The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (2 page)

Introduction

“I
NEED TO TALK TO YOU
.”

For any husband, those six words are usually accompanied by the head tilt or eye roll, because they’re usually followed by a conversation pointing out that you’ve done or said something terribly wrong. In 2007, when I heard those words in a Chicago hotel room, I thought that was where I was headed. I quickly realized that was not the case. Shonda sat down on the bed, eyes watering, and uttered five words I’ll remember until the day I die:

“Grant has autism spectrum disorder.”

I’ve experienced some serious highs and lows in my lifetime—losing my father suddenly in front of my eyes to an aortic aneurism, winning three World Series championships, being told my wife has cancer. This new piece of information hit me with the same level of impact. Inwardly I am a very emotional, very passionate person, which can be both a good and a bad thing. However, in times of crisis, I know how to keep it together. This was such a time. I didn’t overreact, I didn’t cry or go nuts. I said, “Okay, now what?” Or words to that effect. I don’t know any other way to handle situations like that,
other than to immediately accept where you are, figure out where to go, and get moving.

That said, and having attentiondeficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) myself, it wasn’t long before my mind started racing. On the first lap I nearly crashed and burned as countless visions from eight years of chastising, punishing, yelling, and some spanking popped into my head. I was overcome with an immediate and overwhelming sense of guilt, horrible painful guilt only the parent of a child he loves more than life itself could possibly know. At the same time, about ten different pieces of the undecipherable puzzle that was Grant fell into place. I didn’t know what ASD meant specifically, but I knew that answers were coming—answers we’d thought we were years to a lifetime from having were now right on the horizon.

All our children are unique in their own ways, but Grant is
very
unique. Grant did things that befuddled me, which in and of itself isn’t odd for an eightyearold. But the degree to which Grant marched to his own drummer seemed very unusual. Most remarkably, the depth of emotion Grant felt and expressed went far beyond what I’d witnessed in many adults. Sometimes I was proud that a kid could love so deeply so young. Other times I was insanely upset that a kid could be standing in front of me, looking in my general direction, hear a specific set of orders, turn around, and not act on a single one of those orders. It was maddening, it was stupefying, and, at the very least, it was incredibly confusing.

For a long time, Grant was an issue between Shonda and me. My job playing baseball for the Boston Red Sox required me to travel a lot. I was on the road for literally nine months a year. Toward the end of my career I saw more of my wife and kids when they went on a road trip with me than when I was at home. While traveling with the team, my “parenting” was done courtesy of AT&T. Congratulations, good nights, happy birthdays, admonishments, punishments, and many other parental duties were carried out over fiberoptic telephone lines. As my career started to wind down, Shonda and I
talked less and less over the phone. Too often she’d call totally exhausted from a day with our kids, upset as well, and tell me, “When you get home you need to punish Gehrig, scold Grant, tell Gabby she cannot do that, and tell Garrison he has to do X.” My response was often, “No, I can’t, I won’t. I am not going to be away for ten days, talking to my kids for a total of fifteen minutes, and then walk through the door and start spanking them. It’s not going to happen.”

This usually resulted in either a heated argument or a really short phone call. Both of us had been pushed to the ends of our ropes, and neither of us wanted to admit our shortcomings as parents. These unpleasant conversations had the detrimental effect of making us want to avoid talking. She called less often, we talked less, and we really “communicated” barely at all. With arguments creeping into every conversation we had, I think we both assumed that if we didn’t talk, we couldn’t argue. I was dealing with a ton of issues in my day job, and Red Sox Nation is not a patient bunch. It’s win or go home. But looking back, that isn’t and cannot be a valid excuse for any of my actions or reactions.

As much as it pains me to say this, the fact is that for much of my baseball career, our home felt essentially like a singleparent home. I knew no other way to do what I did for a living than to immerse myself in the game of baseball 24/7, 365 days a year. I was the provider for our family, and in my mind, working hard to be the best in the world at what I did was the same thing as being a devoted dad. While I was certainly never the best, I never stopped wanting or striving for that. I can remember one day in Arizona, sitting at a red light with Grant in the car. He was asking me about Pokémon cards. He kept asking, and I was in my own deep thought, until he finally yelled,
“Dad! Why aren’t you listening to me?”
I was thinking about how I wanted to change my approach to pitching to Paul Lo Duca next time I faced him. It was December 28, and spring training was still three months away.

The thing about Asperger’s is that it’s tough to phone in. To really under
stand it you have to be facetoface with it every day. You have to wake up with it, eat breakfast with it, take it to school, and try as hard as you can to get it to go to soccer practice (Asperger’s apparently really,
really
hates wearing shin guards). Shonda knew—even before the diagnosis—that something was not right. Grant was different, and by different she meant
different
. She’s rarely been wrong, but when it comes to the kids she’s never been wrong. While I had my suspicions, what I suspected was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that more parenting and more discipline wouldn’t fix. Now that I’m there every day, I can see just how wrong I was.

Over the past three years, my wife and I have experienced a lifetime of growth. We’ve brought our marriage to a place one dreams of being but few achieve. People have often asked me in the past two years since I stopped playing baseball, “Don’t you miss it?” My response has been a very quick and very adamant, “I miss absolutely nothing about the game of baseball, nothing.”

That response is a direct result of our kids and, I would argue, mainly Grant and the education he’s providing us with on a daily basis. Grant’s situation has forced Shonda and me to look at ourselves in plain daylight, no filters, to assess who we are and what we are as parents. I know I didn’t even remotely like what I saw upon first glance, and since then I’ve worked hard to make noticeable changes, changes I am still working on to this day.

Looking back, and having helped her through this book, I had no idea she’d gone through some of the things she has, just like she has no idea of some of the things I endured over the past five years. But I don’t think either one of us has or will allow that to affect where we are today, and where our family is. She’s managed to raise four children who love unconditionally (albeit four children who can still raise the hair on your neck at a moment’s notice). She’s managed to undergo a massive transformation as a mother, a wife, and woman that very few women her age would even consider, and she’s done it for our children, and our marriage.

I can’t imagine one day of the past twenty years of my life not having this wonderful worldchanging woman in it, and I pray I never have to. The book you hold tells of a journey neither of us wanted to go on, yet the Lord knew we could do it, that we could survive it, and that she could help others by sharing it. For that I am eternally grateful and proud to call her my wife.

C
URT
S
CHILLING
December 22, 2009

one

Our Less-Than-Perfect Family Moment

T
O THOSE WHO KNOW MY SON
G
RANT AND ME
, I
FREQUENTLY
referred to it as the summer that one or both of us would end up medicated.

It was 2007, and Grant was seven. I was rounding the bend toward forty, but there were moments when I was so worn out I felt more like seventy. Every day was filled with exhausting challenges, one after another.

On a visit to my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, that summer, I somehow got it in my head that I should take Grant along with my other kids—Gehrig, then twelve, Gabby, ten, and Garrison, four—to an Orioles baseball game. I suppose it was wishful thinking on my part. There were so many reasons it could have been a special evening—so many reasons to be sentimental. Not only had I grown up going to Orioles games at the old Memorial Stadium, taking in game after game there with my dad, mom, and brother, mostly in the onedollar bleachers, but the Orioles were also how I met my husband, Curt, who used to pitch for them.

To make that particular game in the summer of 2007 even more exciting, Curt was pitching again, only this time for the opposing team, the Boston
Red Sox. I wanted the kids to be there for that—to see “our” team play my home team.

When we got to the stadium, I proudly led the kids up to the stands. Then…

“I wanna go!”

Grant was visibly upset, his face a bright red.

“I wanna go! I wanna go!”
he started chanting over and over while holding his hands over his ears. He draped his upper body over my knees and started rolling back and forth aggressively as he screamed.

Luckily it was loud in the stadium. People were milling about, shouting at one another, and cheering. There were announcements and music over the PA. But it wasn’t so loud that Grant’s tantrum went unnoticed. All nearby heads turned in our direction. People had the most concerned looks on their faces, as if to say, “What did you do to your kid, lady?” A few more Iwannagos and the expression morphed into an indignant “Jeez, why can’t you get control of your kid?”

And then they opened their mouths.
“Grant!”
one of the men shouted.
“You need to listen to your mom!”

“Calm down, Grant!” one of the women said.

Have you ever heard the expression “If you want to help, don’t”? It’s a good one. Those people meant well, but they were only making matters worse, not to mention making me feel even more humiliated.

Despite entertaining vivid thoughts of killing those people (or perhaps just seriously injuring them), I managed to smile through gritted teeth. I needed to put on a good face. People might recognize me, and they were clearly judging me, assuming I didn’t know how to control my kid. They weren’t too far off base, but I didn’t need them to point that out to everyone around us. Plus, it just made Grant more upset.

“Grant, we need to stay here,” I said as firmly and quietly as I could, still all smiles. Grant didn’t stop, though.

“I wanna go, nooooow!”
he shouted again. He continued flailing, and I worried that he might hit himself on the aluminum chair in front of him. I tried to hold him, but he wouldn’t have it.

Then I tried bribing him. “We’ll go to the toy store tomorrow, Grant,” I offered.

Nothing.

“You can pick the movie tonight.”

“You can stay in my bed.”

“You can have cotton candy. We can have popcorn.”

Still nothing.

Frankly, at that point, I would have let him eat a hot dog with cotton candy for a bun and ice cream on top just to get him to stop. But none of my offers worked. (Of course, the next day he would still remember I’d promised a trip to the toy store, and he’d insist on it.)

“Let me take him for a walk,” my mom offered. I felt bad. I didn’t want her to miss this game, either. “Grant, come for a walk,” she said, reaching for his hand, but he kept rocking and screaming. He only wanted me. But there was nothing I could do to make him happy.

I felt completely defeated. I wanted nothing more than for Grant to
want
to be there. But not only did he not want to be there, he didn’t even understand what was going on. For a long time I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get Grant excited about baseball. I wanted him to be able to bond with his dad the way his siblings had, but in his seven years, that hadn’t really happened. There was a disconnect that I couldn’t understand, and nothing I tried seemed to fix it.

At the game, I couldn’t even get Grant to grasp that it was his father down there on the field, that he was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball, playing right there in this game that had brought all these fans to this huge stadium. I just kept thinking,
If Grant sees Curt out there, he will take an interest. He will understand it, and he will be proud.
I thought about how many kids would give
anything to be sitting in those stands, let alone watching their father pitch for the Red Sox. What would it take to get Grant to realize what this all meant?

However, Grant wanted nothing to do with being in the stands. Once the game started, I tried to calm him down by showing him how to mark the scorecard and keep track of every play. But he was agitated and couldn’t focus. I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place: It seemed as if I should get us all out of there before Grant made a bigger scene, but that wouldn’t be fair to Gehrig, Gabby, and Garrison. I didn’t want any of us to miss that game, because I knew that Curt’s career was coming to an end. Also, the kids had begun to have their own lives. A family vacation was going to become difficult to pull together with any regularity now that the kids had obligations to sports and camp and other things they wanted to do with their friends. I didn’t know how many more moments like this we were going to get, and I wanted us all to have a memory of this special night before it was gone.

My heart sank and I started to wonder if the seat I was sitting on would be big enough for me to fit underneath. I wanted to find a place to hide. How much more of Grant’s screaming could we all take? Fortunately, he started running out of steam. He climbed into my lap and began rocking back and forth, back and forth, covering his ears, without saying a word. This was hardly an ideal way for me to watch the game. But it was preferable to fighting with him and listening to him scream.