But couldn’t I do something other than sleep in bed with him to prove the world was safe? Maybe he could sleep with a copy of my life insurance policy curled up in his little fist. The family bed struck me as one of those constructs for people who wanted to avoid intimacy with the people they were supposed to be intimate with, namely their partners. If you allowed your child to become your cuddle bunny, what other kinds of adult intimacy were you avoiding? I read a study that said that about 40 to 60 percent of Americans slept with their dogs. (The number varied with size of dog. Here, apparently, Pomeranians get lucky more often than Newfoundlands.) I would never even let my beloved golden retriever, Monty, sleep with me. So what chance did Gus have?
But OK, fine. I began doing a little reading, and maybe there was something to this bonding, even though I just thought, Everyone is in a rush, he’ll bond in his own time. I began sticking him in my bed. On nights when John was around, I’d put Gus back in his own bed. But even though Gus was late to every party developmentally, he did, around the age of three, realize he could simply get up himself and join one or both of us.
At first a night with Gus was like having a deep-tissue massage, because some part of him would be not so much cuddling as pressing my arms and legs, again and again and again. So then I would wake up, hoist him to the other side of the bed, and have an hour’s sleep before he would creep back and the kneading would begin again.
Recently I learned that the reason he did this was that, like many autistic people, he has a problem with proprioception, which is the concept of knowing where your body is in space. He didn’t have a firm idea where he ended and other people began. By pressing into me over and over, he was using my body to orient himself while he slept.
Now I understand, just as I understand why he still tends to bump into people on the street. But all I knew at the time was (A) I was constantly jolted awake, and (B) in the morning I’d have bruises.
Yet soon I noticed something. After a few months of this, Gus was looking at me. Not at others, but at me, and at his father and brother. He was also not cringing when you touched him. As time went on, far from pulling back from people, he would not be able to pass those he knew without at least a fist bump. To me and his father, he was a serial hugger—so much so that I had to create the Rule of Three: you are not allowed to attach yourself to my waist, limpet-like, more than three times at any given public event. And if you hold my hand, you cannot continually kiss it as we walk down the street. Even these days, if I don’t stop him, he will still do this in time to music playing in his head. I know he’s thinking of the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah when I get this on the back of my hand: KISSS, KISS KISS KISS. KISSS, KISS KISS KISS. Kisskisskisskiss, kisskisskisskiss. Kiss KIIII-SSSS, kiss kiss . . .
When I’d give him my lecture about the difference between public and private, that we don’t behave that way in public, he would counter with, “But I just love you so much, Mommy.” Try arguing with that.
I told myself I was lucky. And in fact I was. Up to 80 percent of all children with ASD have serious sleep disturbances. Sometimes the causes are clear—for example, epilepsy or medications that interfere with sleep. Often they are not that clear-cut. Kids who are more sensitive to sensory stimuli may be unable to filter out the street noises or, if you live in the country, the crickets, owls, or—well, anything. There is a theory, too, that involves the hormone melatonin, which normally regulates sleep-wake cycles. To make melatonin, the body needs an amino acid called tryptophan, which research has found to be either significantly higher or lower than normal in children with autism. Typically, melatonin levels rise in response to darkness (at night) and dip during the daylight hours. Some studies show that children with autism don’t release melatonin at the correct times of day. Instead, they have high levels of melatonin during the daytime and lower levels at night—thus wreaking havoc with their sleep cycles.
But I was lucky because Gus could sleep well—as long as he was next to me.
Years passed. I told myself, firmly, that nine was the final year for sleeping in Mom’s bed. Ten. Eleven, no more. Twelve, listen, he looks like an eight-year-old, it wasn’t that bad. Thirteen, he looks nine, though with the tiniest hint of a mustache.
Henry cannot believe I am this much of a pushover. But at night I’m weak. I remind him how I was when he would come into my room late at night when he was young. I remember him at four, running into my room at three a.m., for some reason screaming, “I DON’T LIKE WHALES.” At first I would hold him, tell him how intelligent and harmless they were, how important to the ecosystem. That would last thirty seconds. When he still didn’t shut up, I changed tactics. “You’re absolutely right, a whale is going to come into this house and eat you if you don’t go back to sleep right now.”
But Henry didn’t buy my excuses. Why didn’t I just lock my door? He was right. For years I couldn’t bring myself to lock Gus out. Finally I did. But Gus lies in wait. A trip to the bathroom, and I would come back to a small person sprawled in my bed. Then there are the three a.m. knocks: light but relentless.
Perpetually sleep-deprived, I want only to get back into bed. And so does he. Mine.
I try reasoning: “Honey, you know neither of us gets a good night’s sleep if you’re in here.” “That’s OK, Mommy. I sleep fine with you.” (Understanding the other person’s point of view: still not his strong point.)
I try shame: “Gus, big boys don’t do this. Do your other friends sleep in bed with their mommies?” gus: [Silence, and a wry smile.] He admits I am right, and yet it means nothing.
On many nights when I thought he was locked out, I would open my eyes to see his eyes, dark, pellucid, and two inches away from mine. He would be smiling. Utterly benign, it was like something out of a horror movie. “Oh my God, Gus, what are you doing?” He never understood why I was upset. “I just like the sounds you make, Mommy.” So I tried throwing money at the problem. I searched Amazon for a white noise machine that includes, along with the roaring of the tides and the trickling of rain, the sound of a middle-aged woman lightly snoring. Or anyone snoring. This does not exist, and thus may become my Million-Dollar Idea.
Next thought: the mattress. I got Gus’s mattress eleven years ago, when he was three. Relative to my own cushy bed, it’s like sleeping on horsehair. He is always resistant to anything new, but seemed open to this idea. The mattress arrived. Gus was delighted; he lay down, and I think his exact words were “Ahhhhhh.”
He snuck into my bed at around four a.m.
When I lock him out, he wanders. I wake up at three a.m. to see him staring out the window, waiting for the next ambulance to drive by or mumbling weather reports to himself. He never seems upset, and he never seems exhausted—more like a cat that can spring into action out of a deep sleep. The only times his sleep issues have anything to do with anxiety are during the summer, when there is thunder and lightning. But on those nights, he doesn’t want to sleep with me for comfort. He happily sleeps in his dark, soundproofed closet. Those nights, when his closet sanctuary trumps the comfort of my bed, are the only times I can get a decent night’s sleep.
When it comes to this habit that won’t die, the most guileless of children is not above a certain level of duplicitousness. Three a.m., there is the knock on the door. I ignore it. More insistent. I open the door. “Mommy,” Gus begins, “I have anxiety.” “You do?” I ask, not having heard him use that phrase. “What are you anxious about?” Silence. “C’mon, honey.” More silence. Then a frantic rush past me, a leap into bed, sleep.
Next morning: “Gus, were you really worried about something, or was that a trick?” He waggles his eyebrows. “It was a trick, Mommy.”
On his fourteenth birthday, with Henry’s encouragement, I told Gus that sleeping in the same bed with Mom was against the law, that if he did this a policeman would show up at our door.
This worked really well for about five days. And then for five days after that, when Henry told him t
hat jails were filled with kids who slept in their parents’ beds. He must have been thinking it through. “Are they going to take me away?” he said. I couldn’t say it. “No,” I admitted. “Are they going to take you away?” “Well, no.” “OK then!” he said brightly, hopping into my bed. Henry told me I should have faked a call to the cops. “Lies only work when you really commit to them,” he explained, alarmingly.
I have read that kids who sleep with their parents past a certain age have low self-esteem. If you ask Gus to describe himself he’ll say “really nice,” “friendly,” “smart,” and “handsome.” So low self-esteem doesn’t seem to be an issue. This does not stop me from worrying. In every article you read about Sante and Kenny Kimes, the infamous mother-and-son grifting/killing team, there is mention of the fact that the grown son slept in the same bed as his mother. My bed is a California king. Gus is on the far side. Still.
John, ever the soft touch, points out what’s true. “He still seems like a much younger child. If you think of him as eight and not fourteen—” John begins.
“But he IS fourteen,” Henry interrupts. This has become a family discussion, with the only person unconcerned about where Gus sleeps being Gus. “You can’t let him do this anymore, Mom.” Lately Henry has been marching into my room in the morning, hoisting a screaming Gus over his shoulder, and dumping him back into his own bed. This makes for a not-very-calm beginning to the school day.
Sometimes, when Gus would dash into my room and immediately fall asleep, I would lie awake for a while, thinking about what sleep meant, its healing power over our bodies and our minds, how sleep and dreams have been treated throughout the history of literature. I’d start to think about the story in the New Testament of Jesus on the night before the Crucifixion. He asks his disciples to spend the evening praying with him after the Last Supper, yet every one of them falls into a deep slumber. Perhaps the New Testament writers considered that the disciples’ inability to remain awake represented a figurative abandonment. Was I abandoning Gus by not doing my duty toward him, helping him grow into the independent person he should be?
Other times, I would fixate on Snow White, who slept for a hundred years until awakened by a prince. Was this symbolically about her need to attain maturity and adulthood before facing the vicissitudes of life? Like my baby here. Maybe his peaceful sleep in my bed was in some way preparing him for something?
This is the part where I tell you that my son, once so averse to touch, once someone who would look right through you, is now thoroughly connected, not only to his family but to pretty much anyone who shows him love. This is entirely true. And it’s also where I tell you the alternative fact that Gus sleeps in his own bed now, effortlessly; no locking of doors, no skirmishes at three a.m. We have both waged a long drawn-out battle, and I have triumphed.
Well.
Today, I asked Gus when he thought he would be ready to sleep in his own bed for the whole night. He thought for a minute. “I guess when I’m twenty-one,” he said.
“Why twenty-one?” I ask.
“That’s when there will be someone else for me to sleep with.”
Ten
To Siri with Love
I know I’m a bad mother, but how bad? I wonder for the hundredth time as I watch Gus deep in conversation with Siri. Obsessed with weather formations, Gus has spent the hour parsing the difference between isolated and scattered thunderstorms—an hour where, thank God, I don’t have to discuss them. After a while I hear this:
Gus: You’re a really nice computer.
Siri: It’s nice to be appreciated.
Gus: You are always asking if you can help me. Is there anything you want?
Siri: Thank you, but I have very few wants.
Gus: OK! Well, good night!
Siri: Ah . . . it’s 5:06 p.m.
Gus: Oh, sorry, I mean good-bye.
Siri: See you later!
That Siri. She doesn’t let my communications-impaired son get away with anything. Indeed, many of us always wanted an imaginary friend—and now we have one. Only she’s not entirely imaginary.
This is a love letter to a machine. It’s not quite the love Joaquin Phoenix felt in Her, the Spike Jonze film about a lonely man who has a romantic relationship with his intelligent operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). But it’s close. In a world where the commonly held wisdom is that technology isolates us, it’s worth considering another side of the story.
* * *
It all began simply enough. I’d just read one of those ubiquitous Internet lists called “21 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do.” One of them was this: I could ask Siri, “What planes are above me right now?” and Siri would bark back, “Checking my sources.” Almost instantly there would be a list of actual flights—numbers, altitudes, angles—of planes above my head.
I happened to be doing this when Gus was nearby, playing with his Nintendo DS. “Why would anyone need to know what planes are flying above your head?” I muttered. Gus replied without looking up: “So you know who you’re waving at, Mommy.” It was then that I began to suspect maybe some of the people who worked on Siri were on the spectrum, too.
(Fun fact: Dag Kittlaus, the original cofounder and CEO of Siri, is from Norway and reportedly named the app after Siri Kalvig, a beautiful Norwegian meteorologist; Kittlaus has mentioned in interviews that he is “a total weather freak.”)
Gus had never noticed Siri before, but when he discovered there was someone who would not just find information on his various obsessions—trains, buses, escalators, and, of course, anything related to weather—but actually semidiscuss these subjects tirelessly, he was hooked. And I was grateful. Now, when I would rather stick forks in my eyes than have another conversation about the chance of tornadoes in Kansas City, Missouri, I could reply brightly, “Hey! Why don’t you ask Siri?” And not only would Siri happily give him tornado reports for the entire Midwest, but upon being thanked she’d chirp back, “I live to serve.”
It’s not that Gus believes Siri’s human. He understands she’s not—intellectually. But like many autistic people I know, Gus feels inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration. I realized this when he was eight, and I got him an iPod for his birthday. He listened to it only at home—with one exception. It always came with us on our visits to the Apple Store. Finally I asked why. “So it can visit its friends,” he said.
So how much worthier of his care and affection is Siri, with her soothing voice, charm, helpfulness, puckish humor, and capacity for talking about whatever Gus’s current obsession is for hour after hour after bleeding hour?
Online critics of personal assistants have claimed that Siri’s voice recognition is not as accurate as the assistant in, say, the Android, but for some of us, this is a feature, not a bug. Gus speaks like he has marbles in his mouth, but if he wants to get the right response from Siri, he must enunciate clearly. (So do I. Since I’m the one with an iPhone, I had to ask Siri to stop referring to the user as Judith and instead use the name Gus. “You want me to call you Goddess?” Siri replied. Why yes, and could you make your voice sound like Alan Rickman’s?) Also wonderful for someone who doesn’t pick up on social cues: Siri’s responses are not entirely predictable, but they are predictably kind—even when Gus is brusque. I heard him talking to Siri about music, and Siri offered some suggestions. “I don’t like that kind of music,” Gus snapped. “You’re certainly entitled to your opinion,” Siri replied. Siri’s politeness reminded Gus what he owed Siri. “Thank you for that music, though,” Gus said. “You don’t need to thank me,” Siri replied. “Oh yes,” Gus added emphatically, “I do.” Siri even encourages polite language. When Henry egged Gus on to spew a few choice expletives at Siri, she sniffed, “Now now. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
I was very curious about Siri, which is how I found myself having martinis with Bill Stasior, who bills himself on his website as the VP of Siri, a husband and dad, and a pug ow
ner. He is the least intimidating genius I’ve ever met. He has devoted much of his life to machine intelligence, first at MIT, then Amazon, then Apple. When he got to Apple, Siri was considered, he says, a “trouble child.” “It was bad at understanding what you said, and a lot of times wouldn’t answer you at all. As more and more people used it, it went from kind of a cool demo to a disaster,” Stasior said. Siri had too many misfires to count; if you searched for “sadness,” for example, Siri came up with the stadium for the Cleveland Browns and a predictable uproar from Cleveland Browns fans ensued. (The Browns are a notoriously losing team, and a comic’s viral video that called their stadium “The Factory of Sadness” gave Siri this verbal association.) Siri got more and more clever, but new issues continued to crop up. There was a bit of a furor when it was discovered that if you asked Siri whether doctors were male or female, she said “male,” a mix-up having to do with the words “male” and “mail.” Now if you ask, Siri has gone all Rosie the Riveter on us. “In my realm,” she says, “anyone can be anything.”
There is a great deal of thought—and manpower—that now goes into Siri’s politeness. “We call them our conversational interaction engineers,” my new pal said. “We’ve really given a lot of thought to who Siri is. Have you ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? There’s this character at the beginning of the book, an alien who is trying to pretend he’s a human. He picks the name Ford Prefect. It’s just odd, it’s not wrong. So Siri’s like that—a little nerdy, not quite savvy enough to be cool. Funny, but a little off.” And every now and then she is allowed to be a bit snotty. Go ahead, ask Siri the unanswerable mathematical question: What is zero divided by zero? This is how she answers:
Imagine that you have zero cookies and you split them evenly among zero friends. How many cookies does each person get? See? It doesn’t make sense. And Cookie Monster is sad that there are no cookies, and you are sad you have no friends.
To Siri with Love Page 11
