The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (24 page)

Looking back, I can see all the signs. If I had a day that had nothing on the calendar, which was rare, I would just sleep. I’d take the kids to school, do a surface clean of the house, and then escape from my world with all its anxieties by putting myself to sleep until the kids came home. I felt guilty for sleeping, and I think deep down I knew that it was a way of running away from my feelings. But it was my little secret.

I now realize that I’d been depressed for a long time. I look back, and it makes perfect sense. I would hear the noise of everything going on in the house, but I wouldn’t react. I felt as if I were watching my crazy world from the vantage point of a fly on the wall. When I’d struggle with Grant, I would feel instantly tired or sick, and needed to lie down. He would badger me for things—like a bowl of cereal twenty minutes before dinnertime—and I would just look at him and say, “I don’t care.” And then I would crave sleep. Sometimes I thought I wanted to sleep until he was grown up.

My depression was big, and affected how I felt in every way. Sometimes I would convince myself that I had caught a bug, but really I had nothing con
tagious—just severe malaise. And my sleeping all day and catching “bugs” didn’t happen frequently enough for anyone around me to put the pieces together and catch on to what was happening.

Even with therapy, I was still having difficulty asking for help at home. I was still trying to be the best mother and wife and not need too much. But I was struggling. After a few months of seeing Dr. Weather, she asked if Curt could come in for one of our sessions. I wasn’t sure how he would feel about that. He questioned me about why she wanted him to come. I knew he was afraid she wanted to talk about him. But that wasn’t the case. Rather, she brought him in to tell him that she was really worried about me. She did it in front of me, so I couldn’t hide anymore. I needed help and I had trouble asking, so she asked for me. I had to accept that I needed others. For too many years, I had let fans’ opinions mold the person I thought I should be and let other parents and society influence how I felt as a parent. I had been setting myself up for failure.

Curt was glad he came and agreed to take more of an active role with the kids at home. That session further improved the communication between us and helped me feel better about asking for help, whether from him or from other people.

Clearly therapy and Lexapro didn’t make my problems simply vanish, but they did help me to become calmer and saner. I stopped staying up nights worrying about Grant and the past. Without the pressure of hiding my inner life, I started relaxing in ways that I hadn’t in years. That in turn made me more patient (which is pretty necessary in a house full of ADHD). If I needed help, all I had to do was ask.

I gained a new perspective on my parenting, too. I realized I’d raised my kids the only way I knew—the way I had been raised. I was a happy kid. I turned out okay, I thought. My kids all played two sports a season and were learning to play musical instruments. Okay, they needed tutoring. But I was able to realize that I just wanted them to be kids and enjoy their childhood.
They didn’t need to be the best at everything. They have their whole lives to figure out what they want to do and be.

Therapy and meds haven’t “fixed” me or my problems. I handle it all better, but there’s still a lot on my plate, and some of it can really get me down. Sometimes, when my depression gets the better of me and I start to feel alone, my therapist will prescribe something they don’t carry at the pharmacy.

“Shonda,” she’ll say, “I think you need to make an appointment with your lunch bunch.”

Don’t get the wrong idea. My friends and I do not fit your typical ladies-wholunch image. We do not get dressed up and go to fancy restaurants. In fact, we wear sweats and no makeup. The lunch bunch is sort of an unofficial support group made up of local friends. We get together now and then to let our hair down, take a break from our crazy lives, and just laugh about it all, together. We all need that now and then.

I had never had this experience until I landed in Medfield. I was probably cautious about making friends outside of baseball in the past because we moved too much, so I never felt I wanted to expose myself to people I might not be around for too long. It’s not too easy to build a lifetime friendship with someone who might be gone the next week. Baseball is so transient, it’s hard to let down your guard and find true friendship.

When we arrived in Medfield, though, I was somehow ready to broaden my horizons. The first person I met was Jen Ouimette. She had two kids in the same grades as Gehrig and Gabby. They ended up being on the same teams and in the same classes. Jen is vivacious and funny, and just happened to be from Maryland like me. We hit it off immediately. Jen made the move to Medfield easy for me. She let me know everything I needed to be doing with the kids. She also gave me a crash course in smalltown involvement and introduced me to her friends, who, along with Jen and me, came to form the lunch bunch.

The lunch bunch has always been a godsend for me, but especially when I first learned of Grant’s diagnosis. Even though I didn’t want to talk about it too much, the group was there to hear what little I could get out, and to assure me that Grant would be okay. It’s so nice to have a group of good women there for you in times of emotional need. Now that the kids are a little older and the subjects are changing, we tend to laugh more about some of the things that stress us out. You didn’t hear it from me, but occasionally a story or two about a husband will find its way into the mix.

My mom, Jen, Ellen, Linda, and Heidi became a support system that I’d never had before. They have been with me right through my biggest struggles. After I’ve met with them, I always seem to walk away laughing and feeling better. No wonder my psychiatrist “prescribes” lunches with those women.

twelve

One Era Ends, Another Begins

A
S
I
ATTENDED MY OWN THERAPY
, I
CONTINUED TO WORK
with Curt in our joint therapy. It didn’t take long for us to realize that entering marriage therapy had been a critical decision. Without realizing it, we’d started healing our relationship at an important juncture. Just as Grant forced us to rewire our parenting brains, we had to relearn our marriage from the ground up. While Grant had been part of what got us to this point, his situation revealed other fundamental issues that we needed to address.

With Curt injured and out of baseball for the 2008 season, there were a lot of questions that swirled around during the offseason about what he would do, and whether he was truly done with baseball. Over the years, this was something I’d thought about more times than I could count. Whenever things were tough with the kids or Grant was giving me a hard time, I’d find my mind drifting to a vision of what life would be like with my husband always around, being able to help in person and on the ground, not just remotely over the phone. For the wife of a baseball player, that idea of retirement sometimes becomes the Holy Grail of your marriage, an elusive date, never totally
within your grasp, at which point you imagine that all your problems will suddenly evaporate.

While Curt wasn’t officially retired after the 2008 season ended, having him around gave me a taste of what retirement might be like. And let me tell you, Holy Grail it was not. Oh sure, it was helpful to have an extra pair of hands around the house, especially with Grant, but it also revealed some of the differences that had grown between us, differences that had been heightened by all the emotional work we’d had to do with Grant over the last year and half.

Now that Curt was home, he was taking these sort of blind stabs at parenting that were only adding to the chaos. If Gehrig did something stupid—like telling his sister to get on the wrong school bus—Curt would yell at him and then level some huge punishment. “Okay, Gehrig, you can’t use the computer for six months!” he’d say. Gehrig would get all upset. Then I’d come home and he’d tell me about it.

“Six months?” I’d ask Curt privately later. “
Six months?
Are you serious? Don’t you realize you can’t enforce that?” Then I’d have to go and fix things, and find a more appropriate, enforceable punishment.

I suppose it’s to be expected that suddenly being under the same roof all the time would come with its own tensions, but it was harder adjusting to this new life than either of us had expected. Despite the struggles, in many respects it was perfect timing. It was incredibly useful to be experiencing these struggles while we had the therapy sessions to help us resolve the issues.

Still, just seeing Curt’s face each and every morning and watching him fighting the battles, laughing with the kids, and pitching in when I needed him was wonderful. Sure, he had a learning curve to master with the kids—especially Grant—and I had to find patience for that, but I had confidence that in time we would get to where we needed to be as a couple and as a family.

By Christmas 2008, Curt still hadn’t decided whether his life in baseball
was over. His arm had healed and he felt physically better. On top of that, it bothered him that retiring now would mean going out on the disabled list. As the holidays inched closer, we spoke about it many times, but no decisions had to be made until the new year.

In the meantime, we continued to work hard on getting our family and our marriage together and happy. I think the whole family could feel that things were changing. The kids enjoyed having Dad around more. Even though we had always spent Christmases together with no baseball to interfere, this one felt different. Unlike before, this year we’d already had lots of time with Curt in the summer and fall. Christmas break from school didn’t feel rushed.

It was especially nice to notice that Curt was more comfortable with Grant. He had gotten to spend more time with him and understood him better. He could even manage taking Grant shopping with him, which was a huge undertaking for anyone. Their time together was aided by the fact that Curt had been trying his hand at the video game business during his downtime that fall. Curt’s company, 38 Studios, was developing a multipleplayer online roleplaying video game, and as it turned out, Grant was very interested. Suddenly Curt and Grant had things to talk about. At last, a topic of conversation he could lock in on with his father.

In the beginning of 2009, Curt began to work out a little to see how he felt. He worked out with a man named Eric Cresse, who was working with about fifteen to twenty young major league players. Curt wanted to see if he had it in him to keep pitching. He worked out long enough to know that he could, right up to the point where he had to either make a serious commitment to keep playing or retire.

As spring training began to inch closer, Curt and I both began to feel pressure about what he would decide. At a therapy session we were talking about what he was going to do and the various pros and cons of returning to baseball. Our therapist, Dr. Xavier, listened to us go back and forth, and then,
almost out of the blue, she simply said, “You two have worked so hard to get where you are.”

Her words stopped me in my tracks; she was absolutely right. Nothing was worth jeopardizing our progress as a couple and as a family. But what went unsaid, and what she and I both knew, was that this choice had to feel right in Curt’s heart. As much as this was about our family, it was about baseball, too.

A few weeks later, Curt and I were trying out one of our new communication techniques at home: simply listening to each other. (It’s amazing how much more smoothly a relationship works when you listen more.) We set some time aside, got a sitter, and went to a local restaurant to have a quiet meal and talk, just the two of us, with no one to interrupt.

We got into a discussion about the next baseball season, and right away he made it clear that he, too, knew that Dr. Xavier was right. The last two years had pushed us to the brink—both as parents and as people. As we spoke about it, it almost seemed as if Curt was relieved that I didn’t really want him to go back for another season. I wanted us just to be a family. The kids and I needed and wanted him home.

Though we’d never actually said the words, everything we’d been working on had been building toward this decision. Curt had achieved a lot in baseball, and pretty much the only frustration he had to carry with him was the lack of resolution to his final season. But the more we talked through the situation, the clearer it was that the needs of his family outweighed his need to return for one final shot on the mound. He told me that what he was experiencing in his life off the field surpassed anything he’d ever experienced on the field. He didn’t want to miss any more of life at home.

Then he said it out loud: “That’s it—I’m retiring,” and it was done.

The next day, with no cameras, no interviews, no fans, and no tears, he wrote a letter and posted it on his Web site, stating that as of that moment, he was officially retiring. It was March 2009. None of us have ever looked back.

In the end, the last game that Curt ever pitched was game two of the 2007 World Series. The day of the announcement didn’t feel anything like I’d imagined it would. For years I had wondered when and under what circumstances Curt would retire. Whether he’d retire on his own terms or be forced out. You never know in baseball. I envisioned that when it happened, he would hold a press conference where he’d say goodbye to the fans and thank them. I would probably cry, since this was the only life I’d known for nearly twenty years. But none of that happened. There was no emotional farewell with a tipping of the cap to the crowd at Fenway followed by curtain calls and tearful postgame interviews—simply a post on the Web that made the day finally real.

No professional athlete ever makes the decision to retire based solely on his or her performance on the field, and no one in our family—not Grant, not Gehrig, nor I—was the reason Curt decided to retire. But as with any decision that affects your family, it’s hard for family not to factor in. For nineteen years baseball had been the center of our world, the one thing above all else that could dictate the pace and the schedule of our lives. Now, at long last, we were making a different choice; we were choosing to put our family squarely in the middle. As we saw it, this choice was the most important thing we could do to hold it all together.