Category: Special Needs Fathers

I’ve always wanted Alex to eat a Flintstones vitamin. I wanted to tap one out of the bottle, place it in his fingers, watch it disappear into his mouth, and listen to the crunching. I figured he’d like the little grape Freds the best, just like his dad. By the time he did this, around […]

Three months ago, a doctor asked me how Alex sleeps. “Great!” I replied, with the enthusiasm common to those about to stride into spinning propeller blades. “Eleven hours a night!” Overnight, Alex has gone from 11 hours to about seven. The decline and fall of my evenings started late last year, when Alex figured out […]

Alex doesn’t always drift peacefully off after we bolt him into his bedroom for the night. He’s honed many tactics for getting us to open the door. First and favorite seems to be rattling the doorknob and screeching. We wish he’d screech “Mommy!” or “Daddy!” instead of his usual impersonation of a trapped parrot, but […]

Alex would learn to pilot an F-16 in exchange for a chocolate-chip cookie. Autism parenting sites all warn about overusing bribes, but nothing sticks Alex to his barber’s chair or to a seat at a family event like a chocolate chip cookie. Jill whipped them out to get us all through last Passover (“Sit down, […]

Thanksgiving looms, and from Bar Harbor to Honolulu families all across America will soon be salivating over turkey, cheering over football, and chasing Alex. Maybe not the Alex part, at least by that name, unless you happen to me. I haven’t had a Thanksgiving for 10 years, really. We usually spend it with some branch […]

Four months ago a 14-year-old boy with autism ran out an open door of his school in Queens, N.Y., and, to those who loved him, vanished. Through the following weeks he became known to everyone else. Each morning I walked Ned to the train to send him to school and heard the subway loudspeaker: “Police […]