The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome (27 page)

A few months later, they had a sleepover on the USS
Massachusetts,
a perfect opportunity for Curt to begin sharing his World War II obsession with Grant. They spent hours touring the ship, which was heaven for both father and son. They watched movies narrated by veterans who served during the
war, and “racked out” on bunks about three feet too short for Curt. Grant’s friend Stephen was part of the troop, too, and Grant made sure he shepherded Stephen all over the ship, explaining things as if he had actually sailed on it himself. He did get distracted by the news that there was ice cream coming, though, so until dinner and dessert Grant was pretty focused on making sure he didn’t miss that.

As if Curt and Grant spending time together weren’t a reward in itself, there was another positive result of their newfound connection: Not only would Curt help me in situations with Grant that typically devolved into battles, sometimes he even took over. For example, on Saturday mornings, when the kids had soccer, I used to wake up and pray that Grant would just put on his shoes and shin guards and get in the car, but eight times out of ten, it was a fight.

Suddenly with Curt around and involved, I had someone else helping to corral Grant and get him ready. He was there, right beside me, experiencing the kind of frustration I used to only report to him on the phone. Though it was hard to see Curt struggling just as I had, it was reassuring to know that the struggle was no longer entirely on my shoulders. All at once Curt had joined me in finding solutions that worked—and also in celebrating the good parts of Grant along with me.

As he spent more time with Grant and learned more about Asperger’s, Curt grew more patient with him, eventually becoming the voice of reason in some situations. Whenever I’d get freaked out that Grant was still into Legos at the age of ten, Curt would look at me and say the thing that I’d needed to hear for years: “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I think it’s great.”

P
ERHAPS IN PART BECAUSE
of the Cub Scouts and being outdoors, or because they are father and son, there was another area that pushed Curt and Grant closer together: their mutual love for animals.

The older Grant has gotten, the more his love for animals has been readily on display. If you ask Grant what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll tell you that he wants to be a veterinarian, and honestly I can’t think of anything more fitting. He loves animals. He could watch
Animal Planet
all day, but more than that, he gets very attached to pets, and even to animals we don’t know. He will sometimes disappear when we’re out as a family if he sees a dog that draws his attention.

Kids with Asperger’s tend to gravitate toward animals. They find something soothing about being around them, and it helps calm and focus them. Dr. Temple Grandin, the autistic author of such books as
Animals in Translation,
talks about kids on the autistic spectrum relating to animals because animals are similarly senseoriented. Whatever the reason, Grant is no exception. When he’s in the company of an animal, he’s a different person.

Curt has always been into animals, so we’ve always had lots of creatures running around the house. When we first started dating he had two Rottweilers, and he’s pretty much had animals around ever since. Me, I was never much of an animal person. I didn’t grow up with pets, and I could really live without them. As far as I’m concerned, the Schillings have always had way too many animals. But Grant and Curt, on the other hand—they’re a totally different story.

Grant has always loved having all the animals around. When he was four, we got him the first pet of his own—a hamster. As much as Grant loved his hamster, he wasn’t the best at keeping it in its cage, and eventually it ran away. We should have learned our lesson from that one, but since we already had the cage in the attic, we gave Grant another hamster when he was seven, which he named Sox.

We figured that because he was a little older, he would be more careful when he opened the cage, but still he let the hamster get out of the cage a lot. This was before Grant was diagnosed with Asperger’s and before I really understood how hard it was for him to avoid getting sidetracked. Looking
back on it now, I can understand why he ended up losing his hamster a lot more than most kids do.

Usually, after it disappeared the hamster would show up within hours, or a day or so. But then, finally, the hamster seemed to be really gone. Day after day the little critter remained on the loose. After about a week, Curt and I figured it had either escaped from the house or died somewhere in the house, and we’d be smelling it soon.

We decided we needed to talk to Grant and tell him…something, we weren’t sure what. We gave ourselves the night to think about it, after Grant went to sleep. Curt and I talked about it for a while, strategizing about the proper phrasing for Grant before finally going to bed. Then, at about two thirty in the morning, I woke up. I felt as if someone was poking a fork into my leg. I figured it was a dream, and tried to go back to sleep. After a minute or two, though, the poking started again. No, it wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare: The hamster was in our bed with us!

I started screaming,
“Curt! Curt, wake up!”

I couldn’t stand to turn the light on. I was completely grossed out by the thought of the hamster being in bed with us. I didn’t want to see it.

“What’s wrong?” said Curt, groggily.

“I think the hamster is in bed with us!”
I shouted. He jumped up and turned on the light. Sure enough, there was Sox, sitting on my pillow, staring at us with this expression that said, “What, guys? Is there a problem?”

“You get it, Curt!” I yelled. I didn’t want to touch that beadyeyed thing. Just as Curt reached over to grab him, he jumped away. For ten minutes we were chasing this little rodent around the room and laughing hysterically. I often think that hamster had to have had a death wish to jump into bed with me.

Sox hadn’t been back in his cage two weeks before Grant begged me to let him take the hamster to the house of his friend who had one of Sox’s sisters. It didn’t sound like a good idea to me—it had trouble written all over it. I
would never have agreed to it except that Grant’s friend’s parents, a wonderful couple named Maura and Dave, said it was okay.

“Okay, Grant,” I said. “Just this once.” I was nervous about it, to say the least. In my mind, having Grant over would be enough of a challenge for Maura and Dave. To have Grant with an animal in tow could only add a level of frustration.

The day of the big hamster playdate arrived. I dropped Grant off, and he was so excited he bounded out of the car. He was there for about two hours, and then I returned to pick him up. Maura came to the door, red and giggling. This is a woman who is usually pretty composed and serious. In the six years I have known her, I’ve never heard her utter a swear word or raise her voice.

She kept laughing. “I have to tell you something,” she said, when she caught her breath, “and I don’t know how to say it. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

My mind immediately started spinning from one image to another, as all I could think was,
Oh, my gosh, what did Grant do?

“I was on the phone,” Maura said, “and things had gotten very quiet, so I walked up to check on the boys,” she said. “When I got there, I found them staring at the hamsters—who—” She started laughing again, and she looked at her hands, trying to figure out a way to use them to tell me what happened.

“They were…” She was having a really hard time getting the words out. Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “The hamsters had just finished having sex.”

To hear this very staid woman say “sex” set me off laughing. “Grant looked at me with the straightest face and said, ‘I’m mating them,’” she went on. “He told me they kissed, wrestled, and then went to opposite corners.” I thought that sounded a little like marriage.

Grant’s intention, it turned out, was to have hamster babies. He had read about hamster mating in a book and decided to put it to the test. He loved hamsters, he loved babies. Why bother with asking Mom and Dad for another
one when you can make them yourself? That was the whole reason behind the hamster playdate.

Needless to say, all the parents had a big laugh over it. Emails went back and forth, and we joked about visitation rights and hamster child support. For whatever reason, although I ultimately was not destined to be a hamster grammy, I did learn everything there was to know about hamster mating. Like, for instance, that it takes only fourteen days to produce a large litter of baby hammies. A hamster lesson and a great laugh, thanks to Grant.

Sadly, because of Grant’s attachment to his animals, we’ve never been able to tell him when one of our animals passed away. We thought he would get too upset. Because Grant is so sensitive to begin with, he gets especially emotional where his animals are concerned, so when his hamster finally died, we talked Gabby into telling him it was hers that had passed away. Grant felt very sad about “Gabby’s hamster” dying, and he made a sweet, genuine effort to comfort her.

The only problem was that every time Gabby got mad at Grant, she would use it against him. She’d say, “It was really
your
hamster that died!” and we would have to stare her down to make her take it back.

I
T’S IRONIC THAT WE’VE
had dogs, fish, lizards, turtles, and hamsters, and despite the fact that everyone but me seems to love all these animals, the job of caring for them ultimately falls to me. Without fail, whoever asked for each pet wouldn’t uphold his or her responsibilities around feeding and cleaning up after the animal, and suddenly I would have a new job on top of all the other caretaking I was juggling. Every time, I wound up thinking,
I should have seen this coming.
I mean, we all know it’s the mom who gets stuck with pet duties.

Somehow, though, I keep saying yes. The kids know how to get to me. They promise that this time they will
really
take care of the pet in question.
Really they will. They gang up on me. And Curt is just as a bad as the kids. I always fall victim to the onehusbandandfourkidsagainstme trick when it comes to adopting animals.

When our dog, Slider, died, Curt talked me into getting another one by saying, “We have to have a dog.” It was the last thing I wanted, but Curt just kept at it. Like Grant, he can keep up a campaign until you give in just to shut him up. Finally, I caved and gave him another one for Christmas, which we named Patton. But one dog wouldn’t be enough. After we had Patton for a year, everyone was concerned that he was lonely. And so we got Rufus, a sharpei/pug mix.

You’d think two dogs would do it, but no. A couple of years ago, Gehrig and Gabby started begging us for dogs. Curt promised them both that when they got to be thirteen, and when he was retired, they could each get their own dog. Of course, he never consulted me about this. Curt is impulsive-ADHDpersoninchief in our house. In the winter of 2009, Gabby started in on Curt again to get a dog. She was only eleven, but she had done all the homework on the Maltese. Of course, at that point Curt still hadn’t officially retired, but he played the card that since he would probably be retiring, he would be able to help out with a new dog. (I swear, I actually have five children.) So we got Ellie, a Maltese. Then, in the spring, it wasn’t fair that Gabby got hers before Gehrig got his, and we ended up with Georgia, the bulldog.

I now had four dogs. The kids’ taking care of them lasted about a month. Gabby said to me, “I am
so
over it,” and then rolled her eyes. They didn’t want to clean up the poop and the pee. They couldn’t be bothered with training. They wanted to cuddle their dogs and then let them go. As I suspected might happen, I became the main caretaker. For a while I thought the wet vac was an appendage of my body. I have become way better at spot cleaning than I ever thought I would need to be.

But when we weren’t talking about stain removal, there was a lot of excitement about having two puppies. Of course, all this did was make Grant talk
constantly about what dog
he
would get. Not surprisingly, he was relentless.

Like father, like son. More than anyone in the family, Grant and Curt were the true dog and animal lovers. Grant had an incredible sensitivity to them, and Curt was raised with them. Now that Curt was home, Grant was always talking to him about our pets, or telling Curt about the latest from
Funniest Animal Videos
or
When Sharks Attack
.

“When can I get a dog?” Grant asked a million times. When Grant gets it in his mind that he wants something, he’ll beat you to death with it. I believe he could make the most hardened criminal confess after a few minutes.

I stood my ground. “No, way,” I said. “Not now. When you’re thirteen.” But Grant knew that Gabby hadn’t needed to wait until she was thirteen. He knew there had to be some way around it. At the time, the buzz around the house was all about Gabby hitting her first grand slam in softball, and Grant put two and two together. As his last game of the season approached, he asked me, “If I hit a grand slam, can I have a dog?”

That agreement was actually tempting. Since Grant had all but quit batting, I thought this was a way to get him to really try—and there was very little chance he’d hit a grand slam, so we probably wouldn’t have to get another dog. If he went to the plate and hit the ball pretty well, he would feel good about himself and it would inspire him. He could find out what he was capable of. That’s how you build confidence, and confidence was what Grant needed. (Lord knows he didn’t need a dog. Or, I should say,
I
didn’t.) I made the deal, and the next week Grant went off to his game, prepared to hit a grand slam.

I was supposed to coach that night, but we’d recently started having Gehrig coach Grant as a way to build a better relationship between them, and Gehrig texted me throughout the game, letting me know how Grant was doing.

“He hit the ball really hard three times,” Gehrig texted. I was thrilled. As I suspected, he didn’t hit a grand slam. But what did it matter? He’d played
better than ever before. I was excited about getting home to talk to him and find out how he felt about his night. I was prepared for a celebration. But that’s not what I got, thanks to Asperger’s.