A Dada

A Letter to my Eldest Son

Last night, I gave you a bath a few minutes before bed. Mom needed to blow dry her hair at that exact moment for reasons that men can never fully understand. Everything was behind schedule as a result. There was no time to do any of your sleepy rituals. You also had a rash. Going off the schedule and having a rash made you very grumpy.

I explained that I needed to put some ointment on your rash and after your bath you were getting right into your pajamas and off to bed. Everything would feel better when you woke up in the morning. We would make sure to do all the sleepy rituals tomorrow. You were paying an unusual amount of attention to me, so I was honest that the ointment might hurt at first. I assured you that the pain would only last for a little while.

You looked me in the eye and with your four year old voice said:

“That’s bullshit.”

I was thrilled.

Since this is also going to be read by other people I will explain why.

At the time of this writing, you are four years old and you have only spoken to me something like a dozen times. The average four year old speaks over ten thousand words per day. Thousands of those words are spent in conversation. You currently speak less than one-percent of the average number of words per day for your age cohort. Maybe twenty or so total utterances per day. You speak in conversation only once every few months. I celebrate any word you say to me, no matter which of your mother’s favorite podcasts it came from.

In my prayers, this will all be an old story when you’ve grown up. We will gab away for hours about how you had so much trouble speaking at Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe you won’t even be able to remember all that your mom and I did to help you find your words. If all goes well, then the Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, ABA Therapy, Interruptive Play, and the dietary supplements that your mom finds on social media will have some palliative effect. I don’t know how your gut flora could be meaningfully related to your speech, but I do know that kind of intervention won’t hurt you. If it’s safe, and there’s some plausible story, like monitoring the type of folate in your diet, we’ll try it. If it seems like we try too many things, I promise you there was an ocean of dangerous snake oil we kept far from you. And hey, at least you got a lot of educational toys to play with even if you had to suffer through long periods of me holding each one by my mouth while I repeatedly tried to get you to call it by name.

The first time you ever talked to me was after I scolded you for something dangerous that you did. Your mother said I was being too harsh and you were scared. I said that you needed to know it wasn’t safe to stand up on the edge of the bathtub and it wasn’t a joke. All you wanted to do was race around the edge no matter how many times I put you back into the water. I tried talking to you a hundred times in a normal voice and it didn’t work. I was worried you might hurt yourself. So, I raised my voice to get your attention. I promised myself I would always be your father first, above all other duties, and that I would never fail you simply to avoid making you upset. I asked your mom what all parents ask when they want to win an argument, “Do you want to be on the news?”

You came to me for comfort later, because I had never raised my voice to you before, and asked:

“Why you happy?”

It was the first time you had ever spoken to a person at all. You were crying when you asked it. You seemed very confused and like there were all kinds of things you wanted to ask me but couldn’t.

“Because I get to be your dad,” I said, and then asked, “why are you happy?”

You considered this for a moment and said:

“Puppies.”

You were two and a half years old and asleep in my arms moments later.

I did not put you down for a long while.

I thought this might be the beginning of you opening up. Your mother and I had been waiting for it to happen, we knew your language was late, but the second time you spoke to me was several months later, when you peed all over the couch. I was working upstairs in my office and your mother shrieked in a panic and shouted for me to come help. When I asked your mother what part of the couch you had peed on, you interrupted her to say:

“You’ll see!”

I suppose it was a stupid question to ask on my part, seeing as how there wasn’t any part of the couch you could pee on that would make it okay for me to stay upstairs.

The third time, again months later, when I asked you to name your favorite animal, you said:

“Brother.”

Recently, after I could tell you had been practicing it for quite a long while, you asked me how I was doing when I got off work. I said I was fine and smiled and asked how you were doing and you said great. This was after over a year of speech therapy. I gave you the biggest hug and didn’t let you see me cry when I walked around the corner. I got control of myself a few second later, because I also promised myself to not make my feelings about these things a big deal to you. Real life can’t be some sappy Hallmark movie and you have to be practical about these things. You can’t be worrying about talking and managing my feelings about you talking. While all your other speech has seemed to be accidental, accessed in some manner you could not deliberately choose, I could tell you did this on purpose. It was also something you had been practicing for weeks without success. You haven’t repeated it, but it gave me hope.

At the time of this writing, I am the only person you have ever exchanged turns with in a conversation. To repeat myself, you do talk, although much less often than other children your age, but almost never to anyone. You will say a truck, a donkey, a big fat owl, an acorn, an apple, a baby duck, a blue truck, a yellow flower, I so happy, I so proud of you, I so tired wanna go asleep, and I love dada. To my knowledge you have never seen a big fat owl, but this one is your favorite. It means you are ready to go to school or some other location. You will almost never engage in back-and-forth conversation, where I say something to you and it changes what you say back to me or vice versa.

My name is your preferred term for both cursing and expressing profound joy. Either will make you shout, “A Dada!” over and over again. It ceased to have much to do with me after you turned three the same way people say Jesus Christ or God damn it without religion entering their conscious mind. Whatever it is now, “A Dada!” began as a demand to bring me to your side. You knew I was up in my office during the day, and it was intolerable to you that you could not see me whenever you wanted. Sometimes, you sat on my lap during conference calls and played with toys on my desk and I was the luckiest man in the world. I’m still the luckiest man in the world, but I don’t let you do that anymore because now you won’t stop grabbing my microphone when I’m in meetings.

You have never exchanged conversational turns with your mother or your speech therapist or any of the other specialists we’ve taken you to see. Not your pre-school teachers, either. I’m flattered, of course. I love you and would do anything for you. I’m beyond happy you love me too. I also know it’s not in your best interest for these preferences to remain fixed. I have met enough other parents with autistic children now to know that your selection of me as your preferred caregiver is a sort of danger to you. Some autistic kids never learn to bond with anyone other than their parents and then when their parents die… it’s not good.

I leave the room when I take you to all your various therapy appointments because it makes you more interactive with the therapist. I only stay for a few minutes at the beginning and end to stay in sync on progress. It forces you into the world. The thirty or so minutes where you are with the therapist by yourself are when I write things like this letter. I will continue to leave the room until I have an appropriate amount of beautiful sad joy in my heart from seeing you make bonds with other people, and then I’ll do it some more. I especially want you to find some friends. I love you so much I want you to crack through the shell of the world and find out just how much love there is in being able to connect to anyone. There’s a big wonderful world out there.

You are working very hard to be able to talk and I tell you how proud you make me every night when I put you to sleep after we say the Lord’s Prayer, which annoys you greatly. To you, prayers are the boring part before the Phonetic Alphabet Song. Yet I know you must understand me because sometimes when you tuck your toys in for sleep you look at them very seriously and say, “I so proud of you” and you are always careful with the Jesus minifig in our van. The Jesus minifig in the van might be the only inanimate object with which you are careful.

Nothing makes you perk up more than hearing how proud I am of you. Nothing breaks you out of a fit more than me declaring in a serious deep voice that something is, “Big trouble!” I do my best to never say this unless you are about to hurt yourself or someone else, usually your little brother for which I save the dreaded, “the Biggest No No!” You have become very gentle with him recently after only three declarations of the Biggest No No. Sometimes, when you are stressed out you go to your brother and place his feet on your forehead for pressure and he giggles. This pleases me. While I am tempted to use “the Biggest No No” on other trivial things, I don’t want to risk diluting its power. The greater part of wisdom is to only use the Biggest No No for things that are actually the Biggest No No. This is the great restraint that must be practiced by all good fathers, kings, and divinities.

Most of the way you communicate is by grabbing someone’s hand and dragging them to certain locations. If you’re hungry you’ll grab my hand and take me to the pantry. If you’re thirsty, you’ll grab my hand and lead me to the water dispenser in the refrigerator. If you want me to read you a book, which you do often, you’ll grab the book and crawl into my lap. You love books. My favorite book to read to you is called “A Cozy Goodnight” because on each page I have taught you to tap, knock, stomp your feet, ping ping ping, and roar on demand.

Your favorite book is called “I Calm Down.” This appears to be a book about a child with autism having a meltdown and then calming down, but I’m not sure the author fully intended this. When you have meltdowns in public, I recite this book to you as a sort of poem. Hearing the words, “I see things all around me and I think and feel lots of things inside of me” does usually help you to calm down. If your meltdown goes on, I press my forehead against yours for the pressure you love and say, “sometimes things seem hard and my feelings are really big.” If it goes on beyond that, I pick you up and take you somewhere far away from whatever is overwhelming you and we get all the way to, “I have lots of ways to calm down. When I have big feelings, I know I can feel calm again.”

This almost always works.

Sometimes, I see you sneaking off with the books I read to you, flipping each page, and reciting the words back to yourself. I think you are starting to suspect the difference between words themselves and the game people play with words. But I still don’t know if you will ever be, as your Speech Therapist terms it, “Available.” Words signify things to you. Words mean something to you. When I read to you at night you get scared and excited in the right places. You were terrified when Aslan died and thrilled when he came back. You tracked these events in a real and meaningful way. It’s just that meaning is all locked up inside of your head, and you don’t seem to be able to access it whenever you want.

Four years. Less than a dozen conversational turns. Me only.

When you were diagnosed with level three autism I shared the news with a coworker from India. He gasped in horror and held his hand over one half of his face. He told me his sister had two children. One totally normal. The other, he confided as he switched his hand to the other side of his face and made a weird expression, was totally retarded. This was his reflexive, automatic response.

He paused immediately after putting his hands back in his lap, his mind racing over the list of things he had been told to never say in America, and realizing he had just said one. I assured him it was fine as his expression turned to terror. In his defense, we spend most of our time together talking about API calls and transaction logging so he was caught off guard. That was his spontaneous and sincere way of expressing his understanding, his concern for me, for you, and for our family. It just wasn’t American. I told him it was okay and I wasn’t offended and not to worry about it too much.

When I asked him if he meant to do the thing with his face, he hadn’t even realized he’d done it. If I can teach you anything, I hope I can teach you to believe people are better than they might be expressing themselves to be in a particular moment. I hope I can teach you to have a big spirit and a lot of grace, because I think you’ll need it. A big IQ has never helped anyone with a tiny heart. Not even if they made a bunch of money and honors. A bucket with a hole in the bottom can never hold water.

Please remember to apply this grace to yourself. You are also better than you might be expressing in a particular moment. No one ever moves through life in a perfect state of serenity, and it isn’t human to expect it of anyone. I was sorely tempted to break the finger of phlebotomist recently when we had your ferritin levels checked. I told him you were level three and we’d likely need another person to help restrain you for the blood draw, and he did the “crazy” circle by his temple with one finger when he clarified, “like autism?” The last time I was that angry, a nineteen year old girl on tranquilizers at Chuck E. Cheese was snidely explaining to me that you had to pay $14.95 and wear special Chuck E. Cheese brand socks to jump on a trampoline because of liability. This was one of the instances where you were totally melting down because you had to wait, and I had no words because I was also too autistic to understand how such a policy had come to be. And also I’m too old to be that furious at a nineteen year old on tranquilizers living the hell of working at Chuck E. Cheese.

Your mother was the first one to notice. We owe a lot to her for not letting it go. I did my best to brush it off. Some kids talk late. Some kids don’t like to talk. You were fine. I insisted you were too young for your various quirks to mean anything. I insisted that the data wasn’t very good and the deviations of the behavioral tests clustered too tightly together until later ages. I was mostly correct about this but I was wrong in your particular case. I still think you’re fine, by the way. But I mean something different by it now.

The checklist kept growing longer at every doctor visit.

Does Dutch turn when you say his name?

No.

Can Dutch follow your finger if you point at something?

No.

Does Dutch prefer to walk on his tip toes?

Yes.

I confess I did have a panic attack when I realized the struggles you were going to face were real. I was mostly indulging your mother at the first few specialist appointments. I thought it was all a sort of hobby that affluent people enjoyed and consoled myself that at least it meant we were doing okay financially. I wanted you to have an elite ultra-wealthy version of autism that wouldn’t ever actually impair you in real life. The version where your autism was going to be fodder for mommy blogs and help you on college essays with no other effect on your life. I didn’t want you to have actual autism and we all know what I mean by that. Actual autism is the kind of autism where you can’t will yourself to not have symptoms. Then we went to a “Sensory Toy Store” for children with autism and… well, you loved all the toys. Which was fine, but it was that you loved all the toys in the same way as the other children that made me finally accept it. I could tell that all those children had autism straight away, but I hadn’t been able to see it in you until that exact moment. Then all the things I had been deliberately overlooking became obvious.

I want you to know the thing I see first when I look at you is always you, my son. I don’t need a label to wrap you up inside to understand you. I don’t need a checklist to categorize your behavior to know what it means to me personally. If you want a label, you will always be my son above all else. The diagnostic part of my mind, the part that knows to be extra careful around certain activities, is something I have to activate on purpose and I make sure my brain is never too comfortable staying there. The first thing I see you with is my heart.

Your mom was the one who championed getting you all the appointments with all the different therapists. I wasn’t opposed, in fact I knew we needed to do this, but it was like she became a whirlwind. There was no place for me to insert myself other than to drive you from place to place. Your mom became a force to get you all the help we possibly could. It has been very helpful to seek help from people who see other children like you all day long.

All of your therapists insist you’re actually level two, although they admit these things are not straightforward and can be context dependent. They wouldn’t say you had autism until it was formally diagnosed and then they immediately stressed that you were obviously level two. They mention other kids with your level of speech and that they usually open up somewhere between six and nine years old. I put some trust in that because they all sound like old mechanics talking about engine trouble when they say it. Your particular problems are to them a thing often encountered with long established patterns. My guess is that there was some sort of liability issue with commenting before the diagnosis. I hope they’re right, but I’ll love you the same regardless. Even if you’re a thirty year old man who still needs me to lift him up so he can point to what Studio Ghibli movie he wants to watch on Amazon Prime.

The way I separate this in my mind is something I make sure to keep clear to myself so I know how to talk to you about it later. You do the things you do because you like them not because of autism. You love to put things in rows and columns and you love to make your Fischer Price Play People talk to each other in complex dioramas because it makes you happy. You can look at wood chips and flowers for hours on end and always find new mysteries because details are important to you. You smoosh your head into my head because you like the pressure of knowing I’m there. The checklists people put around these behaviors to name them is only a nice diagnostic even if it only gestures to some hard to pinpoint reality. You are you. You are not you plus some regrettable other thing. You will struggle with it nonetheless. That is because it is a completely natural part of the human condition to struggle with how your identity fits into the whole of the world and society. It is not some miserable extra thing that will happen to you and nobody else. I will tell you this until you believe it, if you don’t figure it out on your own first.

You are and always will be a gift. You, your mother, and your brother are both a living piece of God’s grace. I am blessed to have you both in my life. The whole world is better because you are in it. I was never fully happy until you were born. You love many things and in loving you, I see those things anew through your eyes.

You love water. You will huddle up like a cat on the countertop and simply watch a stream of water from the kitchen faucet for as long as I’ll allow. You will, alarmingly, compulsively sprint toward any large body of water you see, although I don’t know what you’d do if I ever let you actually get there. Finding time to teach you to swim is becoming a top priority, although I’m not sure how easy that will be. Your baths can sometimes last an hour as you introduce a new toy to all the other bath toys. The way you interact with toys makes me think you’ll do particularly well as you get older. They’re starting to have relationships with each other. You love the color yellow. Nothing which is yellow can be unremarked upon by you. The same is true of pink. You love dinosaurs, which is not surprising. Somewhat randomly, you love the Macy’s Department Store at the Olympia mall, even though you don’t want any of the toys or clothing. You just want to hold my hand and walk through it together. One of the ladies at the perfume counter always smiles at you even though you’ve never acknowledged her once.

As my wizardly chiropractor can attest, you also really like to wrestle. I indulge this because wrestling is the one thing where you understand turn-taking instinctively. It may be why I’m the only person you take turns with. You love when I toss you onto pillows. Or when I pretend I’m going to toss you onto some pillows. You love it when I count to three and then toss you onto pillows. I try to count to three as often as possible because when I finish and say three you react, even if you don’t do it with words. You giggle. You tense up. You know that when I say three you’re supposed to do something and then you always do it. You love wrestling so much that you even laugh when I chase you with your little brother or use your little brother as a weapon to attack you. Sometimes I announce I’m going to eat one of you unless the other one intervenes. And then you do. You both heroically counter attack me to save one another from being eaten. This is how I’m forcing you two to be friends, and it’s working.

You weigh about fifty pounds now, easily the biggest boy in your class. You’re also strong which is why I have long conversations with you about being respectful to your paraeducator at preschool. When you were not quite two years old you ripped one of your baby gates out of the wall. You jumped over the back of the couch a few weeks ago and wrapped yourself around my head like a helmet. It was like I’d been in a car accident. The chiropractor dug his elbow all over my trapezius and it hurt so bad each time that I started hysterically laughing because I’m incredibly loyal to gender norms and refuse to cry from mere pain. Easily the most physical pain I’ve ever endured. Also, the sheer absurdity of being that injured from a four year old jumping on my head was both bewildering and hilarious. It was also a great crash diet for me because it hurt to swallow anything for three days, including water.

You were very respectful while I recovered and laid a blanket on top of me while I laid out on the couch and relied on Studio Ghibli to raise you and your baby brother for a few days. You kept all the boundaries I taught you with your brother, like only holding his hand if you wanted him to go somewhere else and never grabbing him. Sure, you still stood on my hips and watched television like a prairie dog, but you respected my neck which was the most crucial part.

I worry you will think I’m weird when you’re older. That I was constantly distracted. Maybe you will resent that I vibe coded while giving you a bath. Or that I turned Claude into voice mode to work out requirements for Claude Code while driving you to your various appointments. I wonder what you think about all the systems talk. If think I wasn’t paying attention to you, this was my failing. There are always parts of my head rummaging around in the background, untangling knots and tidying shelves. This is the natural flow of my attention and I find I am powerless to change it.

If you inherited your challenges from anyone, it was probably me. I’m a notoriously bad talker and a very good systems thinker. I can see how pieces connect and work together much more easily than I can communicate this to another person. It is often the case that I make something work very close to the exact time everyone thinks I am most insane, only to have them insist I had never previously explained any of the crucial details involved in creating a functioning system. I think your mind works the same way. Once, while I went to the bathroom, you stood on a chair, undid the lock on the refrigerator, grabbed an apple, and then speared it on a butter knife so you could eat it like a lollipop to keep your fingers from getting sticky. You had never opened the refrigerator lock before and you had never used a butter knife before, either. These were pieces you had to work out end to end in your head, the same way you held a theory of mind and a sense of timing to reason you could accomplish this before I got out of the bathroom. Another time, you waited for me to start giving your brother a bath in the sink, used a toy car to climb to the upper cabinets, spontaneously undid the child lock on the candy jar, which you had also never done before, and ate four suckers in less than thirty seconds.

I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend disability doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t negate the truth that everyone’s brain is different. It’s not a sin to fail at being the same as everyone else, it’s not a sin to lack capacity, but it is a sin not to try where you’re able. It’s the journey of your life to figure out what that means for you.

I wasn’t a real proper adult before you were born, so please don’t think you were ever a burden. I didn’t even want anything worthwhile before you came into this world. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t loved something much more than they love themselves can understand what I mean by that. I had never known what it was to be willing to die to protect another person at the level of pure instinct, without having to even think about it. I love your mom, don’t get me wrong. I would certainly give my life to protect hers. Whenever there’s a loud noise I step in front of her without thinking about it. But when your brother tries to poop in the bathtub, I cup my bare hand and catch it with the reflexes of a cat because the preconscious nerves in my lizard brain knows it’s better for me to touch poop than to tolerate one moment of him standing in water polluted by his own filth. That’s what becoming a father has done for me. Radically straightened out all of my priorities and hierarchies about what is most important.

Before you were born it was like I stood on mud, always sliding this way and that as the storm took me where it would. And then, when things got better, I stood on dry ground but still could only brace myself against the wind. I knew good times were only temporary and a little rain would bring the mud right back. Nothing could ever be mine except my accident. I could never be happy except by accident. And then you were born and I felt that I stood on stone for the first time I my life. I had a footing that would never go away no matter how the wind blew or the rain fell. I knew I would do anything to shape the world to make it better and safer for you and the wind was only noise and always had been. I became, at last, immovable.

One day, I hope you find the same strength.

I started this piece over a month ago. That part at the beginning about giving you a bath last night is now a lie. Time has made it so. What can I say, I am a busy man. This is probably going to be one of the busiest seasons of my life and I already know that one day I will look back and wonder how on earth I managed to get through it all. I am a father to two little boys. I am a husband to a wife. I am leading one of the single largest ever reengineering efforts at a major institution. I am doing things like writing this letter and… well, I didn’t know how to end it at first but now I do.

One last thing to teach you, my son. This part is about what it is to stand upon stone.

If something is worth getting sad about, it’s worth thinking about it while you’re sad.

If something makes you angry, it’s worth thinking about it while you’re angry.

If something makes you so emotional you can’t pull your whole mind away from it, then it’s worth breaking a little part of your mind away to step back and think about it.

Your father’s biggest mistake in life, when he was young and arrogant and mad at the world, was to think that thinking was the only thing that mattered. That intellect was the highest of virtues. If only everyone could be like Spock, I thought, then everything would be well. Except I was never motivated to do anything because I never let myself care deeply about anything. I write this to tell you that you have to do both. Always care and always think. That’s what I mean by finding the rock beneath your feet. Whatever other strength you may possess, your heart is the only thing that can anchor you something solid.

There’s always a step toward the light. However small. However hidden. However frustrating it might be to find it. However much you may wonder why. I am so busy, so frustrated, and pulled in so many directions I have time for nothing. Except I make time for you. I found one of those steps forward last week and so did you.

In the last week you have said more words than you have said in the prior three months. You have said your longest sentences ever in these last seven days. And you did this because your father and mother loved you and because your father and mother never stopped thinking about how to help you. And your speech therapist sobbed when I showed her what I’d made for you and how much it helped you and she asked if I could make it for some of her other kids. I said yes. It’s not perfect. Nothing ever is. You’ll have plenty of challenges. But this last week, dozens of those challenges fell and you stepped forward. I am so proud of you.

I hope you can find this kind of love for yourself and for the world. If you do, wherever you go, things will be good. You will make them good. You will no longer be at the mercy of fate to find good things because good things will flow from you. And it’s the best thing in the whole world.