The Journal of Best Practices (17 page)

“Right.” I knew she couldn’t see my point, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed with Meredith standing right next to me. Around her, I had always played the role of Kristen’s Charming Boyfriend—my favorite character—but that guy was nowhere to be found.

“Are you guys talking about Delemont’s bridge pictures? What’s up with those?” Meredith asked.

I couldn’t keep myself from ranting. “Look, what if we had a baby and he came over and pierced her ears? Wouldn’t you be pissed off?”

“I’m not sure if I’d call that the same thing,” Kristen said.

How is that not the same thing?!

“I think you’ll be able to paint over the holes easily enough,” Meredith offered.

That’s when I snapped.

“Oh, that’s fucking great, Meredith! We’ll just paint over it. No problem, right? Grab a fucking hammer and let’s smash some walls! No big deal, right?” I snatched Delemont’s cigarette lighter from the patio table and chucked it into the grass below. “Fuck all this!” I reared back to kick the table, but then I saw Kristen’s face. I’d never seen her look more stunned or horrified. I didn’t even bother looking at Meredith. Suddenly, my head was spinning and I couldn’t take myself or them. I barged past Meredith, stormed inside, and went upstairs to our room.

Fuck
.

I’d gotten that stunned
What just happened?!
look millions of times before—from teachers, from my parents, from friends—but never from Kristen. She had just caught her first glimpse of her fiancé going from zero to boiling in an instant, with no legitimate provocation. For more than a year—scratch that, for more than a decade—I had managed to conceal from Kristen my hardwired incapacity to deal with things like nail holes and anger. I had always kept myself in check around her, and then suddenly this happened.

To Kristen, nail holes were no more significant than fingerprints on the doorknobs or dust on the carpet. To her, such intense anger about something so superficial was far more damaging than the holes themselves. But I didn’t get that. All I saw was her face during my outburst, her expression and speechlessness mirroring my desperation. For the first time, I didn’t feel like the life of her party, and I hated myself for it.
Great. Nice job, shithead. Mer just got it, too—that’s perfect. Game over. You’re the freak now, and they’re all going to hate you. Happy? Happy, fucker?
I just wanted to crawl into my old closet at my parents’ farmhouse, or push myself facedown through the halls to my old hiding spot behind the dining room door, and wait for the episode to leave my head.
Fucking Delemont.

Kristen eventually joined me on our bed to talk about what had happened. Had we known that I had Asperger’s, there wouldn’t have been so much confusion. We might have known that I tend to feel a greater emotional connection to inanimate objects, like walls, than I do to most people. We might have known that a sense of order and control was critically important to me. We might have known that my brain wasn’t built to tolerate reality when reality doesn’t match my expectations. Circumstances being what they were, however, an explanation was in order.

“Everything okay?” she asked.

I was too ashamed to look at her, so I stared at the wall and nodded.

“Is this really about a few nail holes? Or is there something else?”

“Today it’s about nail holes. But what about tomorrow? It might be wild parties, complete strangers driving motorcycles through our house. There’s no control. I can’t deal with this.”

Kristen laughed. “So, today’s nails open the door for tomorrow’s home-obliterating motorcycle parties?”

I couldn’t laugh with her because it made perfect sense to me.
Of course! Duh.
She tried explaining the difference between reacting and overreacting, saying, “It’s natural to get upset about things. I was just surprised by the intensity of your anger. You can get mad, but it’s not okay to get so mad that you lose control.” I understood her point, but I couldn’t imagine myself reacting any differently.

“I don’t know what my problem is,” I said. “I just can’t handle this.”

“Dave, I think you just need to relax. This whole year is about having fun. We just have to let some things slide. Okay?”

I said okay, as I would hundreds of times that year when being told exactly the same thing. You have to relax. You have to pick your battles. Let’s just enjoy this. “Okay.”
But how?

The year progressed without any more nail holes, without the dreaded wild parties, and without any crazed motorcyclists cutting donuts on our immaculate oak floors. (It’s worth mentioning, however, that Kristen cut a deep four-foot scratch into the kitchen floor by accident, and unlike Delemont’s nail holes, there was no way to repair it without full replacement. Yet I managed to laugh that one off. Forgiveness is easy when you’re in love.)

But that’s not to say that things got any easier. Meredith contracted conjunctivitis—pinkeye—and I quarantined her for days. It wasn’t a formal quarantine; she had simply gotten the hint that I was fearful of contamination when she saw my hand, protected by a latex glove, slipping a list of nearby hotels with phone numbers under her door after I found out that her eye was crusted shut with pus. “The antibiotics I’ve been given make it impossible to spread,” she insisted from behind her closed door. But come on. That’s just ridiculous.

Worse than exposing my aversion to bacterial infections, however, was the fact that I never quite figured out how to cope with the social dynamics of the household. My failures in dealing with group situations began taking a toll on both Kristen and me. Spending time with Delemont or Meredith individually was never a problem. I knew that the key to hanging out with Delemont was always to talk sincerely and literally, to include tremendous detail, and to tell highly exaggerated jokes. I eventually learned how to manage Meredith as well. Details seemed to confuse her, as did having to repeat herself (“Wait, repeat which part? What was I saying again?”), so I learned to get to the point quickly and then activate hyper-listening in preparation for her astoundingly fast-spoken response.

But these techniques for one-on-one engagement flew out the window whenever we convened as a group. Game nights, especially, were ripe for disaster. For weeks, we followed a particular sequence of games: Catch Phrase! followed by Scattergories, followed by Kristen and Meredith gossiping to each other while Delemont and I played Mastermind. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed this pattern, but I sure did; the routine had become as essential to game night as the games themselves. When someone suggested a new game, or when the group decided to change the sequence, I couldn’t handle it.
Scrabble?!
I would participate in the games, but my lifelong pattern of scowling and brooding in response to a change in routine would take hold of my behavior. I would grow silent and passively belligerent:
We always start with Catch Phrase!, and they know that, so why are we mixing it up?
Delemont might laugh about something, then look to me to keep the joke going, and I’d snub him by asking if we were still playing. “Well, are we? Because I thought this was game night. So, whose turn?” If someone asked me what was wrong, I’d say that nothing was wrong and then grow even quieter.

The fun would plow forward without me, and my anger would turn inward:
You’re only ruining this for yourself, dumbass. They think you’re a jerk, and they’re right.
Kristen and our roommates would assume that I was angry with them, although I thought that I could trick them into thinking I was crabby about something else. They knew me better than that. “Dave, what’s the problem? Why are you pissed at everybody?” Kristen would whisper.
I don’t even know.

We’d end the evening early, Delemont and Meredith would return to their rooms, and Kristen would be disappointed with me—her sulking fiancé, who should have been enjoying the company of friends. “Is it impossible for you to have fun now?” she’d ask, and I’d tell her to forget it. The awkward evening, with all my mistakes, would play in a constant loop in my head for days until something would happen, for instance dropping my phone, and then I’d melt down. Sometimes I would sit in my car, furious at myself for making everything so hard, sobbing uncontrollably, slapping myself in the face over and over and screaming, “Fucking asshole! Fucking asshole!” But who hasn’t done
that
from time to time?

The fact that I used to sit around in my car and punch myself in the face after a rough night of Scattergories should have been a clear indication that something was amiss. It wasn’t until years later, however, that I’d understand the underlying problem: I didn’t know how to go with the flow. As life skills go, adaptability is perhaps one of the most essential. Things happen unexpectedly or they don’t always break in your favor, and maintaining composure under those circumstances is often the only way to get through them with your sanity intact. Unfortunately, those of us with Asperger syndrome tend to be short on flexibility, just as we are on empathy and conversational give-and-take. (If you’re keeping score at home, that’s Asperger’s three, marriage zero.)

This natural disinclination to go with the flow made living with me almost unbearable for Kristen and our roommates. Back then I was jeopardizing friendships with my emotional outbursts, but as time went on, the stakes became much higher. My inability to cope with real life and the resultant anger it fostered made me, if not an unreliable marital partner, then certainly an unpleasant one. And it didn’t take long for my status as a husband to erode from “unpleasant” to “unworthy,” all because of my inability to deal. Going with the flow was especially important after we had kids and life became truly unpredictable. As infants, Emily and Parker didn’t seem too concerned about my daily routine. My days amounted to a series of interruptions. As the kids grew, they took cues from our behaviors as to how they should react to things, and as someone who lost his mind over hamburger buns, I was not a very suitable role model. With our children’s development at stake, it was more important than ever to learn how to minimize the damaging outbursts and behaviors.

Fortunately, the kids and I had Kristen to show us how to roll with life’s punches and how to do it with a smile. “What can you do?” she’d say with a shrug, heating up a steamy shower at three
A.M
. if one of the kids was suffering a croupy cough. Almost as a matter of protocol, I’d insist that we head straight to the emergency room (just as I did whenever one of them bumped their knee or had a runny nose), and with wet hair clinging to the sides of her face and a toddler nearly asleep on her hip, she’d stop her gentle lullaby to comfort me, saying, “If it gets worse, we’ll go. But I think the cough sounds better, don’t you?”

Kristen had expected our year living with Delemont and Meredith to be one of the happiest years of our life together—a dream that exploded in her face because of my failure to adapt. While someone else might have packed her things and left, Kristen didn’t give up on me. Instead, she handled it with her usual grace. Not gracefulness, not finesse, but authentic grace that she bestowed on me even though I hadn’t earned it.

After our roommates moved out, it occurred to me that I had run out of opportunities to enjoy living with them. I apologized to Kristen for ruining the entire year and she shrugged it off. “This year was a disappointment, but then again, I didn’t know how challenging it would be for you.” Then her eyes brightened, and she added, “We’re getting married in a month, and then we’ll have lots of opportunities to enjoy things together. So let’s just relax and have fun.”

That’s how Kristen handles things. She doesn’t look backward, only forward. In doing so, she had committed the ultimate act of going with the flow. It was a perfect model for me to follow, but of course, I failed to make that connection. And for years, I kept failing. She constantly had to remind me to chill out. The other cars got a green arrow and I didn’t: “Relax, Dave. It happened four hours ago. You can’t let it ruin the whole day.” Emily ate a candle: “This isn’t the end of the world, Dave. No, you don’t need to fly home from Italy, she’s fine.” Both of our children proved to be terrified of people in costumes
after
we waited in line to buy tickets at Six Flags Great America: “Dave, oh well. Let’s find something else they’ll enjoy.” “Okay,” I would say.
But how?

Sometimes I argued with her. “Going with the flow is for hobos and douchebags. It’s for people without goals or vision. People with nothing to accomplish. Me, I’d rather accomplish things.” She would insist that going with the flow wasn’t about complacency or letting the tide carry you along. “People like you especially need to learn how to adapt,” she’d tell me. “You do have your own vision, you do have goals to pursue. But life throws punches and if you don’t roll with them, you’ll get knocked down and you won’t accomplish anything.” For the longest time, her point failed to sink in, even when she put it bluntly: “I don’t like being around you when you’re flipping out over stupid stuff. Knock it off.”

Her message finally clicked for me in the fall of 2008. I was sitting on the floor in our family room, trying to make good on my most recent Best Practice: folding laundry. I had a meeting with my sales director the following morning, and I was watching
SportsCenter
on ESPN in preparation for his inevitable sports banter—sort of like cramming for an exam. The show’s anchor made a reference to one of the greatest tennis champions of all time, Roger Federer, and as I squared up a pair of boxers, I took a moment to wonder what it must be like to be the best at something:
This Federer can’t lose—he just wins all the time. Well, not all the time. I guess he can’t win every point. He doesn’t win every game, actually, or even every match. But he’s the best—I like that. Federer knows what he needs to do and he doesn’t let a bad call or a loss bring him down and . . . OHHHH!