Wapner At Four

Children are hard to deal with because they're childish. They're impatient, they make you miserable if they don't get their way, and they demand you give them everything you've got, whether you have it to give or not. Any romance or friendship with those dynamics would be called unhealthy. But you can't unfriend your kids or tell them "it's not you- it's me." There's no breaking up with my son.

When people hear my son is autistic, an image comes into their mind. Before my son, my picture of autism and autistic people was completely based on the film Rain Man, and I think that's true of most people who haven't encountered the condition in real life. "Wapner at four" is one of those lines that everybody remembers, and I've seen people ape Dustin Hoffman's mannerisms in the movie when they say it millions of times. Like a request for "fava beans and a nice chianti", or "you can't handle the truth!" "Wapner at Four" is one of those movie moments that is etched into the zeitgeist. To most of us, autism means scenes like this one:




In a sense, they're not wrong. Up to now, my son's tantrums and toddler's megalomania have looked like they would in the case of the average kid. Autism means that the furlough most parents look forward to when they're in the midst of a supermarket tantrum or an airplane fit has been indefinitely postponed. The autism diagnosis means that sooner or later, I'm going to run into the same infuriating autistic intransigence that Charlie Babbit faces in that scene.



These days, autism is conceptualized as a spectrum. There are autistic traits we all share to some degree. In the case of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders- "people on the spectrum"- these traits are prominent in a way that's often maladaptive. Raymond Babbit, the character Dustin Hoffman plays in Rain Man, is actually not representative of all autistic people. There are many autistic people very similar to that character, but there are many, many, many more who have nothing in common with him.  It is a little premature to assume that my son will be like Raymond Babbit or that I will have absurdly frustrating moments like the airport scene in Rain Man. I have them now, but every parent of a toddler does. The thing is, they have no reason to suspect that the stubborn defiance of the pre-school years won't fade.

I do. In fact,  while my son's tantrums, asociality and rigidity look like they do in most kids his age, they are more frequent and they're longer than most parents see in a boy of three. My son has tantrums every time something goes badly. When he has a longer, more serious tantrum it takes on an operatic character, replete with epic struggle and lung-busting arias of despair and loss. Seriously, they're like that. And there's a few of those a week. Sometimes more. Since he has been in ABA therapy, they're less frequent and they're shorter. I'm immensely grateful for that, and I hope that the trend continues. We're still a long way from normal in that regard, and as my son gets older the gap in emotional maturity between him and his peers gets wider. I have good reason to expect that there's at least a possibility that I will live with a Raymond Babbit of my own for the rest of my life.

Every day the deck is reshuffled and my boy may be obsessed with the very thing that bugged him yesterday. He's tough to predict, so there's a lot of reason to think that the future will be different- and much, much better. My son is receiving extremely intensive treatment at a very early age, which also improves his prospects enormously. My son could be a successful, fully functioning adult. He could turn out to be more happy and well-adjusted than my wife and I. That is a distinct possibility, but I can't let myself entertain it long. I tend to expect the worst and hope for the best.

When you're raising kids, that's a dangerous tack to take. I am a firm believer in the axiom that we rise to the level of our lowest expectation. To "expect the worst"would be making a judgment about my son that I'd be naive to think he wouldn't notice. He'd quite likely come to share my stunted expectations. The hopeful pessimist stance will be damaging to both of us and him especially.

My pessimistic optimism is an attitude I'm working on abandoning, with middling success. The truth is that raising an autistic child means all the rules you get from middle aged ladies, family and friends don't apply. I can't say to myself that the things that my son does that make it hard to live with him will go away in the future. There's no prognosis and therefore no itinerary for my son's development. We have to take it as it comes.

When he flails in my arms as I carry him from the car to school, when he screams at the top of his lungs for no apparent reason, adopting a "take it as it comes" attitude doesn't work either. In the microcrisis of a tantrum, there is only anxiety and anger. That has to go somewhere, and the greatest challenge I've faced as a parent is figuring out where that all goes in the moment when he's screaming at the top of his lungs in the dairy aisle. There's no one to be mad at. There's no one to blame or hate except yourself or your kid, and neither of you is at fault.

Recently, I discovered the secret. The key to getting through those moments is to become a little autistic yourself. My son often grins this sly, knowing grin when he sees me get upset, and that used to make me even madder. Now I realize what it was that was making him smile. My son appreciates in a way that only autistic people can that there is a certain amount of absurdity built into life on Earth. The things that consume us are usually not as important as they seem, and even if my son's autism doesn't pass, every tantrum does pass eventually. If my son could talk, I think he'd say that life isn't something to be taken too seriously because it isn't that important. When you really think about it, it's not even that interesting. My son taught me how to survive his autism because he compels me to look at how he copes, and he deals with it by getting up from a tantrum and shrugging as though it had never happened. He lives with his autism because it's just not that big a deal. Nothing is.

Sometimes, when his face is twisted into a Japanese Oni mask and tears are streaming down his cheeks, I see that other part of him- the part of him that would laugh if he could see himself and how funny his face gets when he's upset. That's when I know I have to do the same. My son has showed me how to hover over the two us wrestling to get his shoes on and see the situation as it is. It's comical. The two of us sitting there struggling like the world depended on how taut I got the velcro on his shoes is absurd. My son knows what it has taken me three years to figure out- I look ridiculous when I'm angry and silly when I'm depressed. So I laugh at myself with him. Often, it works.