The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (21 page)

This photo of me with Grant (
left
) and Garrison (
right
) was taken in 2004. Even though Curt helped the Red Sox win the World Series that year, Grant was probably the only person in New England who didn’t pay attention. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get him interested in baseball.

A family trip to Disney World in 2005. Because Grant had a tendency to wander off without thinking, it was easiest for me to dress all the kids alike so that we could keep track of them in the crowds.

Grant and Garrison eating corndogs. As Garrison got older, it emphasized the differences between him and Grant, showing just how developmentally out of step Grant was in some ways. Grant also would lock into one food—this particular summer it was corndogs. Corndogs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Since Curt and I were some of the oldest parents on the Red Sox, Family Day always meant that there were a lot of kids younger than Grant running around, which he loved. This was Family Day, 2005, when each of the boys had yellow hair gel to imitate Curt, who had recently let Kevin Millar cut and dye his hair during a rain delay.

Curt and Grant at Family Day, 2005.

Our kids quickly came to love Family Day because it gave them a chance to go out and play with their dad on the baseball field

This photo of Grant and me was taken at a Patriots game in 2005. Even though sports were mostly just background noise for him, it was a special day for Grant—just him, with no siblings around.

Grant was great when he first started playing soccer, but it didn’t take long for him to lose focus. His behavior on the field was exactly like his behavior everywhere else: One second he’d be fully engaged, the next he’d be off in his own world. Until the diagnosis, these kinds of contradictions were really hard to make sense of.

Grant with his friends Patrick (
right
) and William (
left
) on the first day of kindergarten. Though Spinal Muscular Atrophy has kept William in a wheelchair for as long as Grant has known him, Grant has always shown amazing tenderness and awareness toward his friend’s condition.

Christmas, 2006: Just like every other kid, Grant goes nuts for Christmas. Every Christmas Eve, after church, we rush home to see if the kids were good enough all year for the elves to leave pj’s. If they did, everyone puts them on and goes to bed because Santa is on his way.

Grant, Garrison, and me at the Red Sox annual Picnic in the Park fundraiser at Fenway Park in 2007.

The summer of 2007 was the summer when everything changed, and Grant’s ill-fated turn at Pop Warner football had a lot to do with that. Curt and I thought that the structure of football would be good for him, but all it did was show me just how wrong things were.