Yesterday I took my son for a swimming lesson at the downtown Seattle YMCA. It’s for “high functioning autism spectrum disorder” children, which means he gets one on one time with a specially trained instructor for a half hour.
A few words about that. My son is so far on the “high functioning” side of the autism spectrum that he’s almost off the spectrum entirely, but once you’re on the spectrum, the label sticks. His testing occurred a few months after he and his mom moved back to Seattle after she and I separated. It was a rough time for her and for him; he stayed with his mom’s parents in Pittsburgh for a week while she got things ready in Seattle, and that was a bit of a disaster. As any three year old would be, he was confused by the fact that he had been living with his mom and dad, and now wasn’t; my ex-wife was devastated at the time, too. But like any three year old, he was empathetic and loving and just wanted to be happy, and wanted his mom to be happy too. It was hard.
By midsummer that year, my ex was probably hitting bottom. We had just started divorce counseling but I was by this time living with the girlfriend in London and in my own world, and although I was rapidly being pulled back to the reality of being a father, I was also trying to enjoy the release I felt after a long, slow decline in my marriage and the end of the high power curve of my career – this was extraordinarly hard on the ex, obviously. The first few counseling sessions were also brutal, on all of us (including the girlfriend, for that matter) and I’d come back for a week at a time, every five or six weeks or so, and take care of the son, living in Airbnb rooms while having him during the day until dinner time. It required a lot of painful, awkward, triggering engagement with the ex-wife. I was a mess, but I can only imagine what she was like when I’d walk off every night at 7pm – or take the flight back to London and my sudden new life – and she’d be left to put the son to bed and pick up her own pieces.
My son withdrew from her, wasn’t sleeping through the night – especially in the nights after I’d head back to England – would cry for no reason, was starting to reject affection. She had him tested by a child psychologist and a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (“ASD”, three very annoying letters) came back.
Oddly, the girlfriend had had a job helping severely autistic children in Cornwall after she graduated from university and was slumming about a bit amongst the surfer community there. Her experience was raw and intense, and what she related of her time there had nothing in common with what I saw in my son. And as a result, when the diagnosis came back I was resistant because my thinking was, duh, he’s having an emotional struggle right now because we’re all having an emotional struggle right now – and this sounds nothing like what the girlfriend was describing. As will happen, however, a few months after the diagnosis came back, there was an interesting essay in the London Review of Books talking about autism and its “disease of the month” feeling. The author talked about the incredible increase in diagnosis over the past couple of decades, the evolution of autism from a “disease” to a “spectrum disorder”, and pointed out how much resource (in his case, in the UK’s National Health Service) was being diverted to autistic children as a result of the spike in diagnosis.
The author then observed that his own child was “on the spectrum” (I think technically with Aspergers, but it doesn’t matter), and he made similar observations to what I was thinking about my son. But he said “I don’t care if they call my child a zebra – if it gets my family access to better care and better resources to help us all grow, then I’ll take what I can get.” That message helped me a lot to get comfortable with my son’s diagnosis. I still think it’s a bit of professional overkill on the part of the diagnosising child psychologist, and the label will stick with him probably at least until university. But the access to resources has been stunning, and not so much for me but for my ex-wife. She found support groups and resources in parenting ASD that actually just gave really good parenting advice and tools, but couched them in terms which made them more accessible for my ex-wife, grieving deeply but slowly finding her way out of the depths of the divorce.
Three years on, if you met my son today, you would have no clue that he’s on the spectrum. He has two days a week of “social skills therapy,” designed to help him overcome his ASD tendencies to isolate himself blah blah. But his therapists, without rejecting the diagnosis itself, have admitted that he’s pretty much just a normal kindergarten kid. Sometimes he is a little isolated, but he’s got lots of friends at school, loves group play time, isn’t overly sensitive, loves physical touch and contact, and shows actually a fairly advanced conceptualization of other people and what they may be thinking or feeling – what they call “theory of mind” – and how that relates to him as a different, but just as human, individual. He’s in great shape, but the diagnosis continues to get him extra help, an extra set of mindful eyes looking out for him at school and at his community afterschool care center. As a family – particularly as a non-traditional family attempting to navigate a humane divorce – we have been fortunate, all in all, to have been labeled.
Anyway, this isn’t really about that, but it’s some background on my son getting a subsidized one-on-one swimming program on Saturdays at the downtown Seattle YMCA. My ex and I were both keen to get him swimming time before the summer, as we’d been planning for him to come to Maine for a month to spend time with me and his grandparents, and if that didn’t involve beaches and lakes and swimming pools, we’d be beyond foolish. Plus I signed him up for two weeks of summer day camp at a place with a swimming pond, and we wanted him to at least be comfortable for it by the time he came out in late July.
I think we were both curious to see how it would go, though, because we had tried an infant swimming class at a community center in southeast London when he was around eight months old, and it was an absolute disaster. I’d get in my swim trunks and we’d travel through the water, and for a couple of weeks it went fine, but then on the third week he started just shrieking with terror when he’d start to get wet. After a couple of weeks of trying anything to make it work, we gave up.
I wasn’t thinking much about my son or his fears at that point; I was mostly thinking about how miserable I was, thinking about how I had gotten stuck in a marriage that felt like death and trying to drag myself through a job that involved trying to make mediocre executive and a sub-mediocre board make good decisions that they were terrified of making. I was thinking about my own fears – fear of what leaving my family would look like, long before I had met the woman who would become the girlfriend; fear of what my family would think and what my wife would do; fear of what I would do in my career given that I felt like I was at the absolute dead end. I was also mystified by the fear I saw around me, especially in co-workers and especially in what constituted “leadership” in the banking world I had been a part of for the past two decades. I thought a lot about fear but when faced with my son hating being in the water, I figured the chlorine just hurt his eyes, and put it in the back of my head.
But a lot has changed. I left my wife, which was terrible because of how it happened and the callousness that I had to bring to it to make it happen, but it’s worked out actually quite well because oddly, it allowed me to regain my humanity and be the kind of person I wanted to be all along – including being a good father, not living in my own fears but living for life, his and mine and others. I spend about eight or nine days a month in Seattle with my son, in a little apartment that someone observed is a lot like a houseboat cabin, while he lives with his mom the rest of the time and goes to his neighborhood school. My ex and I are in great shape – as I’ve observed before, not quite friends but cordial, friendly with one another, and on the same page with raising our son. He, meanwhile, is as previously described – happy, fun-loving, loving, joyful. Just what we wanted, and just what we weren’t on track to supporting when we were together.
So with that background, I parked the rental car in the UW stadium lot – along with a lot of anti-gun protesters, which was odd – and took the light rail downtown to the YMCA. My son was bubbly and excited, partially because we were riding light rail (well, mostly because of that) and partially because he was excited to see Gage, his instructor at the Y. We stopped first at the public library – a hulking yet light and skeletal Rem Koolhaas object across the street from the gaudy early 20th century faux Gothic tower block of the YMCA – and we both checked books out. Then we took our books across the street, checked in with the nice volunteer lady who gave us a towel, and headed to the men’s locker room. This was the part that frankly I was most nervous about – I was a member of the San Francisco downtown YMCA awhile back, and the amount of gay cruising there made me worry a bit about using an open locker room as a changing area for a five year old. But it was fine, and we headed down to the pool.
The pool was exactly what one would expect for a 1920s building – shaped as a fat L, with the long side with four lap lanes and the stubby side a “rec area” for lessons. We grabbed a seat by the rec area. The ceiling was maybe 12 feet high, the walls whitewashed and bleached by a century of overchlorination. Notices about the need for infant diapers, lane sharing, showering before entry, and club registration littered the walls, laminated ones being more legible than the crinkly and whitened paper notices. I was in jeans and a long sleeve t-shirt, but a collection of big, tall, fat, petite, childish, elderly, wrinkly, tight, short, tanned, pink, white, brown, hairy, bald, and mostly uncovered bodies stood around waiting for the next lesson time to begin or lazed in the not-very-deep water. No competitive swimming here: just weekend warriors and children and their parents waiting to use the pool.
Gage showed up and the boy scurried off to greet him. My ex had told me that last week – the first lesson – my son had just felt the water, mustering up the courage to go one step into the pool by the end of the half hour, but he had been comfortable with Gage, who in turn had clearly been trained to be used to this sort of thing from spectrum kids. Gage seemed smilingly unflappable in the way that twentysomething bearded thin guys trained in child psychology can be. My son bounced over to him and walked right into the pool, two steps down in the first 10 seconds, and by minute three he was sitting with water up to his chin and splashing and having fun. Gage kept coaxing him, with toys and encouragement and fun – no orders, no cajoling, just fun – to get further in. By 15 minutes in, my son was being carried through the water to retrieve toys that he had been allowed to toss around the rec area. Despite his father’s complete inability to throw a ball, he even managed to hurl one toy into the swim lane area, and a happy if husky Hispanic guy laughed and tossed it back and my son laughed back.
I was loving every second. And I was trying to comprehend how my son, who so hated the little rec pool in Lewisham when he was an infant, could be so happy in this no more attractive pool in Seattle.
I’ll be honest, I really can’t comprehend it. He’s happy now, though, and maybe he just wasn’t happy as a little boy, and if you’re unhappy, are you really going to like a loud echo-ey room that smells like poison gas? None of us were happy back then – my ex wasn’t, I wasn’t – and the house we lived in felt like it had been soaked in misery. When the girlfriend moved in, after the ex and son had moved to Seattle, she disinfected it with white sage. It smelled good but it actually did make a difference, removing the gloom that had infected that world. That gloom more broadly in his life, though, is gone.
My son and I now share a happy little maritime existence – bunks put away every morning to make room for breakfast and play, chairs moved into their nooks for game time after school, small meals made on a cutting board and microwave, everything put away and bunks back out for bedtime. His world with his mom is a lot different – there remains a gloom about her that is still palpable, and although it’s not as bad as when she first moved back to Seattle or during the last decade of our marriage, it’s still a darker shade of grey – but it still has toys, and light, and he has other children and a happy school in an idyllic neighborhood. He has lots of Legos; he plays Sorry and Go Fish and Uno. He draws and paints, he builds and writes, he reads and does math. He’s a normal kid.
I think we learn to do new things – whether it’s how to swim, or the bigger things, how to accept and change and love and forgive – when we’re in touch with what brings us joy. It could be an environment – a house we love, people who love us – or it could be we’re in the midst of doing what we love. I remember how I was when I was at the bank in Seattle, when I had a manager who was teaching me with infinite patience how to be a better manager and person, who realized that letting me do my day job without micromanagement would provide the platform to make me comfortable learning the far harder task of being a good person. By giving me a space to do what I did well and could enjoy, he carved out some peace for me to work on much harder lessons. Not many adults do that – indeed I doubt I’m one of them, at least not regularly enough to help those who face the hardest lessons. But I see the concept, quite clearly, in my son’s experiences.
I think it’s possible to learn otherwise, of course – we often have powerful lessons seared into our souls by the deepest trauma. But usually those lessons are negative; they tell us what not to do, or worse, reinforce our tendency to fear. The good lessons, though – the ones about love – need to be nurtured in a broader environment where we feel at home – or rather, where we feel at peace. My son’s homes are now at peace, and now he can learn and grow and learn to love and accept and forgive. I’m glad my ex and I have been able to create that environment.
We can’t force lessons on people – adults or children – even though sometimes we need to ask that they learn something to be safe, either to themselves or in the broader world or for our own safety as comrades. All we can do is bring the lesson to them. As a parent, I’m (hopefully) doing my best to provide the environment that will allow learning to take place – that peace, that safety, that light that settles our souls and lets learning grow. I think that’s actually the calling of friendship, too – helping create that environment in small ways, whether by offering sanctuary in lives that are otherwise in turmoil, or by reminding our friends simply that such environments can exist.
I’ve had a number of conversations with people recently – quite a few people – that have time and again come back to this theme. And I realize I’ve been writing about it too, as I think about what it means to be local again. I’ve had a mixed record of providing others with that sanctuary, however. Partly it’s because my own life has been a bit of a jumble of late, and I’ve been looking for my own sense of peace.
Last year at this time, I was still living in Leschi above the lake, waiting for the weather to warm up so that I could swim again. I had no peace then – I was trying simply to do my best to create that peaceful space for my son, doing the hard work of preparing him for school and embarking into what would be his first own world, and doing so as the parent he didn’t live with and had only recently started to visit. No swimming in lakes any time soon this year, but seeing my son in the pool yesterday downtown, I realize how far I’ve come in the past year. Bubbles have collapsed, sure, but I’ve also learned a few of my lessons, and I’m more confident and ready than I’ve felt in a long time – at least, on some things, more than before. And his world has exploded: he seems so much more human now, not an adult of course but not the odd pre-human creature that four year olds can be. That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been difficult to feel peace and to get here, but at least in my little on-land houseboat with my son on Latona Avenue NE, it’s starting to emerge on its own terms. Hopefully I’ll begin to find that everywhere.
Happily for us now, though, I’m in the mini studio writing this, the boy re-engineering his locomotive for the fifth time this morning, so maybe that’s why the lesson is clear today. I wish all of my readers a peaceful place where they, too, can keep learning those lessons, which never end. Happy spring.