The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (19 page)

Michael and I stood together, taking it all in. Then I had to yell down to the basement to get him to come upstairs and put all this stuff away so I’d have someplace to put the lasagna. Sometimes I think that if I’d stopped to totally comprehend what I was seeing, it would have been harder to be a mom to him. “It’s just Jake,” Michael and I would say to each other. We never stopped to think about how truly beyond belief his capabilities were at that time, and I think that was probably a good thing.

I don’t really know when Jake first became aware of himself as a prodigy, but eventually he came to understand how different he was. He always liked to lie under the trees in our backyard. On occasion, we’d hear him giggle and say, “Four thousand five hundred ninety-six,” or some other large number. That was the number of leaves on
the tree. It wasn’t that he was counting the leaves, at least not one by one, the way you or I would. The number was just obvious to him. If one came wafting down, he’d adjust the total: “Four thousand five hundred ninety-five.” When Jake started to realize how unusual these behaviors were, he became a little more self-conscious about them. “Okay, that was kind of two hundred forty-six toothpicks,” he’d say with a chuckle, referring to the iconic scene in the movie
Rain Man
.

I hated his self-consciousness, not wanting him to feel embarrassed about the gifts that made him special. But third grade was hard. At age eight, boys tend to group together by their favorite sport. You have the baseball boys, the football crew, and the soccer kids. Jake still had a lot of physical delays. He was a slow, uncoordinated runner, and swimming was a struggle. So when the school sent the sports sign-up sheet home, he didn’t put his name down for any of them.

He did sign up for the chess club, a group that met for matches before school. Most of the players were still learning how the pieces moved, so Jake didn’t have a lot of serious competition. He kept things interesting for himself by sacrificing a number of his important pieces—his queen, one of his bishops, and five of his pawns—early in each game, leaving himself with only weaker pieces with which to defend his king. None of the children ever noticed that this was deliberate, even though he gave up the same pieces every time. While the other kids were learning the game, Jake was honing important social skills, such as how to be patient while someone else takes a turn and how to give and take in relationships.

He got a lot out of the friendships he made with kids at school and in the neighborhood, but he was also socially aware enough to know that he was somehow different from his friends and from all the other kids in his class. After school, the other kids wanted to shoot baskets or watch sports on TV. Jake did those things, too, but he really wanted to spend time working on advanced math or updating his political map of the United States.

There was a fundamental part of Jake that he couldn’t share with the other boys. Gerrymandering or soil chemistry or whatever his preoccupation was that week generally didn’t interest them, and his passions
only underscored the difference between him and them. By that time, Jake found it easier to slow himself down, to sit there and pretend that it took him twenty minutes to get through a times-table worksheet, like it did for everyone else. Getting along socially meant that Jake had to keep part of himself—a big part—a secret.

One of the prodigy experts we talked to pointed out that when someone with Jake’s IQ concentrates on doing anything, even if it’s just acting like an ordinary third grader, he’s going to knock the ball out of the park. Yet the double life he was leading also caused him to have a kind of identity crisis. He had to find out who he was, because he didn’t really know.

Jake and I spent a lot of time online looking at videos of autistic savants and child prodigies. Many of the child prodigies on YouTube are musical, which had the unexpected side benefit of inspiring Jake to play music. Jake would listen to a few minutes of a piece of classical music, press Pause, sit down at the piano, and instantly play what he’d just heard, more or less perfectly. This was amazing to watch, and it seemed to be relaxing for him. Jake has never been a morning person, but playing the piano for a few minutes in the morning became one of his favorite ways to wake up.

We found videos of Kim Peek, the autistic megasavant on whom Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie
Rain Man
was based. Peek was known for calendar calculation, among other things. He could tell you, for instance, not only the date of Winston Churchill’s birth but also on which day of the week Churchill was born, based on the year of his birth.

“Really?
That’s
a big deal? I can do that,” Jake said, as we watched the video clip.

“You can?” How could I not have known about this? Admittedly, a skill like that doesn’t generally come up in conversation.

“So what day of the week was I born?” I asked.

“In 1974, April seventeenth was a Wednesday,” he said, without looking away from the screen.

He was, of course, right.

I also had no idea how good his visual memory was until we saw
another documentary online about the artist Stephen Wiltshire. Wiltshire is an autistic savant who has been called “the Human Camera” for his ability to draw a nearly perfect rendition of a landscape he’s seen only once. For the documentary we saw, the filmmakers hired a helicopter to fly him over Rome. After a single aerial pass, Wiltshire was able to draw the city, down to the most minute architectural details, such as the number of columns in the Pantheon.

“That’s how I see, too,” Jake said, surprised that there was someone else out there who saw the world the way he did, and also by the fact that
everyone
couldn’t accurately remember how many windows there were in a skyscraper they’d seen only once. Jake didn’t have Wiltshire’s artistic ability, but he, too, could remember accurately how many cars there’d been in the Best Buy parking lot we’d passed at fifty-five miles an hour, and how many of them had been silver, along with hundreds of other minute details.

Seeing other autistic savants on YouTube was a relief for Jake, but it wasn’t a solution to the alienation he felt in his everyday life. In some ways, knowing that other savants and prodigies were out there actually intensified Jake’s feelings of loneliness.

There’s a big difference between knowing you’re not alone because you’ve watched someone on YouTube and feeling like you’re not alone because you have someone to talk to as an equal. Jake could tell me all about his interests, but we weren’t having a conversation. I wasn’t suddenly going to have an insight about pyroclastic flows that would engage him. The best I could do was listen and ask questions, and at a certain point that’s not enough.

At Jake’s urging, I got in touch with Dr. Darold Treffert, Kim Peek’s doctor, and one of the world’s leading experts on autistic savants. At that time, Dr. Treffert’s website featured profiles of a number of savants, and Jake felt an immediate sense of connection. For someone who had been asking the questions “Where do I fit in?” and “Where do I belong?” Dr. Treffert’s site seemed heaven-sent. So I called.

In the world of autism, it can take a year to get in touch with an expert in your state. I was shocked to find that Dr. Treffert answered
his own phone. I told him about my unusual son, and he was immediately interested. After we’d talked for a while, he made a comment that I think about almost every day. He said, “Wait and see. Your son will surprise you.”

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. “Oh, he already surprises me plenty,” I said, laughing. “He surprises me every day.”

It was true. After all, I hadn’t had the slightest idea that he could do calendar calculation, had I? But in the years since that conversation, I’ve come to realize how truly wise that prediction was. Dr. Treffert knew that we’d only seen the very tip of the iceberg. He understood that Jake’s capabilities would increase exponentially as he got older and that they would expand past anything we could have predicted.

During that first call, I told Dr. Treffert about the loneliness Jake was experiencing. In response, he offered to introduce Jake to another eight-year-old prodigy. The two boys were gifted in different areas, but they shared many of the same interests and had similar development patterns. Dr. Treffert thought that they might get along and be able to relate to each other in a way that neither could with others their age. I could barely wait to get off the phone to call the other mom, but it turned out she didn’t want to make a date for the boys. Her son, she explained, was too busy to make new friends. His music practice and touring schedule simply didn’t permit it.

I was shocked. Nobody knows better than I do that a gifted kid is self-motivated. I never once made Jake do math or learn physics or astronomy, and I’m sure that other kid’s mom never had to force him to practice his instrument. I’m the biggest proponent out there of allowing children to do what they love; it’s the cornerstone of everything I do. But in all things, there has to be a balance.

“Physics will be there tomorrow,” I always tell Jake. “That math isn’t going anywhere.” The same is true for chess or music or art. I’m sure that nobody was forcing Bobby Fischer to play chess every waking minute when he was a child; that’s probably what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. But when that’s the case, I believe
it’s a parent’s job to close up the chessboard and send the kid outside to play. A child needs to have friends his own age; he can’t discover who he is in a vacuum.

Despite all our efforts, the loneliness and boredom of third grade eventually got to Jake. He was desperate to learn, and school seemed only to be getting in the way. He’d stay up until all hours reading in bed, no matter how many times we went and turned out the light. Then in the morning, he didn’t want to go to school. The compromises we’d asked him to accept between what he had to do and what he loved to do no longer seemed in balance. The vivid, engaged, excited child who chattered about asteroids from the backseat of the car—that was
my
Jake. The kid I was kissing goodbye at the bus stop every morning seemed like his shadow.

When he got home from school, instead of playing with his friends in the neighborhood, eight-year-old Jake would squeeze himself into one of the cubes in a bookshelf we had in the daycare. When parents arrived to pick up their kids, they’d find him crammed in there. Some of them even thought it was amusing.

But there was nothing funny or cute about it. I was deeply concerned. This was true autistic behavior. I felt as if I was losing him again.

I
called Stephanie Westcott, the psychologist who’d first given us Jake’s autism diagnosis. She listened as I told her what was going on, and she didn’t mince words: “It sounds like he’s bored, Kristine. You have to engage him. Has he expressed an interest in anything recently?”

That was easy. Jake had been pestering me about algebra for more than a year. Unfortunately, third-grade math meant multiplication tables and long division, not the algebra he was so desperate to learn. I couldn’t help him. By third grade, he’d blown way past any math I’d ever learned. As the math and science he loved had gotten more and more complex, Jake had left us behind. The only help I could offer was to listen while he wrestled with the problems and tried to work them out himself.

So I called the school. Teaching was what they did, and Jake needed a teacher. Maybe there was a gifted math class he could join? They invited us to come in for a meeting to discuss some options.

Warning bells went off as soon as I saw how many people were assembled there. Why did the school psychologist need to be in the room when we were there to talk about math?

The meeting started civilly enough. Michael and I explained how desperate Jake was to learn algebra, and we shared our frustration that we couldn’t help.

“He’ll have plenty of time to learn that material when the gifted program starts in fourth grade. But in the meantime, we might be able to get him some extra assistance if we reopen the IEP.”

I was dumbfounded. An IEP? I thought we’d left that conversation behind in kindergarten. Jake’s desire to learn was not an expression of a need for services. This wasn’t a kid who needed extra help because he couldn’t sit in a chair. Jake was a straight-A student.

“But he doesn’t need assistance. He needs resources.”

“An IEP might be the way to get him those resources.”

I still didn’t understand. “Why are we talking about special ed? Is Jake disruptive in class? Is he not able to communicate? Is he not playing with his friends at recess?”

“No, no, of course not. He’s a model student, and he’s got lots of friends. There’s been no problem with Jake at all.”

“Does he need occupational therapy? Physical therapy? Speech?”

Again the answer was no.

“Then what is it? Why are we talking about an IEP?”

It was the alphabet cards all over again. I had come because my son had been begging me, for two years, to learn more about a school subject that I couldn’t help him with. He needed resources to learn, and I’d come to his school to get those resources, but they were saying that to get them, we’d have to put Jake back in the special needs box.

“I think we’re done here,” I said. “Excuse me.” And I walked out of the room.

Michael came running after me, utterly shocked. “Kristine! Come back in and finish the meeting.”

“I’m not going back in,” I told him. “We’re done. I don’t want anything to do with any conversation pertaining to my son and special ed. That’s not why I’m here. I’ll meet you at the car.”

I didn’t blame Jake’s school or the teachers. In fact, I was grateful to them for their work and dedication. They were trying to do the right thing for Jake. But in my heart, I knew that opening up an IEP was not the way to go. I knew that I might be making a mistake, just as I had known that when I pulled him from Life Skills. Even though I do believe the mother gut is always right, maternal intuition doesn’t come with warning lights and buzzers. In this case, however, the path was clear to me.