Speaker 1: 0:14

Hi Pod, I am Dad. He's not just Hi Dad, he's my dad, james Gutman. Folks, it's James Gutman, it's james government. It's high pod, I'm dad. Welcome back. It's been like a week, two weeks, since I last talked to you here on high pod. Uh, every friday on spotify, anywhere, you find me. Yada, yada, yada, highpod, I'm dadcom. Thank you for taking the time to check me out. I am back.

Speaker 1: 0:40

We are on youtube. Maybe you're watching this right now. In which case, how are you? We're doing a lot more video content, trying to put more I don't know actual moving images of me and Lucas, because I don't know. It's the new millennium, folks, you gotta get with the times.

Speaker 1: 1:00

So what I did this past week? If you guys got a chance to check me out, you could follow me, by the way, digitally, don't follow me on the street, but if you want to follow me online, I am on Instagram. I'm on all the different social media places as HiJamesGuttman, h-i James Guttman, and one of those places is TikTok, which is way below my age range. I get it. I'm not dancing on TikTok. I promise you. I'm not dancing on TikTok. I promise you. I'm not eating crazy food, mukbang and playing video games. I am making videos, putting them up there, telling you guys about our lives together, and one of the things it was a suggestion from someone this past week that I should put a video up of me cutting Lucas's hair and I never thought about it. I don't know why I never really thought about it. I think in my head there's just been something that's been happening with him for forever.

Speaker 1: 1:54

At this point it feels like For those of you guys who don't know, my son, obviously, if you know, is nonverbal. He has autism. He has severe autism. It affects him in many ways life skills, things like that and one of the big disadvantages to having a child with severe autism who is nonverbal, is that there are things that you can't explain to your kid, that they have to do and it will break your heart. It broke my heart to get his hair cut. It used to break my heart to do anything. Bring him to the doctor, get him shot. He used to have an issue with getting weighed at the doctor. You can give him a shot. He was cool, he didn't care, he was like whatever dance around, but getting on the scale it was like throwing him into a swimming pool. He would freak out and I would feel terrible and I couldn't be like buddy, this is what big boys you can't do. That the first time he ever took a school bus. That was terrible. He was little man, he was like preschool and we put him on a school bus and they told us it was good, he should do it, it's good for him and to this day he's good with it, so I'm grateful. I don't know if I'd make the same choice now looking back. I don't know. I probably would because it helped him. But either way, I couldn't sit him down and I couldn't tell him why we were doing this. And one of those things was the haircut. And I've told this story before.

Speaker 1: 3:14

We go to this autism-friendly if you're on YouTube, you see me doing the little finger bunnies autism-friendly hair place in kind of a swanky Long Island town I'm not going to name the town, I probably named it at some point or another and we go to this hair salon that's supposed to be autism-friendly. I knew right from the beginning I was like there's nothing particularly autism-friendly about this place. It was fire engines instead of chairs. They were very cramped. There wasn't a lot of room. It was weird. So we go in there and we're kind of making our way around. Thankfully there was no one else in this autism-friendly hair salon, it was just me and him. And I knew that up until now, my wife at the time had been having issues getting him to sit for his haircut. It's one of the things that she was doing. So I said I'll do it, I'll bring him.

Speaker 1: 4:11

So we go to this place and we end up at one of the fire engines and he gets in and I sit back and I'm like, all right, let's see this lady cut his hair, let's see what autism friendly is. And I lean back and I watch her and she goes to cut his hair and he puts his hand up and she puts her hands down and she goes, huh, and she looks visibly frustrated and I'm like, all right, now the magic happens. Now she's going to bring out whatever magical thing she does as a hairstylist and cut his hair and make him understand. And she tried again. He put his hand up and she went and before long I realized there was no plan. Autism friendly meant, I guess, that they don't throw things at us when we walk in. I don't know what autism friendly means to these people, but it definitely didn't mean they knew how to ease the concerns of a boy with autism.

Speaker 1: 5:02

So I came over to help and it ended up being me holding him by the arms, like squeezing his arms, while this lady is like cutting his hair and he's screaming bloody murder on there with this stranger like attacking my kid, and he doesn't understand that. I can't explain to him and I hate myself for it. And as this is happening, I look up and she's looking over my shoulder at the receptionist and she goes. Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, you saw the face I made. It was the exacerbated exhale bug eyes, annoyed, look. And at that moment I was like I'm never bringing my kid here again. This is not happening. I can't, because I'm going to kill this lady and he's going to freak out. I'm going to scar him for life.

Speaker 1: 5:50

So I decided I'm going to cut his hair and, oh my God, I tried everything to make it easy for him. I was like it's got to be the sound of the buzzer. I bought a quiet buzzer. He hated it. I bought these scissors that were attached to. It was the stupidest thing ever, man. They were like it was like buzzer and how. The buzzers have like little clips for the end on them, you know. So it had a clip from a buzzer on a pair of scissors. Made no sense, didn't work, hated it 70 bucks. At the end of the day I ended up just cutting his hair and just using a buzzer to do it and it was bloody murder. Every single time, just me and him I would go in there.

Speaker 1: 6:29

I'm little known fact, I'm double jointed in my legs. So I do kind of this pretzel sit. My daughter does it too. We have races to see who can throw their legs up the quickest into this yoga pose. I don't know why I'm telling you this. It actually is important to it. I think Lucas does it too, because I'll see him just sitting there with his legs, all you know, spaghettied out.

Speaker 1: 6:49

And so I sat on the floor and I took my legs in the pretzel pose and I wrapped them around his arms so he couldn't move and he was kind of like a little mummy and I just shave his head like and it was like two on the sides, three on the top, you know it was. It was short, but it wasn't completely buzzed. So I'm out there and I'm cutting his hair and every single time it was terrible, it was the worst possible thing. I used to say it took a piece of my soul. Every time I did it, I wanted to just jump out a window. It was so bad and I decided I wasn't going to do it anymore. I said I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not. Someone else got to do it and, as you guys know, I wrote a blog about getting divorced. So I think you know that sometimes you have those moments where you're like I'm not doing this, I'm the only one doing it. So you get upset. I just thought I'm not going to do it anymore.

Speaker 1: 7:39

And what ended up happening is he ended up looking like one of the monkeys. You know the monkeys from the 1960s, the you know, hey, hey, we're the monkeys. That was him. And if you're on YouTube right now, you see a picture of him right there. That YouTube right now. You see a picture of him right there. That's what he looked like. So if you're not on YouTube, go to HiBlogI'mDad on YouTube and you can check it out. That was what he looked like and I just let it be that way.

Speaker 1: 8:07

And every time I saw this kid's face, it was a reminder that I need to cut his hair. It was like having this hanging chore over my head constantly reminding me hey, you're a bad dad. Your kid looks like a hippie, and not even a cute hippie. I know people are going to be like what kid has long hair? Your kid has long hair, but you have your kid's long hair on purpose. My kid's long hair was just like what would he look like if he was on Survivor. And that's exactly what happened this big puff of hair on his head. And eventually I had to cut it and it was the worst haircut ever. And I noticed something in that haircut that I hadn't noticed before. I noticed that the thing he really didn't like was when it would pull on his hair right, when the buzzer would go over and yank his hair out. And now I realized that because at its longest, I was seeing him cry the loudest and I said this is terrible, I can't do this anymore. But I did, and this time I did it sooner because I didn't do a full job and I kept doing his hair, not waiting as long between each one.

Speaker 1: 9:01

And then one day it all worked out. One day, the big secret. And people always say to me what was your secret? How did you solve the problem of your son getting his haircut? Well, I walked into the room and he just let me. I didn't do anything. I did nothing. One day I went into the bathroom, I loaded up the buzzer. I would always warn him. I do it.

Speaker 1: 9:24

Now, if I'm going to cut his hair that day beforehand, I go, hey, lucas, I take my hand to his head and I go, and he goes. He rubs his head and he looks at me and he goes. He rubs his head and he looks at me. He's got those little eyes that he gives me and so he knows. He knows it's coming. So I load up the buzzer, I turn it on. He's standing at the sink with his iPad. Like you may have seen on TikTok, when we posted the video of me cutting his hair and he just let me do it, there was no fighting, there was no nothing. And that's when I realized that.

Speaker 1: 9:55

A couple of things. First, there wasn't really a trick. He had to reach a maturity level where he was like oh, this is nonsense, I can do this. He does it at the doctor. He goes on the scale. Now, I didn't teach him about the scale, I didn't buy him a toy scale. He just gets on the scale. He's like, oh, this is stupid, this doesn't eat me, I'll be all right. And he gets on it and he did it.

Speaker 1: 10:18

But also, if the issue is that it was pulling on his hair, the trick was to actually cut his hair more often, as opposed to waiting, which I had been doing the whole time because I hated cutting his hair. So I would wait a month, a month and a half. He would get, like you know, this big 1960s puff on his head and then it would hurt. So by doing it every two weeks, doing this thing that he hated more often, it got him more used to it and his hair also wasn't as long to pull on. So that's what happened. That's how I cut his hair.

Speaker 1: 10:47

But if you see it now on TikTok we posted that video. It looks like I don't know man, it looks like we've been doing it forever and it feels like we have been. So I've been kind of happy about that and that's the whole point. Dude, like my son doesn't have any words, like verbal words. My son has many missing life skills, like major life skills that are going to be an issue for a long time, and those things can be rough, but for things like that, there's stuff like cutting his hair and these obstacles that we had years ago that seemed just as insurmountable as some of the ones that we have now, and we got past them and I remember that and that's, I think, part of just appreciating not just autism but appreciating kind of my role in his life and the changes that we made. So yeah, man, there's been a lot of tough roads ahead. There's been a lot of tough roads that we've crossed, and for that I'm grateful and I thank you guys for letting me tell you about it. I thank you for checking it out, watching it, whether it's on Instagram, I post on Instagram too.

Speaker 1: 11:53

Is hi James Gutman, or TikTok, hi James Gutman. On Facebook, or on YouTube, or wherever we are. Hi blog, I'm dadcom, where we are, or highblogomdadcom, where I write about it all, or, if you want to hold it in your hand, high World Omdad. My book how Fathers Can Journey to Autism, awareness, to Acceptance, to Appreciation. It is available as an audio book as well. You can listen to it. You don't have to read it. Maybe you don't like reading. I'm not judging you. You don't have to. I don't read that much either. So if you don't want to read, you can listen to it. I narrate it. It's a lot of fun. All this is a lot of fun. Guys, thank you so much for allowing me to speak to you. Thank you for checking me out once again on another edition of Hi Pod I'm Dad. I'll be back next Friday with more on YouTube and on all the streaming services, and I'll be back Monday, wednesday, with new blogs on HiBlog. I'm Dadcom. Until then, this is James Gutman saying be well, bye Pop, I'm out.