Raising Cubby (30 page)

Today, there is a whole industry built around advocating for services. Lawyers and consultants hire themselves out to parents to force school districts to provide the support the law says they must deliver. Schools might fight tooth and nail, but the lawyers usually prevail. However, it never occurred to us to pursue a legal remedy. We assumed we were on our own. Little Bear had fought with the schools back in South Hadley, but all she got was an agreement that they would pay for Cubby to be tested. And I had never looked to others to save me or anyone in my family. The way I saw things, from the moment I left home as a teenager, I worked or starved. There was no safety net. It never occurred to me that things might be different for my son.

I sure wish I’d known a little more and hired someone to fight hard for Cubby. Twenty hours a week of one-on-one coaching might have made a world of difference for him. But I didn’t know, and it didn’t happen. I told Cubby we had to cut back on tutoring. Instead, Martha volunteered to help with organization. She accompanied him to Sylvan and watched carefully to see what they were doing. His coaches were happy to help her and offer advice. It seemed pretty straightforward.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. His grades dipped again, and stayed that way. The admonishing notes resumed and their tone made me feel as if our fitness as parents was challenged right alongside our son’s poor academic showing. At first we didn’t know about the warnings, because Cubby came home before us and he took to looting school correspondence from the mail. Weeks went by with no word from school, and I thought we were on track. The report card we pried from him set that notion straight.

I felt sad and scared and powerless. I could not afford the kind of help he needed, and the help I could afford didn’t seem to make
any difference. The worst thing was, my son was losing interest in school. With every nasty note, he lost a little more hope that he’d ever actually graduate. At the same time, he saw his budding success with chemistry, and thought the same kinds of things I’d thought about school versus electronics many years before.

“If I’m never going to graduate, why should I stay? I’m doing just fine learning chemistry on my own. What do I need high school for?” I tried to tell him how hard it would be to land a job as a chemist with no academic credentials.

“You did fine,” he responded.

“Cubby, the situation was totally different. I joined a band, and used success there to get a job designing sound effects. And look at me now! I fix cars! Where’s the brainpower in that!”

If he wanted to be a chemist, I told him, he needed to go to college. In fact, college wasn’t even enough. His ambition was to do something big, like invent a new explosive or design a new antidepressant. To do that kind of work, I explained, he’d need a doctorate from a top-tier university.

He still didn’t give in. “I could invent things, like Bob Jeffway. If I bring a big company a chemical process that works, they aren’t going to ask where I went to college.”

I didn’t know what to say, because he was basically correct. Bob was one of my oldest friends. We’d been engineers together at Milton Bradley almost thirty years before. Back in 1979, Bob and I both earned a great living as engineers and thought we had it made. Yet the wages we earned then seemed like peanuts compared to the royalties Bob made later, when he went back to those same companies as a game inventor and designer. Cubby knew that. There was no personnel officer scrutinizing the credentials of inventors when they walked in the door. If someone brought Milton Bradley a winning game, they grabbed it. It didn’t make a shred of difference whether the designer walked out of a Florida swamp or graduated with honors from Harvard.

“It’s a hard road, Cubby,” was all I could think to say. “Being a freelance inventor, with no one bankrolling your lab or your lifestyle—that is a hard road to follow. No matter what you say now, life as a chemist will be a thousand times easier if you get a good education. I just want you to make the right choice.” All I could do was hope he was listening.

Teenagers are very different animals from little kids. Little Bear and I found that out when Cubby was about fourteen or fifteen and began making plans of his own with his new Amherst friends. We parents weren’t included. Actually, we weren’t even consulted. Cubby simply began riding the bus to his friends’ houses, or getting rides, and staying late into the evening. On days when he was supposed to be with his mother, he’d call her and say, “I wanna stay late. I’ll have Dad pick me up, and I’ll stay with him.” Over the space of a year, he went from staying with Martha and me three nights a week to living in Amherst five or even six nights a week.

There were times when his mom got mad at that arrangement. “I need to get a lawyer,” she would say. “You’re undermining our equal-custody agreement.” She thought I was conspiring to take Cubby away from her, but I wasn’t. I told her so over and over, and eventually she realized it was true. Our son was old enough to make his own decisions, and he was choosing friends and community over us. He might have spent more nights in Amherst, but I didn’t see him all that much either. If he was at home, he was in his room with the door shut, on the phone or on the computer.
If he was out with friends, I didn’t see him except briefly on the ride home.

With every passing day, he was becoming more and more determined to run his own life. Parents who were once founts of knowledge became dumb as rocks overnight. Not only were we stupid, we were uncooperative, embarrassing, and totally useless. It was nice to be needed.

“Dad,” he would say. “I need a ride.” That became our principal conversational exchange. I wasn’t sure how to go beyond that. I realized I relied on Cubby to start and maintain conversations. He’d always launched into monologues when I picked him up after school. I’d spent countless hours learning about schoolmates, Beanie Babies, Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, or whatever else was on his mind. I didn’t have to do anything to keep the flow going; the challenge was making it stop. When that suddenly changed, I didn’t know what to do.

Being Aspergian, it did not occur to me to say, “Hi, Jack, how was school?”

Being a geek himself, it did not occur to my kid to expect any questions.

When we got home he’d go into the kitchen, wash his hands five or six times, look at them, and wash them once again for good measure. Then he’d head for his room. His hand washing—sometimes as much as fifty times a day—was the most visible of his compulsive behaviors, now that he had outgrown brushing the hair off his head. I thought it was mostly harmless, except when he washed his hands so much the skin turned raw. We went to the doctor, who prescribed creams, but we never found a treatment for the underlying behavior.

Despite the hand washing, for a long time he had a powerful aversion to the shower, and he’d stay out of it for a week at a time. Then something changed and he went to the opposite extreme, taking hour-long showers with the water on hot. He’d ignore my
yelling through the bathroom door, and I’d get so annoyed at the waste of water that I’d shut the lines off in the basement. Then he’d emerge, swearing.

“Run the shower all day when you pay the water bill,” I told him. We learned to get along the best we could.

Maybe his eccentricities don’t need treatment
, I thought.
Not everything does
. My dad had many Aspergian traits and he also washed his hands compulsively. Now that he’d gotten older and stopped drinking, he was okay and functional. My real concern was staying engaged with Cubby as he got older. That was hard to do when he stopped talking to me except to yell.

Of course, Cubby’s sudden lack of interest in friendly conversation didn’t stop him from pointing out my many defects and character flaws. Every week I’d hear some variation on, “You’re acting like a weirdo freak, Dad, all my friends think so!” I had known about my Asperger’s for a number of years, and I was willing to accept that perhaps I was somewhat different from the other dads in the area. However, I didn’t think that was what he meant. Sure enough, a bit of observation made it clear that the times he said I was weird, or a bad parent, or the worst dad of all were when I declined to do what he wanted. Thinking that through, I concluded that he had no idea if I was bad or not. How could he know? I was the only adult male he had ever lived with. He had no idea what his friends’ dads did, and they no doubt described their parents with the same pugnacious derision he reserved for me.

That insight certainly made me feel better. After all, I did want to be a good parent. But it didn’t change what I had to deal with. All Cubby knew was that I wasn’t fulfilling his every wish. For that I was deemed worthless.

I tried to take it all with good humor. He was still my Cubby, and I liked him a lot. Even when he was totally obnoxious, self-centered, and combative. For now, I controlled the house, the car, and the
money. He would have to act nice and deal with me until he could move out. I wondered how soon that day would come.

Thinking about that, I realized he had abandoned parents for friends. The year before, I’d wondered how long my little boy would remain a boy. Suddenly and without warning, I knew the answer. He wasn’t a boy anymore.

“But he’s not a man yet, either,” my friend Bob told me. My buddy Neil had a better response. “This is when you chain him to a tree in the woods, and bring him a sack of food once a week. He’ll either get nicer and come home, or run away.”

Yet he wasn’t always nasty. There were times he’d still snuggle up to me and listen to a story, especially when he was going to sleep. I’ll bet he’d be embarrassed to admit it today, but there was still a little boy hidden deep inside.

Cubby had always been resistant to discipline. The more he moved from the parental orbit to the wider universe of his teen friends, the harder it was to obtain behavioral compliance. He was constantly testing us. “Call for a ride by eight,” I’d say, “or get yourself home by nine.” Sure enough, 9:05 would come and the phone would ring. “Come get me, I need a ride.”

What do you do in a situation like that? You can’t leave your kid at some other parent’s house. You have to get him. What then? The parenting books made it sound so easy, but it wasn’t. If I refused to get him, I ended up with a snarky parent in my driveway, pissed off that he had to bring my kid home. “Tell him to walk home,” I’d say, but they never did.

Cubby became a master at playing me and his mother against each other, too. That made it very hard to impose consequences or levy any sort of punishment. We agreed that we wouldn’t whip him or cut off his ears, so what did that leave us? Cut off his allowance? All that got was a call to his mother, or my mother, or my brother, and someone would replace what we took away without our ever knowing. He’d learned to circumvent us very nicely.

The same situation applied for his other behaviors. When he rode that bus to his friends one time too many, he’d call Little Bear and have her get him instead of me. He’d stay at her house a day or two and hope I’d forgotten his previous transgression by the time he came back.

Like most teenagers, he was difficult to raise.

“You need a job,” I told him. “A working kid is a happy kid, and everyone knows children are born to the yoke.” He just looked at me, wordless.

Jolly fun parenting had come to an end.

In the spring of his fourteenth year, Cubby did something extraordinary. He got a girlfriend. Others may take girlfriend acquisition for granted, but for geeks like me and my son, romantic success is far from assured. I knew that from personal experience and years of loneliness. When I was Cubby’s age, I had only dreamed of holding hands or kissing a girl. My kid actually pulled it off.

Of course, I didn’t find out about the girlfriend because he told me. I had to deduce it from his behavior.

The first thing I noticed was that he stopped coming home from school on the bus. Instead, he began walking into town and hanging out with friends. At least that’s what he said. I didn’t mind him doing things after school, but I did mind the phone calls. “Dad,” he would say, “come get me. I missed the bus.” The first five or six times, I believed him. But when it became a daily thing, and I found myself picking him up at a café half a mile from school … something was up.