Global News

June 16, 2012

Father’s Day, With Autism: Rethinking the Cool Dad

Full story: The New York Times | By JOEL YANOFSKY

The cover story in the June issue of Wired magazine, celebrating geek dads, is ruining my Father’s Day. It’s got me thinking: should I be doing more?

Like building a hovercraft, dissecting a baseball,making gummy worms glow or instilling “an empowering worldview” in my child. These are just a few of the activities suggested in Wired’s “guide to being the coolest father on the planet.”

“Breathe,” my wife, Cynthia, says when I ask her what “an empowering worldview” might be. “Relax and breathe.”

This is old advice. In fact, the first time I failed to follow it was almost 14 years ago. Cynthia was pregnant with our son Jonah when I began hyperventilating, consumed with worry, thinking of all the things I’d need to learn to do for the child’s sake – ice skating? Break-dancing?

Now, there’s a different reason the do-it-yourself smugness of Wired is getting to me. Jonah has autism and I don’t have to go any farther than the basement storage closet to survey all the projects we’ve started and abandoned, often after only a day or two.

When you’re the father of a child with special needs, you have to rethink what kind of father you’re going to be. First to go is the notion of being cool. You will lose your cool – many times. Count on it.

So even though you always thought you could live without a homemade hovercraft – and, face it, you can – you read some magazine article and there it is: one more thing you can’t do with your son. One more thing you’re being cheated out of. It makes you bitter, then guilty for feeling that way.

Buzz Bissinger begins his new memoir, “Father’s Day: A Journey into the Mind & Heart of My Extraordinary Son,” with a heart-wrenching confession. He prefers not to think about his 24-year-old son, Zach, bagging groceries in a supermarket.

Never mind that it’s an honest job. Or that Zach, who suffered brain damage when he was born three-months premature, wasn’t expected to live and function nearly as well as he does. Forget all that: Mr. Bissinger still struggles with feelings of shame and disappointment.

“I think these things, not all the time,” Mr. Bissinger writes, “but too many times…. This is my child. How can I look at him this way?”

Of course, Mr. Bissinger, author of the bestselling book “Friday Night Lights,” also does what fathers like us invariably do – he overcompensates.

I recognize the impulse – you try too hard, push too much. It’s part love, part temporary insanity. Again, check my basement for deflated basketballs and footballs, for notes on the book I thought Jonah and I would write together, for the poker chips I was going to use to teach my son to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Buzz Bissinger has a crazy idea in “Father’s Day.” He takes Zach on a two-week road trip – Philadelphia to Los Angeles. The plan is to revisit the places they’ve lived, but really he is desperate, after all these years, to connect with his son, to know him better. Some 2,991 miles later, the results are mixed. The memoir, however, is unequivocally brave – an unflinching but loving tribute to Zach, who, from the start, had the good sense to want to fly to Los Angeles.

“Father’s Day” also serves as an antidote to the pressure I can’t help feeling on this trumped-up holiday. The fact is I had plans to be a cool father, too; maybe the coolest.

Plans change, though, and now coolness seems overrated. There are more important things: for instance, just being around.

Last week, while Cynthia went to work, Jonah stayed home from school with an ear infection. Secretly, I worried about what we’d do all day. I was sure we’d drive each other crazy; we did, a little. But we also figured out how to bluff playing Go Fish. Me: “Any nines?” Jonah: “Not telling.” We even ended up using the poker chips.

Joel Yanofsky is a writer in Montreal, Canada. His latest book is Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism.



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