The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (10 page)

I kept trying to get near him, but he kept pulling away and screaming. Finally I gave up.

“Fine,” I told him. “I’ll leave you alone.” I didn’t know what else to do at that point other than walk away, so I did.

“Mom!”
he then cried.
“Mom!”
He didn’t seem to like that I was walking away, either. I couldn’t win.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, completely frustrated. “Just tell me what you want me to do!”

“You didn’t do
anything
!” he wailed.
“I was hurt and you didn’t help me!”

I was at a complete loss about how to help him. I couldn’t hold him, I couldn’t talk him down. I came to the conclusion that I just had to let him lie there on the floor and work it out for himself.

“Mom, how could you not do anything?!”
he continued.
“You didn’t even help me!”

I was on the verge of tears. I didn’t have an answer. I searched but couldn’t find one. I felt like a failure as a mother. This was motherhood
101: You see your kid fall and you go to pick him up, but you can’t pick him up, you can’t stop him from crying, and you can’t make him feel loved. Catch 22: And then he blames you for not making him feel loved.

I called my mother. “Mom, how can I be a mother to him if he doesn’t let me hold him?” I begged, completely distraught. “He won’t let me love him, and he won’t love me back. How can you love someone who won’t love you?”

My mom was speechless. Grant had managed to stump the master.

six

The Boy Who Cried Lice

T
HE YEARS WENT BY AND BASEBALL CONTINUED
. A
S
C
URT GOT
older, the ballpark consumed more of his time, which meant less time for me, less time for the kids, and less time for him to see with his own eyes how very different Grant was.

As Grant got older, his behavior became more worrisome. At a certain point, Garrison, who was three years younger, began to seem more mature in many ways than Grant did. He knew how to listen to adults and how to play well with other kids. He played the games kids his age were into, as opposed to Grant, who remained obsessed with things that most of the kids in his grade had moved on from years earlier.

In addition, there was a natural affinity between Curt and Garrison. Curt found Garrison easy to be with, and Garrison just adored Curt. When Curt would go on the road, Garrison would get sad—more so than any of the other kids had. He always wanted to know when Curt was coming home, a question that Grant almost never seemed to ask.

Specifics aside, much of Grant’s behavior spoke for itself. He never seemed
to connect with his older siblings, never could relate to them. This was not just because they were annoyed that I gave him his way. Grant pushed the definition of “annoying little brother” to new heights.

He would find the oddest ways to interact with all of us. For instance, he went through a phase where he liked to scare us. He’d come running around a corner and scream, and it would be utterly startling. We’d each get mad when he did that to us and scream at him. However, our being upset never seemed to register with him. It never got old to him. He would keep doing it, and his reaction was the same the twentieth time as it was the first. Meanwhile the rest of us were all left to wonder where we could find his “off” button.

He also went through a phase where he insisted on squirting water from a water bottle on other kids on his football team. At first the kids would laugh and seemed to enjoy it, but after the thirtieth time or so, the other kids had enough and would be screaming and yelling at Grant. He never understood that the joke had long been over.

Another phase Grant went through was shoving, tagging, and taunting people. The shoving seemed like a misguided attempt at being playful. It started at home, with Gehrig giving Grant playful little pushes that I didn’t mind because they seemed like a form of social bonding between the two of them, who had always been like oil and water. It was sort of a kiddingaround push, and it seemed affectionate. But Grant didn’t get the subtleties of it. He didn’t realize it was okay between his brother and him, but wouldn’t be okay with kids he didn’t know.

Sure enough, Grant started giving little shoves to kids at school and at his siblings’ games. Some kids he knew and others he didn’t. Then he started doing it to kids bigger than he was, not realizing the dangers of that. Naturally, the other kids didn’t like it, but he never seemed to pick up on that and he persisted. I just kept hoping that at some point he’d get a clue just from being around and interacting with other kids.

There was no denying that Curt’s absence made things a struggle. While baseball was the engine that our family was built on, it became increasingly difficult to cope with Grant’s behavior on my own. When Curt was away, it always felt like a nonstop WWF match in my house. I’d call Curt most nights and tell him I was exhausted from dealing with Grant and the many ways he bothered us and other people. “Go to bed,” Curt would say. If life were only that simple. To make matters worse, I was suffering from a deficit of adult conversation. I almost never got to talk to other grownups. On most days our phone call would be my only chance to talk and to unload. This created tension between us. I would go on about all the ways in which the kids were being difficult, but it would just make Curt feel frustrated because he couldn’t do anything about it long distance.

G
IVEN THIS HISTORY OF
Grant’s odd behavior and outbursts, it would be easy for people to assume that he was some kind of monster child. But he wasn’t, I swear.

Grant was actually one of the sweetest, most loving kids you might ever come across. For a boy who doesn’t read social cues, he is incredibly sensitive toward others, especially those in need. Grant doesn’t pick up on facial expressions, but he can instantly identify those who are in need of compassion. He’s not uncomfortable approaching the situation with that person, whereas most people would avoid the issue altogether. It’s one of the things that has always made his challenging and odd behaviors forgivable—and for brief periods, even forgettable.

He has always been known for his affection. Back when he was in preschool his teachers said that what they most remembered about him was that he would hug everyone. He hugged the teachers hello, and if he came in and didn’t see them, he would come look for them just to say hello. At the end of the first day that he rode on the school bus, the bus driver called me over.
“Grant did the sweetest thing,” she told me. “He thanked me and then hugged me before getting off the bus.”

My heart was warmed. The sad part for her was that while she loved it, there are rules forbidding the drivers from making physical contact with the children. “I hated having to have a conversation with him about this, telling him he couldn’t hug me anymore,” she said.

Unfortunately, in his sweetness, Grant would often cross social boundaries leading to all kinds of awkwardness. By the time he was in second grade he would still be trying to hold hands with the other boys in his class, something you did in preschool and kindergarten. He didn’t understand why the kids would say, “Get off me.” He was totally unaware that he was being ridiculed.

This obliviousness to ridicule was at once frustrating and remarkable. It could cause him to dominate a conversation with kids and interrupt them at every turn, but it also meant that he was completely genuine in his affection for those around him. What really distinguished him from the other kids was that when deciding who deserved his love and attention, he never stopped to consider how other people would view him.

Cooper, who is my brother’s son and Grant’s cousin, has many food allergies, and from early on Grant was always protective of him. When Cooper was around, Grant would constantly check ingredients on food we had in the home. “Hey,” he’d shout out, “does this have peanuts in it? Because Cooper can’t have it if it has peanuts.” Our meals and snacktimes were overshadowed by Grant’s desire to protect his cousin. His actions were more like those of an overly concerned parent. Yet Grant was just a child.

In first grade, Grant became best friends with a boy named Stephen who has Down syndrome. Grant just naturally gravitated toward him. He stood by Stephen and watched out for him. Their first grade teacher, Mrs. Callahan, was struck by this and mentioned it in our conference: “His sweetness and sensitivity toward accepting others, especially those with disabilities, is an admirable quality in someone so young,” she said.

She shared a story with me about Grant: In class one afternoon when Stephen had finished his art project, Grant saw his picture. He then took it upon himself to show off the project to the other kids in the class, telling everyone how nice a job Stephen had done. His actions were those of a parent or teacher trying to boost selfconfidence in a child. This behavior would have been advanced for a senior in college, much less a firstgrader. Grant was teaching his classmates how to praise and encourage Stephen.

Mrs. Callahan told me another story about Grant that spoke volumes about how powerfully he felt sympathy in certain situations. “We were studying Columbus and learning how he had taken some Native Americans with him on one of his voyages back to Europe,” she said. “We had a whole class discussion about how those Native Americans must have felt being taken away from their families and being forced to live in a place that was unfamiliar to them. Grant didn’t say much during that discussion, but came to me later in the day and said, ‘You know, Mrs. Callahan, I was thinking. If that was me without my family going to a new land, I would be crying so hard that my tears would sink the ship.’ It was another one of those moments when I realized how sensitive and loving Grant is.”

She said it was also a sign that he was a deep thinker who took time to process and digest information in order to make sense of it all. Not just that, but she also told me he could write poetry. At the time I thought,
What kind of poetry is a kid going to write in first grade?
But after I ran a marathon, he gave me a poem. It said, “Running is hard, jogging is, too. But you do it so fast, people thought you flew.” Not bad for a little kid.

If his emotional depth was one thing that showed me Grant was not like other kids, another was his intelligence, which I was amazed by time and time again. While Grant’s ability to get hyperfocused on things could be a problem when we were in the toy store, it also had an upside, especially when it carried over to his school life. He would get locked in on subjects—dinosaurs, for example—and have to learn everything there was to know
about them. It would be all he’d talk about or think about. He’d want to read books on the subject, and I’d get him everything I could find. As a result, Grant was an incredibly smart kid who devoured books and information with a remarkable appetite. One teacher told me that Grant would get so hooked on a book, he’d read it nonstop, even walking and reading at the same time.

As if that weren’t enough, Grant wouldn’t just read. He’d speedread. I discovered that talent one night when the kids were all reading before bed. I was putting everyone to sleep, and when I got to Grant’s room, he had finished half the book.

“Stop messing around and read,” I said.

“But I am,” he answered.

“Bull,” I responded, cutting him off. “There’s no way you’re already on that page.”

We went back and forth a few times, and finally I decided to ask him a few questions about the book. He knew all the answers! I was shocked, especially because he couldn’t read too fast out loud.

When Grant was in first or second grade, he was fixated on naked mole rats. He learned about them through the Disney show
Kim Possible,
which had one as a character. He became completely obsessed with these animals, talking about them all the time. The school librarian took notice and bought a book on the subject for Grant. He loved that book and read it over and over. It was so sweet of her.

Sadly, that thoughtful librarian passed away from cancer during summer break. The school advised parents to tell their kids before school resumed in the fall. We didn’t know what to expect when we told Grant, but we weren’t prepared for what we saw. As we said the words, he hesitated for a minute and then slowly his entire body just deflated. He was heartbroken, and he cried for a good twenty minutes. It was a deep, heartfelt cry, one that left little doubt about how affected he was. Though he did not see this woman
every day, she was an integral part of his experience at school. He was simply devastated.

As a mother, I found this tough to watch, but it also revealed how powerfully sympathetic he was. I was astounded by how caring he could be. Though there were times when Curt and I questioned his respect for us as parents, he seemed to have a respect for life that went far beyond anything I’d encountered in other kids.

I
SHOULD REALLY GO BACK
and check my horoscope for 2007. So much was happening to my family then, and the chaos hit such a fever pitch, there were moments when I wondered whether I was under some kind of hex.

Early that year, both the good and the bad aspects of Grant’s behavior began to pile up in my mind. While I still didn’t know that anything was wrong clinically, I couldn’t shake the idea of how different from other kids—both our own and those we knew—he was proving himself to be.

Part of the problem was that despite my instincts that something was wrong, I felt as if people secondguessed me whenever I brought up Grant’s behavior. When I would talk to friends and family about how Grant acted, there was always an excuse, something that they felt made the behavior somehow my fault. They weren’t necessarily trying to point the finger at me, and everyone was wellintentioned about giving advice, but all their ideas seemed to place the blame squarely on me, especially because Curt was on the road so often.

Grant didn’t respect me.

I spoiled him.