In our excitement, we arrived a little too early. The grounds were beautifully maintained, and we found an enormous grassy hill to roll down right by the planetarium’s parking lot. At the bottom, by a little pond, we found hundreds of horse chestnuts lying in the grass under the trees. While the sun set, we walked slowly around the pond, and Jake picked up as many of those chestnuts as he could carry, packing them into his pockets and filling the fuzzy dog-shaped backpack he took everywhere. The chestnuts were pleasantly round and smooth, and I could see that Jake liked the way they felt in his hands. By the time the doors to the planetarium opened, his pants pockets were as stuffed as a squirrel’s cheeks.
The lobby was spectacular, but almost instantly I wished we were back outside. I’d thought we’d be able to zip in to get a quick look through the telescope without disturbing anyone, but I discovered that to look through the telescope, we’d have to take a tour of the planetarium. Worse still, as I learned after we’d already waited in line and bought tickets, the tour included an hour-long, college-level seminar given by a professor at Butler. As the lobby began to fill up with people, the knot in my stomach intensified. A college-level presentation in a silent, crowded auditorium was not at all what I’d had in mind, and it was the last place on earth anyone in her right mind would voluntarily take an autistic three-year-old.
But I’d promised, and Jake was sure jazzed to be there. I told him I’d made a mistake. I explained about the tour and the lecture and asked him if he would rather go get a pizza instead. But he was adamant; he wanted to stay. While we were waiting for the show to start, he took me by the hand and led me up the curving central stairs, along which were hung enormous photographs of deep space. For half an hour, he dragged me up and down those stairs, chattering at me while I scrambled after him, doing my best to contain him—and the occasional chestnut that spilled out of his pockets, bouncing every which way on the majestic marble staircase.
Distracted as I was chasing after those chestnuts, it sounded to me as if Jake was giving a convincing lecture on each photo. He was rattling off terms and language unfamiliar to me, and while I couldn’t tell if he was making the stuff up or imitating someone, it sounded pretty impressive.
Eventually, the doors to the lecture hall opened, and the crowd filed in. As soon as we got inside, I thought, Oh, boy, this whole thing is about to go bad. The room was small and hushed; a PowerPoint presentation was ready to go. The first slide had to do with nineteenth-century telescope resolution. The only seats left were right up front.
I started digging through my bag, desperate to find something—animal crackers? a crayon? some gum?—that might stave off a complete meltdown. By the time the lecturer stepped up to the podium, I was in a near panic, and it only got worse. As the slides started clicking by, Jake began reading, quite loudly, some of the words popping up on the screen: “Light year!” “Diurnal!” “Mariner!”
I shushed him, sure the people around us were going to give me the stink eye, hissing at me to get my kid out of this place we clearly had no business inhabiting. Sure enough, the people around us were starting to notice, and to whisper, but it soon became clear that they weren’t so much annoyed as they were amused and a bit incredulous.
“Is that little kid reading?” I heard someone say. “Did he just say ‘perihelial’?”
Then the lecturer introduced a history of scientific observations about the possibility of water on Mars, starting with the nineteenth-century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who believed he saw canals on the planet’s surface. Hearing this, Jake started to laugh. In my anxiety, I thought he was going to lose it, but when I looked at him, I could see he was genuinely cracking up, like the idea of canals on Mars was the greatest knee-slapper he’d ever heard. (It was the same delighted giggle I heard every time Dora the Explorer stopped the thieving fox Swiper.) Again, I quieted him down. But I could see the ripple spread through the crowd as people started craning their necks to see what was going on.
Then the lecturer asked a question of the audience: “Our moon is round. Why do you think the moons around Mars are elliptical, shaped like potatoes?”
Nobody in the crowd answered, probably because no one had the slightest idea. I certainly didn’t. Then Jake’s hand shot up. “Excuse me, but could you please tell me the size of these moons?” This was more conversation than I’d seen from Jake in his entire life, but then again, I’d never tried to talk to him about Mars’s moons. The lecturer, visibly surprised, answered him. To the astonishment of everyone, including me, Jake responded, “Then the moons around Mars are small, so they have a small mass. The gravitational effects of the moons are not large enough to pull them into complete spheres.”
He was right.
The room went silent, all eyes on my son. Then everyone went nuts, and for a few minutes the lecture came to a halt.
The professor eventually regained control of the room, but my mind was somewhere else. I was completely freaked out. My three-year-old had answered a question that had been too difficult for anyone else in the room, including the Butler students and all of the adults present. I felt too dizzy to move.
At the end of the lecture, people crowded around us. “Get his autograph. You’ll want that someday!” someone said. Another person actually pushed forward a piece of paper for Jake to sign, which I pushed right back. Usually overwhelmed by crowds, Jake took everything happening around him in stride, staring contentedly at the last PowerPoint slide, a close-up satellite shot of an enormous mountain on the surface of Mars.
I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. But when it came time for everyone to make their way upstairs to look through the telescope, an astonishing thing happened. The crowd fell back to let Jake go first. The entire auditorium had wordlessly united behind the same goal: Let’s get this kid upstairs to see Mars! I know it sounds crazy, but there was a reverence in the air. Jake and I went up the stairs, buoyed by the energy and hopefulness and goodwill of the group. I felt almost as if they were carrying us.
The observatory would soon become a home away from home for Jake and me. Although I’ve been there many times since that first night, it never loses its magic for me. It feels exactly like what it is, a window onto the universe. The roof of the domed space retracts with the push of a button. Underneath that slice of sky is a tall flight of metal stairs on wheels, with a landing at the top. To look up at the sky, you actually look down through an instrument similar to a microscope, which is connected to an enormous white metal barrel pointing out at the stars.
Jake may have been the first to go up the ladder, but he was too short to see into the eyepiece. Again, the strangers in the crowd graciously extended their hands to help. Someone fetched a stepladder. A couple of people steadied him and held the little ladder as he climbed. One even held his hand as he looked down into the scope. He looked for a long time, but I sensed no impatience or irritation from anyone else in line. I felt numb. It was as if everyone in that room was saying, “Take your time. This place belongs to you.”
As we drove home that night, Jake couldn’t stop chattering about space. I could finally understand what he was saying, but all it did was freak me out even more. How did this child know the comparative densities and relative speeds of the planets?
After I tucked Jake in for the night, I called my friend Alison. Melanie Laws had introduced us because Alison’s son Jack was also autistic and the same age as Jake, and we had become dear friends. I told her everything that had happened during our evening at the planetarium. Reliving it raised goose bumps on my arms.
“What am I supposed to do with this child?” I asked her. “Should I be doing something more, something different? Seriously, should I take him to NASA or something?”
I have thought about that moment again and again in the years since. Like the decision to pull him out of preschool, it was a turning point. We could have gone down a very different road, one I clearly see now would have been wrong for us. I am so gratefu
l to Alison for her good sense. “You do exactly what you’re doing right now,” she told me. “You play with him, and you let him be a little boy.”
As I fell asleep, I knew that Alison was right. The things that made Jake special weren’t going anywhere. He would make his mark eventually—that much was becoming clear—but right now he needed to be comfortable and happy at home with us. He needed to go to school, to have friends, and to share in family rituals such as going out for pancakes and making s’mores in the backyard. We were going to eat gummy bears and watch VeggieTales. For now, Jake would be a regular kid.
After so much agonizing time searching for him, I could finally catch my breath. I’d found my son.
Even so, that evening at the planetarium, something shifted for me. Michael and I understood that Jake was more than just a smart kid, but he had stunned me, the lecturer, and everyone else in the auditorium with a level of knowledge about the solar system that was frankly bizarre. Suddenly, I was able to see all the cute and remarkable and sometimes odd things Jake could do for what they were: extraordinary.
I’d never experienced anything like the awe and veneration I’d felt from the crowd in that lecture hall. In some ways, that had shocked me more than Jake’s answer, or anything he’d told me about the radius of Betelgeuse on the way home. Those people in the planetarium had been inspired, transported to a better place, and they’d been delivered there by Jake. That night, I had the distinct feeling—which has never been very far away since—that Jake was going to use his amazing brain to make a significant contribution to the world.
In the meantime, though, I had to get him into kindergarten.
A Cup of Chicken Soup
For everything Jake knew about the moons around Saturn, the Little Light kindergarten prep classes weren’t easy for him. In particular, it was always hard to get him to stay with the group. During any kind of social-relatedness exercise, he’d try to go off by himself. Simply getting him to sit next to another child for ten minutes took a long time—probably a year.
But I had gone too far to go back, so I kept moving forward. Jake and I did kindergarten preparedness every single night, with steady, patient work (and a few tricks). For instance, I bought a bunch of fuzzy toilet seat covers in all different colors and used those as visual markers for the children so that they knew where to sit during circle time. Those social-relatedness exercises became a little easier for Jake, as they did for all the Little Light kids. Activities such as sitting next to another child during circle time became second nature to him because of the repetition. It also felt different than the relentless, monotonous drills of traditional therapy, because he was getting lots of time to pursue everything he loved to do.
One night I looked up to see Michael standing at the door of the garage with Wes in his arms. He said, “I thought we should stick with the experts, that they knew what was best. But I was wrong, Kris. You’ve done it.” There was nothing but pride in his voice. I turned back to the room, and for the first time I could see what we’d achieved. Michael voiced what I was thinking: “It looks just like a kindergarten.”
Jake and I became regulars at the Holcomb Observatory. By the end of the summer, I knew most of the people who worked there by name. The more astronomy Jake was exposed to, the less withdrawn he became. It gave us common ground. Being able to talk to someone else about his love for astronomy helped him to make the connection between talking and actually communicating, and not just with me but with other people, too.
I was delighted and touched to see, for instance, that instead of ignoring my pregnancy as he had when I was pregnant with Wes, Jake actually expressed some curiosity about the baby on the way. I took him to one of my ultrasound appointments. It was a big one—we were going to find out the baby’s sex. Jake was, as I had predicted, fascinated by the equipment.
“It’s another little boy!” the technician told me. My heart rate shot through the roof. For weeks, everyone had been teasing me about having a third boy. There had been jokes about starting my own baseball team and building a house made up exclusively of padded and washable surfaces. Truthfully, I’d been hoping for a girl, but not because I wanted someone to get a manicure with. Statistically, another boy was much more likely to be autistic.
Ironically, it was Jake who took my mind off the worry. “Why does she keep calling my sister a boy?” he kept saying, glaring at the technician. Apparently, he’d had his heart set on a girl, too.
Our time at the observatory helped in other, unexpected ways. Sitting in the grass with a picnic waiting for the planetarium to open, I could have all those good “mom” feelings with Jake that I thought autism had cheated me out of. I could look through an astronomy book with him and stroke the soft down on his cheek while I watched his chubby little hands turn the pages. I could smell his beautiful toddler smell and feel his weight against my leg. I had missed him so much, and now I had him back. It might not have looked like much to an outsider, but in that half hour sitting in the grass, we were both feeding some elemental and important part of ourselves.
Some of the Little Light moms had been so worn down, they weren’t even looking at their kids anymore. First they’d lost them to autism, then to the strain of having an autistic child. I could understand that. During that first summer off with Jake, I’d learned this lesson myself. It wasn’t only Jake who needed typical childhood experiences; I needed them, too!
Jake began to talk more, and we started to get an idea of what had been going on inside his head all the time he’d been lost to us. He could finally tell us what he’d been doing and thinking about. “I’m going to need a cup of chicken soup to handle that one,” I’d say (and still do) when he knocked us flat with one of his pearls.
For instance, one of Jake’s favorite games had always been to spin people. He would walk around the daycare, choose someone, lead him or her to a very specific spot, and then set the person in motion, spinning him or her like a top. If you were spinning, you couldn’t move out of your spot, and you had to maintain your speed. Then he’d lead someone else to a different spot and set that person in motion, too. The kids in the daycare thought this was a blast, so sometimes everyone in the room would be standing and spinning at different speeds.
We had always chalked this up to his autism—a meaningless and repetitive behavior that gave him pleasure—until one afternoon when he was about four and had begun communicating with us a little more. Slightly under the weather, I kept slowing down as I was spinning. Jake returned over and over to correct me, until I finally put my foot down: “I’ll spin, honey, but I have to go slow.”
“You can’t spin slow, Mommy,” he said, exasperated. “The ones closer to the sun go faster.”
We were planets. Only after I searched Google did I fully understand that Jake had been using the children at the daycare to model the planets, which rotate at different speeds depending on where they are in relation to the sun. Jake hadn’t picked that up through osmosis, but by intuition. Somehow, while he’d been locked deep inside his autism, he’d figured out Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.
The more we learned about Jake, the more I realized how fortunate it was that we hadn’t taken away everything he’d been using for self-stimulation in those early days. The cereal he’d dump out onto the kitchen floor? He was figuring out the volume of the boxes. The webs of colored yarn that made it impossible for me to get into the kitchen? Those were equations, using a parallel math system that he’d invented.
After years of what had felt like relentless gray rain, we’d finally gotten a break. There had been glimmers of light all along, glimmers that sometimes only I could see. Now we were learning that in the silence, Jake had been steadily working his way through some of the great breakthrough moments in science. Can you see what I mean about needing to sit down with a little chicken soup to calmly digest it all?
Most amazing to me was the evidence of Jake’s creativity. I had heard about savants—human calculating machines, p
eople with photographic memories who could remember every fact they’d ever seen or heard. But Jake wasn’t parroting information he’d read somewhere. He actually understood how to analyze the facts he’d been learning; he knew what they meant. Even before he could read, when we thought he’d just been staring at the shadows on the wall, Jake had been making real scientific discoveries. It was incredible to realize that all this potential had been there the whole time. My beloved boy hadn’t been missing after all. He’d just been working. And now that we were beginning to understand what he was capable of, it was even more terrifying to think about how much might have been lost.
I’m sure it is no coincidence that some of Jake’s work in physics today concerns light waves and how these travel. He believes that his research will lead to a much more efficient electronic transmission of light. That’s why I always ask the parents I work with about their children’s earliest and most persistent interests. In the case of parents whose children are locked in, I ask what kinds of activities their kids were interested in before the onset of the autism. A good friend of ours is a brilliant engineer. It’s no wonder that his mother says he started taking household appliances apart as soon as his fingers were big enough to hold a screwdriver. Our strengths and skill sets are there, right from the beginning, but they need time and encouragement to flourish.
This is an important point. Because of his autism—because we couldn’t reach him—Jake had a lot of time and space to do what he was naturally drawn to do. Simply because he was so locked in and unreachable, he was afforded much more time in his day than most kids to focus on the things he cared about: light and shadows, angles and volume, and the way objects move in space. Nobody was telling Jake how to learn, because nobody thought he could. In that way, autism had given Jake a bizarre gift.
The Spark Page 10
