked that too, but not as much. I worried about it myself, because I always imagined shooting him up into the ceiling and having his head bang right through the Sheetrock. Being male, I probably overestimated my tossing strength.

  He would laugh maniacally every time I caught him and zoomed him into the air again. It never occurred to him that I might miss, leaving him to go splat on the floor. I guess kids are trusting about that until the day you drop them. He would go up and down, squealing with delight, until my arms wore out.

  “Come on, Dad. Toss me again!” Even with my muscles built up from months of practice, the sandbag toss remained very tiring. I couldn’t pause, even for a second. Cubby insisted on constant motion. The moment he hit my arms on the way down, he giggled and yelled, “Again!” and I had to shoot him back up into the air instantly, lest he howl with dissatisfaction. I was beginning to understand why people said parenting was exhausting.

  Baby Toss became a regular activity for Cubby and me. We did it until he got too big to toss and catch reliably. “You can do it,” Cubby would say, but I wasn’t so sure. That was when we discovered the carousel game, where I took both his little hands in mine and whirled him around and around, lifting his feet off the ground.

  He loved it, but Little Bear wasn’t so enthusiastic. “Don’t spin him too fast,” she would say. “You’ll pull his little arms right out of the sockets.” Hearing that, I had visions of myself, holding two arm stumps while my kid sat on the ground howling and wondering where his arms had gone. I don’t know why moms are so cautious. She wasn’t that way before he was born. Something must have changed with the arrival of the kid.

  I’ve seen some pretty rough play in parks in my day, and I’d survived without any damage. When I was Cubby’s age, my Uncle Bob swung me so fast I flew right across the yard to land in a pile of leaves and straw. I never saw anyone’s arms come off, back then or since. Of course, it’s possible that those earlier armless kids were too ashamed to be seen in public. I always heard there were strange children living in the Prodigialis family’s basement down the street when I was a kid.

  When Cubb
y got a little bigger, he became too big to toss and too heavy to swing. Some dads would have given up at that point. Not me! That’s when we made the move to machinery. Our local playground had a parent-powered carousel he could ride, and I could spin it fast enough to twirl his head into next week. He liked that a lot. Sometimes we’d see other tykes there, and we discovered that they liked the carousel too. And I mean really liked it. They’d see me spinning Cubby and pile on with him. In no time at all, I’d have three or four laughing and screaming kids who kept yelling, “Faster, faster” no matter how fast I moved.

  Other dads seemed more cautious around playground hardware. Sure, they pushed their kids on tire swings and encouraged them to crawl through giant pipes. But few tossed their kids in the air, or swung them till they flew across the yard, sliding like a ballplayer for home plate. Maybe the other dads were more sensible, but the kids I entertained truly squealed for joy, and hardly any of them ever lost an arm or head in the process. That just goes to show you: True playground euphoria requires a lot of energy and a dash of danger to achieve. I may have been a loser with the other kids when I was growing up, but I was a hands-down winner as an adult.

  One of the signs that Cubby was getting bigger was that he claimed his own space. “My room!” he exclaimed proudly. His mom had spent a lot of time making it perfect, and it showed. The bed had nice soft sheets and a warm, tasty blanket. His toys were in a big box in the corner, except for his favorites, which covered the floor. There were even books and clothes, in drawers and in piles. The only problem was the monsters.

  I don’t know why kids are scared of monsters, but every one I have ever observed has that fear. It must be genetic. I cannot recall telling Cubby to be scared of monsters even once. Yet he feared them, and I remember feeling the same way as a little boy. There are things out there that eat kids. You just know it.