The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (32 page)

Once a month, we move the basketball stuff out of the way and use our video projector to throw a movie up against the big back wall. (It’s expensive to buy the rights to films, so we don’t do this as often as we’d like to, but we did buy the HBO movie about autism awareness activist Dr. Temple Grandin, and all the moms in the audience cried.) We’re still not fully funded, and there’s a lot we still want to do. A wall in the stairwell has been half primer, half celery green for a while, and some of the furniture, all of which has been donated, is not in the best condition. But a couple of times a month, a group of moms gather around that red couch just to talk, while the popcorn machine hums along and the kids do martial arts in the back room. This is my lifelong goal, to be running a place where nobody ever tells a kid what he or she can’t do or tries to “fix” anyone. It’s Jake’s hope to have these safe
spaces for autistic kids all over the country, because we all need other people and other families—a community—to help us through.

That first day, I could see it as it would be: Moms drinking tea and talking about doctor’s appointments and food aversions, while their kids explored every nook and cranny of the building, eventually ending up in a game of tag in the gym. Dads playing catch with their sons, using the soft, squishy balls that we’d bought.

A reporter from a tiny local newspaper called the Frankfort
Times
was there, and she talked to Michael and me, as well as to Jake. Small local papers had done a number of stories about Little Light and the sports program, and we were always happy for the publicity. We wanted people in the area to know that the charity was there for them. The article, when it appeared, was a brief description of the building and the services we hoped to provide.

Then we got a call from
The Indianapolis Star
. I still don’t know how the reporter heard about Jake, whether it was through the Frankfort
Times
, the Kirklin Town Council, or someone else, but the reporter asked if he could come out to talk to us. Of course, we said yes. Interest from the
Star
was very exciting, even if it turned out to be only a little piece in a way-back section of the paper. When the reporter showed up at our house, Michael and I were meeting with our accountant to talk about refinancing our home. After a few quick questions, I turned the interview over to Jake, confident that he’d represent the charity well. He knew everything, and I thought it might even be interesting for the reporter to hear firsthand what sorts of things the kids were doing there with their friends.

“Don’t forget to tell him about family game night,” I reminded Jake, then went back into our meeting. Ten or fifteen minutes later, I heard the front door close. When I asked him later, Jake said that their chat had gone well. It never occurred to me to ask what they’d talked about.

Later that week, just as daycare was starting, the
Star
reporter showed up again at our house. He asked me for a few pictures of Jake for an article that would appear in the Sunday paper. That night, Dr. Darold Treffert called to ask our permission to talk to the
Star
reporter
about Jake. Dr. Treffert lives and works in Wisconsin, so I was impressed by the rigorous reporting for a little article about an autism charity in Kirklin, Indiana, population under eight hundred.

On Sunday morning, we woke up early to get the paper. I was really excited. Even if the article was buried behind the ads for yard sales and free kittens, it was still a big deal to us. We piled into the car and drove to Kroger, a grocery store about a mile up the road from our house. When we pulled into the parking lot and got out of the car, we heard people nearby saying, “There he is! There he is!”

Mike and I looked around, confused. Our town doesn’t get very many celebrities, but once in a while a NASCAR driver will come through, and people will make a big fuss. But there wasn’t any NASCAR driver in the Kroger parking lot. All those people were pointing and looking at Jake! Jake, who was pulling up his shorts and giving Ethan a hard time about a Katy Perry song he liked. Before we knew it, there was a crowd gathering around our son, and they were asking him to recite pi.

When I saw Jake’s face on the front page of
The Indianapolis Star
, I was shocked. “Why?” I kept asking Michael, truly confused. “Why does anybody care about Jake?”

It’s not that I didn’t think he was special, but I’m his mother; I’m
supposed
to think that. I understood that Jake was unusual, but he’d never seemed “cover of
The Indianapolis Star
” unusual. All our friends knew about what he was doing, and nobody had ever made a big deal out of it. Putting him on the front page of the paper seemed a little extreme.

By the time we got home, the phone was ringing off the hook. I talked to Jake’s old elementary school teachers and the parents of kids he hardly knew, as well as our friends. Everyone was reaching out. We hadn’t kept in touch with a lot of these people, so they had no idea what he’d been up to. One of his former teachers thought that we’d left her school because we’d moved. Talking to them, I started to understand how strange Jake’s story must have seemed to an outsider. The most common reaction was incredulity: “Is he really doing all this stuff?”

By the afternoon, I was exhausted. It seemed that we’d caught up with everyone we’d ever met, and all this on the heels of the charity’s successful first day, which had been a huge event in itself. By early evening, the story had been picked up by the Associated Press, and consequently by almost every major media outlet in the world. By the time we woke up the next morning, it was everywhere.

Honestly, I’ve never experienced anything in my entire life like the next few days. Every morning show I’d ever heard of, and every newspaper and television station, called us. We’d pick up the phone, and a radio announcer would be on the other end saying, “You’re on the air!” Our neighborhood is normally completely quiet. Aside from birds or the occasional kid yelling to a friend as they wheel past on their bikes, you never hear
anything
on our block. So it was very unusual to wake up to the sound of a commotion.

“You have got to be kidding me,” I heard Mike say from downstairs. There were reporters camped out on our lawn.

People called from Hollywood. Jake got job and scholarship offers from all over the world. Research firms and think tanks called, along with Stephen Wolfram, the man who wrote the Mathematica software and developed WolframAlpha, a computational knowledge engine. Later, a friend sent me a Chinese newspaper. The only thing I could read were the words “Jacob Barnett, age 12,” floating in a sea of Chinese characters.

We could barely leave our house. There were girls outside holding up signs that read, “We love Jacob!” Wherever we were—at Dunkin’ Donuts, at our brunch restaurant, at the grocery store—people came up and asked Jake for his autograph or to take a picture with him. (To his credit, Wes made only one effort to cash in on his brother’s newfound notoriety. “Maybe we can get to see [skateboarder and actor] Tony Hawk now?” he said hopefully.)

A therapist who had been working with a kid in my daycare for a solid year screamed like a teenager when Jake opened the door. That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever seen. “You were here last week. Nothing has changed between last week and this week,” I said.

We were scheduled to go to a wedding the next weekend, but I
canceled. At that point, Jake would have upstaged the bride and groom.

The glaring spotlight was overwhelming and, frankly, pretty unpleasant. Reporters can be very persistent when they’re on the hunt for a story, and some of them were aggressive. A lot of the charity our family does is anonymous because I really do feel that it’s more Christian that way, so this flood of attention was unwelcome, to say the least. And I was scared. People were acting crazy. I caught a pair of tabloid reporters from London trying to break into our basement. That night, I made Jake a bed on the chaise longue in our bedroom, and he slept there for a month.

It was also increasingly hard to protect him from what other people were saying about him, as when a tabloid in the UK said that he’d make the perfect supervillain. That comment hurt his feelings. “Why would they say that without knowing me?” he kept asking us. “You know I would never do anything to hurt anyone, right?”

The media eventually moved on, but the experience was a transformative one for Michael and me. For years, we’d thought of ourselves as living in the shadow of Jake’s autism diagnosis. Now we have a different perspective. Jake is still autistic. His autism is not something he has overcome, but something he overcomes every day. He is still acutely sensitive to all sorts of things that go completely unnoticed by the rest of us: bright lights, the humming of an incandescent bulb, the change from concrete to tile underfoot. He takes pride in the ways in which he is different, and given the chance to drop the label, he has chosen to keep it. But the media helped Michael and me understand that autism is no longer the dominant theme of our journey with Jake.

Initially and for a long time afterward, I didn’t understand why people responded to Jake the way they did. I think I have a better understanding of it now. Growing up with my sister, Stephanie, an art prodigy, and marrying Michael and mothering my children may have skewed my understanding of how unusual these gifts actually are. As soon as the piece in
The Indianapolis Star
came out, I talked to Dr. Treffert, who explained that there’s a scale of gifted children ranging from mildly to moderately to highly to exceptionally to profoundly
gifted. Jake belongs in the profoundly gifted group. According to Miraca Gross in her book
Exceptionally Gifted Children
, there is less than one profoundly gifted person per one million. People like Jake are extremely rare.

Finally, all the feedback from people who learned about Jake helped shed light on why his story captured the imaginations of so many. Narnie said it best: “Jake is good news.” People right away tapped into the fact that Jake is determined to do something good with his gifts. At a time when newspapers are filled with doom and gloom about America’s children and their terrible reading scores and growing rates of obesity, about guns in schools and
Teen Mom
on TV, there’s Jake. Indiana’s public schools are struggling so much with their budgets that some of them have cut bus service. There’s not a lot of good news about kids in this country, but Jake is indeed good news.

Jake’s story is an American story, too. Whenever you read about those terrible test scores, the article always ends in the same way. China, or India, or wherever is going to take over because their kids can do math and our kids are hopeless. Of course, that’s not true, but many of the people who contacted us said that’s why they were so heartened to know that Jake was out there. And even though I’m glad that children all over the world who love math are surging forward, I confess that seeing the Wikipedia page about Jake that began “Jacob Barnett, American mathematician,” made my heart soar.

It’s important to Michael and me to explain that there’s nothing supernatural or otherworldly about Jake. Some devotees of the mystical healer and psychic Edgar Cayce believe that Jake is Cayce’s reincarnation, as predicted by Cayce himself. This is a normal Saturday for me: I pick up the phone and have a conversation with someone who believes that my son is the fulfillment of some mystical prediction.

But Jake is not supernatural. He doesn’t even come from a private school in Manhattan. He lives in a cornfield in Indiana. He doesn’t look different from other kids his age, and he doesn’t act differently either, at least not most of the time. He’s just a goofy, adorable kid in
a backward baseball cap who can do incredible things. Wrapped up in a very ordinary-looking package is this extraordinary mind.

Michael and I agreed to do the CBS newsmagazine show
60 Minutes
partly to dispel any kind of supernatural myth. The first time the producer called, we honestly felt as if we’d entered the Twilight Zone. “We’re going to hear Rod Serling’s voiceover any minute now,” Mike wrote on our phone pad, cracking me up. But after we talked to the producer, we believed the show was committed to doing a thoughtful piece. I felt that I could trust them not to make Jake seem like some freak of nature. And I knew that if we gave hope to even one mom who was being told by experts all the things her autistic kid couldn’t do, it would be worth it.

Knowing
60 Minutes
will be filming in your house is an excellent way to get your husband to deal with all those annoying little projects he’s been putting off. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be yelling, “Jacob Barnett, you’d better be darn sure that Van de Graaff generator of yours doesn’t electrocute Morley Safer” up the stairs—well, I just don’t know what I would have said.

A
fter the article appeared in
The Indianapolis Star
, we were inundated by requests for interviews. A lot of them came from academics interested in talking to Jake. One email in particular stood out, from a doctor at Ohio State University who studies child prodigies.

I’ll be totally honest. I approached the email with a kind of horror. There was something a little unseemly about the idea of allowing my child to be used for scientific research, and I wasn’t interested in it at all. Mike couldn’t resist ribbing Jake about it: “We’re donating you to science!”

Jake responded dryly, “They can study me when I’m dead.”

But as soon as I opened Dr. Joanne Ruthsatz’s message, I could see that I had judged her too quickly. First of all, the research she was doing was itself compelling. Dr. Ruthsatz specializes in the genetic underpinnings that prodigies and autistic people have in common. Jake was already very interested in that topic, particularly because it has the potential to help a lot of people who are genuinely suffering.

In addition, Dr. Ruthsatz sounded like a real person, and she also sounded like someone who would treat Jake like a real person, not a rat in a maze. Her playful energy and her passion for her research were contagious. She invited us to come to Ohio.