by Ron Fournier
After I wrote a magazine article about my relationship with Tyler, a reader, Russell S., emailed me about his father. “I always wanted to impress him,” wrote the public relations executive for a Fortune 500 company. “I thought the only way to get him to like me was to do things he liked. But I don’t think I ever lived up to his potential. I was never good in sports—a killer, considering my Bronx-born dad once worked at Yankee Stadium. And I am in my mid-30s with no kids. He’ll never say it, but I always feel like I cannot give him what he wants. I sometimes think I embarrass him.”
I called Russell at his Manhattan office and asked what exactly he thought his dad wanted from him. “I feel guilty that I’m not giving my dad or any dad what they expect in a son,” he replied.
“What’s that?” I pressed. Russell was holding something back.
“You expect to become a grandparent,” Russell said. “It’s almost an unspoken social convention that you give your parents [grandchildren].” He coughed to cover up the teary crack in his voice. “I’m gay.”
Russell paused. I sensed that he wanted me to change the subject. Finally he filled the silence. “It’s probably not going to happen for me—children,” he continued. “I often think, when I die, where’s the name going to go? I feel a real responsibility, and I’m not sure it’s the right kind of guilt.”
I asked how his parents had handled the news. “We’ve never had the talk,” he said. “Of course they know. But I’ve never had the coming-out talk with them.”
The closest Russell’s father came to accepting his son’s sexuality was during a roundabout conversation one Thanksgiving. “Maybe you’ll never have children,” his dad said, “but before I leave this earth I want to know that you’re being taken care of and being loved.”
“Thank you,” Russell replied.
In Far from the Tree, Solomon also argues that the aversion to raising an “atypical” child is exacerbated in parents who assume they’re raising an echo of themselves. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity,” he wrote. “We depend on the guarantee in our children’s faces that we will not die. Children whose defining quality annihilates the fantasy of immortality are a particular insult; we must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.”
Looking back, Alan Dworkin knows that was his mistake. A successful attorney from South Carolina, Dworkin always wanted a boy whom he could teach to play sports, and who might follow him into the legal profession. His son Mitch turned out to be a klutz, both socially and physically, the kind of boy who had trouble making friends and avoiding bullies. Dworkin thought golf would help Mitch meet people and learn to control his impulses. Bad idea.
Mitch, who was about 8 years old when his dad first brought him to the golf course, gripped the club like a baseball bat. “He couldn’t play a lick,” Alan said. Worse, while Alan’s pals and clients lined up putts, Mitch chattered and darted to the flag pin. “I’d pull him back—I wouldn’t yell—and I’d whisper in his ear, ‘You don’t do that when somebody’s putting.’ ” But the boy had no sense of social propriety. Alan once introduced Mitch to a new client, a woman with a large mole on her cheek. The boy pointed at the ugly mass and asked her what was wrong with her face. Adam was horrified.
Mitch is now 50. He remembers the pain and shame of embarrassing his father. “I tried to please my dad a lot as a child, but he was kind of hard on me,” Mitch said. “I kind of felt just like I couldn’t do anything right.” Mitch felt the pressure of his dad’s expectations until those expectations were reset by a doctor’s findings. Mitch was in his 30s when a doctor diagnosed him with anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in his 40s when labeled an Aspie. “Until then,” Mitch said, “Dad was not being unreasonable in what he was expecting.”
Alan loves Mitch. He has always loved Mitch. But it’s only been in the last 15 or so years that Alan has understood his son, and with that knowledge comes guilt. “When I think about what I did and didn’t do,” Alan said, “I just want to cry.”
—
Even as a toddler Tyler was mesmerizing—a handsome, blue-eyed packet of precocious energy, with the vocabulary and curiosity of a college professor and the joyful charisma of a comedian. Everybody in the family has a favorite Tylerism, a story that illustrates his old-soul intelligence and wit.
I remember him in the middle of the night, on tiptoes from inside his crib, turning on his bedroom light and yelling, “I want to play with choo guys!” That huge crinkly-eyed smile. He slept with a heavy blanket pulled over his head, no matter how hot it got, and would pretend to snore with an exaggerated “honk-shee!” While speech and vocabulary came easily to Tyler, conversation did not. He spoke in monologues and on tangents, with an oddly commanding voice. When somebody tried to interrupt him—because it wasn’t a good time for a small boy to be talking, or he was totally off topic—Tyler seemed physically incapable of stopping his thought process. He just had to finish, pounding out his thoughts in hurried, quick bursts of speech.
Lori recalls a visit to the mall when Tyler saw a baby boy crying. Rather than quietly asking Lori what was wrong, our preschooler plunged into the other mother’s personal space—his nose almost touched her knee—and shouted, “ ’Cuse me, ma’am. ’Cuse me, ma’am. What’s wrong with your son?” On another shopping trip Tyler grew restless as Lori helped Holly pick out a dress for senior prom. Sprawling across the aisle, Tyler declared, “My blood sugar level is dangerously low!”
Holly’s favorite Tylerism is listening to her brother try to negotiate his way out of a shower. “When I get free will, I’m not gonna shower every night anymore,” Tyler said. “I’ll flip a coin. Heads, I shower. Tails, I don’t.” Most little boys don’t like taking showers. Few link the chore with the philosophy of free will. He hated collared shirts—couldn’t stand the textured fabric against his neck—and called them “style-cramping shirts.”
One of Tyler’s first teachers had a strict rule: Any student who forgot his or her pencil needed to give the teacher a shoe as collateral for a loaner. Most kids remembered their pencils most days. But with his attention-deficit disorder and a hyperliteral sensibility, Tyler coped this way: Every morning for an entire school year, he took off his left shoe at his locker (which was filled with pencils, by the way) and limped down the hall to English class. “Here ya go!” he’d tell the teacher, handing her his shoe. “Where’s my pencil?”
Before history and social sciences, Tyler’s fixation was animals. He stumped zookeepers in Washington with his obsessive, encyclopedic memory. One night the family was playing a trivia game with some friends. Two teams were stuck on a question: What’s the world’s largest rodent? For laughs, Holly ran to another room and asked her toddler brother the question. Tyler shrugged and said, “Capybara,” in a no-brainer tone of voice, as if his sister had asked him the color of the sun.
We didn’t recognize the symptoms of high-functioning autism—his pseudo-adult intellect, vocabulary, and baritone; his awkward social interactions and obsessions; his aversion to certain fabrics, the comfort he found in a weighty blanket, and an extraordinarily picky palate. Tyler wouldn’t eat what we put in front of him until he fell into that state between wakefulness and sleep—head down on his high-chair table, eyes shut, as he slowly shoveled food into his mouth. The rest of the family would tiptoe around the high chair while clearing the dinner table, knowing that if Tyler woke up, he’d stop eating.
It was all so adorable. After his diagnosis, I learned that the pediatrician who first identified Tyler’s form of autism, Hans Asperger, called kids like Tyler “little professors,” because of their unusually sophisticated vocabularies. Dr. Tony Attwood, author of The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome, said Aspies lack “social understanding” and harbor intense interest in one or two subjects. “Perhaps the simplest way to u
nderstand Asperger’s syndrome is to think of it as describing someone who perceives and thinks about the world differently to other people.”
They’re wired differently. With the right support, Aspies can lead loving and productive lives. They need to learn how to read body language, how to modulate their voices, and how to follow the subtle rules of conversation and relationships.
Tyler tried. Once he noticed Lori’s eyes welling after she received some good news. “Those are happy tears, right?” he asked. “You know, sometimes I can’t tell the difference.”
In his charming and brutally honest memoir about his late-in-life Asperger’s diagnosis, The Journal of Best Practices, David Finch wrote, “Most people intuitively know how to function and interact with people—they don’t need to learn it by rote. I do.” He described his natural conversational style as verbose, exhausting, and unfiltered—“the verbal equivalent of a volcanic eruption, spewing mind magma in every direction.”
Bestselling author Temple Grandin warned that Aspies like herself “are often loners, with few friends, the geeks, the nerds, the socially odd individuals who never seem to fit in.” She urged parents and educators to aggressively identify children with Asperger’s. In The Way I See It, Grandin explained: “The worst thing parents can do with a child between the ages of 2–5 is nothing.” Reading that sentence makes me sick to my stomach. Tyler was 12 before we did something.
Why did it take so long? The most benign explanation is that Asperger’s is easy to overlook because Aspies are so well-spoken and intelligent, according to Grandin and other experts, especially when it comes to their favorite subjects.
Another excuse: We were enchanted. You’ve heard the expression “Kids say the darnedest things.” They all do. But kids with Tyler’s particular wiring are uniquely bright and expressive, which makes them hypnotizing. His sister Gabrielle once caught me at the dinner table staring at Tyler and joked, “You look at him like he’s the Christ-child.” He wasn’t the son of God, of course, but I knew from the get-go that this son of mine was special. He amazed me. He also worried me. Which touches on a darker explanation for our neglect, or mine, anyway: I didn’t want to believe that Tyler was clinically, certifiably different.
—
Brick Heck is a geek: a scrawny and bookish youngest child who whispers observations to himself, partly because he has no friends who might listen. A young character in the ABC sitcom The Middle, Brick reminds me more of Tyler than does Max Braverman, because Brick’s apparent autism is milder than Max’s. Adults love Brick. Kids steer clear of him. His parents struggle to understand and help him. In one of the show’s earliest episodes, Brick’s dad realizes that he is just as “socially challenged” as his son. The pair screw up the nerve to attend a block party, then later commiserate about their relative success.
“Maybe we’re meant to be who we’re meant to be, and it’s when we start trying to change who we’re meant to be that things get messed up,” the father says. “Brick, are you happy?”
“Yes,” Brick replies. “Are you happy?”
“Yes. So why are we letting people try to change us?” In other words, different is okay.
Try telling that to Adam Bromberg, Stacey’s husband. “My wife, she’s taken it hard.” We were eating lunch at an Alexandria, Virginia, restaurant, a few weeks before I met his wife at Starbucks. “Her problem isn’t the diagnosis as much as the fact that Gavin doesn’t fit in socially and so on. She takes it more personally.” But he takes it personally, too. “My job was to raise him, and I should have seen something sooner. I should have done more.”
Why didn’t he? “I don’t know,” Adam replied. “We saw things, little things, but we just didn’t want to believe that something could be wrong with our little boy.” It’s a common refrain in my conversation with parents.
Through Twitter, I met Craig S., a North Carolina businessman raising teenage triplets, one of whom has a bundle of issues that sound to him like mild autism. He has hesitated to seek a diagnosis, much less treatment, because he can’t let his dreams go. “I grew up a jock. My dad and I connected through sports and it was a bond for us. My kid has zero interest [in sports]. Not just a little—zero.”
“He’s not like you,” I said, “and if you’re right, your boy is autistic and needs help.”
“I hate to even think about that,” he replied.
A few weeks later, I met John S. in a grungy Mexican restaurant not far from the attorney general’s office in Lansing, Michigan, where John works as a spokesman. He is a divorced father with a mildly autistic son. We were eating tacos and drinking beer. “There’s these puzzle pieces scattered…” John stopped for five seconds, his face reddening. “I said I wasn’t going to cry about this.” We took a pull on our beers.
“I’m sorry. I do it all the time,” he said, blotting his eyes with a napkin. “It came fast.”
While he regained his composure, I told John that the puzzle piece is a symbol for autism. “It’s fitting,” he said. “Because to me there are things scattered all over the table. You know, when he was born everything looked good, but he didn’t want to be held. His mom finally gave him a swaddling blanket, because he would kick and scream whenever we put him to bed. But he hated the blanket. He can’t stand being trapped in any way. That was a puzzle piece I didn’t know what to do with.”
John continued: “The little professor stuff—I remember he was probably as little as 3, walking down the street in Charlevoix [Michigan] on vacation, just charming the daylights out of adults. So you’d be like, ‘I’ve got the greatest kid and things are going to be awesome.’ ”
But they weren’t awesome. They weren’t perfect. Not for John or for me—or for any parent, really. You can hear our kids in the lyrics of singer-songwriter Roger Miller: Funny I don’t fit. Where have all the average people gone? The only thing normal about any child is that something makes him or her different.
GENIUS
“If He Falls Behind Now, He Won’t Get into the Right Middle School”
Quincy, Massachusetts—Now that we had checked off Lori’s first box with the White House trip, it was my turn—and I knew where I would take Tyler next: the homestead of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams. The nation’s second and sixth presidents, respectively, the Adamses were the only father and son to hold that office until George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush started calling each other “41” and “43.”
Years ago, I was researching the history of education in America when I came across a revealing story about the relationship between John and John Q. When the younger Adams was 7 years old, his father wrote home from Philadelphia, where the elder Adams and other delegates from the 13 American colonies were debating whether to declare independence from Britain. The father had another matter on his mind: his aspirations for the education of his four children. “Let us teach them not only to do virtuously, but to excel,” he wrote his wife, Abigail. “To excel, they must be taught to be steady, active, and industrious.” Soon after, John Q. wrote to his father that he was working hard at his studies and hoped “to grow into a better boy.”
I find something uncomfortably familiar in the elder Adams’ exacting expectations and his son’s desperate vow. John Q. might as well have written, “I hope I don’t let you down, Dad.” I try to talk to Tyler about it today while touring Quincy, but he won’t. He doesn’t like to talk about his feelings and has developed numerous defensive mechanisms to keep people at bay. One is humor. Another is the filibuster: When Tyler gets nervous, he fixes on a subject and talks it to death. Today it’s the elder Adams. “I learned somewhere that he lived to be 90,” Tyler says, pointing to a picture of the elder Adams hanging in a hotel lobby, where we’re having lunch before touring the Adams property. “Keep in mind, that was a time when people usually lived to be 45 before kicking the bucket. He died on July 4, Dad. The same exact day as Thomas Jefferson. They hated each other until they got old, and wrote a great series of letters.” The words
are pouring out of Tyler’s mind now, faster than his lips can move, collapsing upon each other in a barely understandable torrent. “You know what John Adams’ final words were?”
I shake my head.
“Thomas Jefferson survives.” Tyler laughs. “What a diss!”
He had tried to back out of the tour earlier in the day, preferring to spend the day alone in the hotel room, but he’s now engaged in conversation—progress, already. Actually, it’s more of a monologue. As if his brain is a website being queried for presidential information, Tyler pulls up fact after somewhat-related fact. The elder Adams was a lawyer who defended British officers accused of the Boston Massacre murders. He wrote the Massachusetts constitution, a model for the U.S. document. The Tea Party was just a tax fight. And on and on…
“The Tea Party is a weird name. When you think of ‘tea party,’ you think of a refined class. But it was just a bunch of thugs throwing tea into the harbor and…” Tyler stops and stares at me. “You’re not listening.” He’s right, I’m not.
“Yes I am.”
“What did I just say?”
I shrug. “Something about the Tea Party?” Tyler laughs again. He’s accustomed to people tuning him out, in part because, as a person with Asperger’s, Tyler has a difficult time understanding whether people are interested in what he has to say. “Let’s go on the tour,” I say.
The Adams National Historic Park consists of three homes. The saltbox house where John Adams was born is located just 75 feet from the birthplace of his son, and both sit hard against what is now a busy suburban street—so close to the road that from inside the 18th-century homes you can hear music booming from the fast-passing cars. The third structure is called the Old House, a sprawling two-story home to both John Adams and John Quincy Adams. We start at the tiny saltbox house, where Tyler keeps interrupting to correct the park ranger, ask a question, or crack a joke.
