Autism, Fatherhood, and the Lure of Isolation

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There was an article in the Boston Globe last week about how men tend to let friendships slip away over time. The resulting loneliness has dramatic implications on our physical health, to say nothing of mental health. Why? Because we are hard-wired for “phileo”.

We talk a lot about the need to be loved, but by that, we usually mean the big, obvious kinds. We need agape love, unconditional affection from our parents, our families, and from God. We feel the need for eros, romantic love with sexual expression. But we talk less of our need phileo, the deep, friendship variety. Brotherly love, as it’s called.

As D.C. McAllister wrote, phileo is “a kind of love we desperately need in our lives—passionate, nonsexual love. But we’re so uncomfortable with the expression of intimate, familiar feelings among men that we’ve given it its own name—bromance.” She’s right. Phileo has become a pop-culture punchline. I have to think that is part of what’s driving the trend toward isolation. We don’t take friendship seriously.

Phileo is a need. So why do I run away from it?

When describing my autistic son’s initial regression, I often say he went into a fog. He became distant, he lost his vocabulary, and he refused to look us in the eye. What I don’t say often is that I followed him. I went into my own fog. I became sluggish, troubled, and increasingly introverted. While Jack drifted into autism, I drifted into depression. And I fed that depression with a self-imposed isolation.

Sorrow hung over me for years. I had friends, but I didn’t call them. Instead, I would fold myself into my laptop, plug in some earbuds, and tune out the helplessness, even while my kids tried everything short of setting my socks on fire to get my attention. I would offer a wry nod, then go back to whatever on-screen emergency I had just invented.

Studies show that parents of special needs kids have significantly elevated risks of anxiety and depression.

That makes sense. The physical strain of sleepless nights, the psychological fears of wandering, bullying, and the future all contribute to that risk. But for fathers at least, there’s another factor. Men are fixers. I know, that’s a cliché, but there’s a reason for the stereotype. Men crave resolution. We lean into it. And when we encounter something we can’t resolve — especially something as confounding as autism — we lose our sense of equilibrium. Our confidence comes crashing down.

I wasn’t seeing a counselor during my dark season, but I was fortunate enough to have my boss and senior pastor, Joshua, down the hall. For months on end (or was it years?), I would sit in his office and fall apart on a weekly basis. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have hurt to double down with a therapist.

But then, what are counselors if not friends we pay for out of desperation?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful and immensely helpful profession, but if people talked to their friends more often—-I mean real conversations in the bond of phileo-—don’t you think many of us would find healing organically?

I had organic friends. I just didn’t hang out with them. And for that reason, it took me far too long to mend.

Then one Sunday, I was onstage preaching about going through pain, and it all came out in a rush. Jack was going through a frightful season, and we were all hurting with him. I ended up awash in tears. Big, ugly tears.

When it was all over, two men stood at the foot of the stage, looking up at me with red eyes of solidarity. Two good men. Friends. I stepped toward them, and they embraced me together without shame. I wept some more, right out in the open. I think they did, too.

And at that moment, I swear I heard a whisper deep inside me: “I have given you brothers.”

Indeed, I have brothers, but even years later, I still have to fight the urge to live as if I don’t. Because I’m a man, see, and “I got this! What? You don’t think I got this?”

Yeah… I don’t got this. “It is not good for man to live alone.” We quote those words at weddings, but it’s as true for phileo as it is for eros. It is not good for man (or woman) to live without friends. We are relational beings, like it or not. When we pull away from relationships, we suffer. That is part of our design. Life is built to be shared, not hidden.

I recently joined some guys for a weekend at the coast. I was too busy to go, but I went anyway. We had no agenda, and ended up wasting time together over beach bocci ball, grilled meats, and an assortment of grizzly banter. But of course it was more than that. We were sharing troubles. We were trading life. We were lending strength.

One of those mornings, I walked to an overlook at Seal Rock beach, the same hidden paradise where we shot our viral video last summer. For an instant, it was as if I stood above my entire journey with Jack. All the heartache of his diagnosis, the depression, the growth and the setbacks, the hiddenness turned shockingly public with a single upload—-all of it hit me afresh. And again, I heard the words, “I have given you brothers.”

I am glad to be out of the fog, and to see the path again. But most of all, I am grateful I do not journey alone.

***

Feature image provided by Daniel Horacio Agostini at Flickr.com under Creative Commons License.

On Learning to Love a Tow Truck

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If you’ve read anything I’ve written this year, you know that Jack, my autistic eleven year old, loves the movie Cars 2, and I don’t. I’m a grown man and a Pixar apologist (there should be a badge for people like me), but I cannot abide the studio’s version of The Fast and The Furious. The story is jumbled and lame, the noise is loud and unrelenting, and the rusty protagonist drives me backwards insane.

I grew up in East Texas, so you’d think I had some appreciation for Mater the Tow Truck, but so help me, the man who voices him, Larry the Cable Guy, strikes me as decidedly unfunny. This character grates on me from the beginning, and he does not let up for the entire ninety minutes. It’s exhausting.

But oh, my dear son . . . he disagrees. Jack adores Mater, and he has watched his bumbling heroics hundreds of times without ever tiring of it.

The English writer G.K. Chesterton maintained that, “Part of God’s infinity is manifested in a little child’s propensity to exalt in the monotonous.”

A child glories for weeks in his only two knock-knock jokes. He gets tossed in the air and laughs and says, “do it again!” God, too, makes the sun rise and says, “do it again!”

Adults though? Dad, especially? Monotony is hard for us. It is the opposite of adventure. There are no twists, no surprises, no opportunity for Keizer Soze’s hand to un-cripple itself or for Jack Buck to call, “I don’t believe what I just saw!” Monotony is wonder-less.

Except there they are: our children, especially our children on the spectrum. There they are, watching the same tow truck bumble his way around the world as the same accidental spy, and get the same inexplicable knighthood in the end. And even after the five-hundredth viewing, there is fairy-tale affection in their eyes.

Why do our children delight? Is it that their young minds are so limited and their tastes so unrefined? Are they just bored and don’t even realize it?

Or maybe we are the problem. Maybe our culture is simply addicted to novelty.

Maybe we get bored so easily because our imaginations have become petulant tyrants, suspicious of routine, and demanding newness all the time.

I’ll be honest, even the word “routine” sucks the imagination right out of me. And that, friends, is my problem, not my son’s.

For Jack, routine is more than a necessity. It is a comfort. For my son, repetition is not the droning, looping script that I hear, but a room of friendly voices, casting the the place in warm tones, classic jokes, and action sequences that never stop being awesome.

Parents, hear me: we need to slow down and get younger. We need to let our children teach us from time to time. They still believe in pixie dust, in spy cars, and in houses that fly, and the main reason we don’t is we’re too easily exasperated. My old headmaster used to say, “if you’re bored, it’s because you’re boring.” I think he was right. And just because we’re boring and cynical doesn’t mean ours is the better way.

There are treasures in slowness. There is beauty in the retellings. There is wonder even in predictability.

I’m trying to learn it. I’m trying to make peace with Jack’s looping obsessions. I’m even trying to like Cars 2. Really. And you know what I’ve discovered? The Italian racer, Francesco, is actually quite hilarious. And even Mater . . . well, there was this one moment when he asks about a drink for McQueen, and he misunderstands Guido, and . . . I laughed.

I’m never going to be a big fan of this movie, or of this character. He will never rank next to Sheriff Woody or Mr. Incredible or Remi the Rat or Carl Frederickson. But through repeated viewings, I am starting to at least see what Jack sees in him, if only just a little. The awkward misfit just wants to do what’s right; to have fun, and be a hero.

If Mater’s antics serve to reinforce those ideals, I can live with that. If monotonous viewings of a mediocre film cause my son’s mind to explode with possibility, then I will sit next to him and squint my eyes to find the wonder. I will never have the infinite patience of God Himself, but I think I can re-learn some measure of child-likeness. And that is appropriate, for as we know, the kingdom of heaven does not belong to the most refined among us, but to the wide-eyed and hopeful. To children.

Autism, OCD, and the Longing for Home

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We all heard him screaming; not everyone knew who it was. But I’m Jack’s dad, and I know his voice. I was in the auditorium, teaching a Wednesday night class on the book of Acts. He was in a different classroom across the hall. It’s our church’s special room for kids with developmental delays. We call it the “Open Heavens Room.”

I knew from his scream that he was frantic but not in pain. His mom would be two rooms away, teaching a gaggle of children. I swallowed.

“I’m sorry, guys, that’s Jack. Mind if I… I’ll be right back.” My class was gracious. They know the drill by now. I love our people…

I ran out of the sanctuary and Jack saw me at once over the split door that keeps him safe. His eyes were red and he was screeching the words, “Smart Writer One.”

I knew at once what he needed.

“Smart Writer One” is the name of Jack’s favored electronic toy. Why the “One” in his name? He has a twin, you see: “Smart Writer Two.” We found the twin on eBay. It was all Jack wanted for Christmas. He inspected every Amazon package that came to the door over the entire holiday season, begging us to open it. You’d never have guessed he was waiting for something he already had. What’s better than a Smart Writer? Two identical Smart Writers, that’s what!

So now, the boy plays with his two favorite toys for hours every day, and they alone share his pillow. His sister, on a whim, suggested that he change Smart Writer One’s name to “Gary One.” It made no sense, of course, because her mind operates on random thirteen year old frequencies, but for some reason Jack capitulated. He liked the nickname.

“Gary One,” he said in approval. And of course, the new guy is “Gary Two.”

The Garys never leave the house. They are much too precious. Oh, believe me, we’ve tried to bring them along. We’ve told Jack how much more fun his drives to Portland would be with his two favorite toys, but every time we’ve tried, he’s pushed them toward their hiding spot in the cupboard.

“No fank you! No fank you!”

Well okay then.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not uncommon for kids on the autism spectrum.

In fact, OCD is one of the primary markers that experts look for. In our experience, these obsessions can change over time. Jack had a tower of bean cans that he kept in our living room for months. He also had a shirt he refused to take off. And then there are the movie phases. We’ve had “My name is John” videos, and seasons of Pooh Bear, Dragons, and uncountable viewings of Cars 2.

Food, too, reflects those OCD tendencies. Jack eats, like, three different foods. That’s it. He does chips, waffles, and these slimy cookie ball things that help him to decorate our sliding glass door with handprints. Sara hides all manner of nutrition in everything he eats because that’s the only way he will get what he needs. His diet is just too limited.

Whenever he makes a shift to allow something new into his life, we all breath a sigh of relief. It’s good for him to stretch. It’s good for all of us to stretch.

Right now, his Smart Writers are his best friends on the planet, and whenever he’s out and about, their existence is always on the edge of his consciousness. They anchor him to where he comes from. When he cries out the name “Smart Writer One,” then, we know what it means. It means he wishes he was home.

That night in the hallway, I pulled my microphone off my ear and hugged him over the split door. His eyes were red and he told me one more time, “Smart Writer One?” It had become a question, and he turned his ear to my lips to receive my expected answer.

“First Open Heavens Room,” I whispered, “Then Smart Writer One.”

That is our script. Yes, son, we know you don’t want to be here. Yes, you will see your toys soon. We have some things to do before then, but it won’t be long. First this, then home.

Jack wiped his eyes and turned back toward the couch where his laminated pictures sat. That was all he needed the rest of the night. All the kids in that room have their coping mechanisms. Jack’s are actually quite simple. He just needs a reassurance that we haven’t forgotten about him, and that things won’t be that way forever.

Indeed, that is a truth we can all settle into. Life can make us anxious and angsty. Irritants can masquerade as emergencies. And soon, everything turns frantic.

At such times, we need to a good reminder of the temporariness of things. Life might seem acutely exhausting right now, but it won’t be like that forever. There will be better days when peace returns, joy comes roaring back, and the air around us smells like home again. First, the hard stuff, then the break. First pain, then home.

All it takes is a whisper from our Father.