Hi Pod, it's James Gutman. Welcome back to another edition of the show. It's Friday. It's the best day of the week. It is December the 19th. It is one of the best Fridays of the year. We are on the road to, well, New Year's, the road to Christmas, the road to fresh beginnings, new starts, and 2026. I appreciate you guys taking the time to check it out, to join me. Whether you found me on HiPodOndad.com or any of the streaming services, I appreciate it. Audible, Apple Podcasts, I don't know, iHeartRadio. We can make them up. Maybe you found me on uh on Woofer. I don't know. It's I'm everywhere. You name it. We've had this podcast. Thank you so much. The same thing with the book. If you guys want to pick it up, Hi World I'm Dad, my book. I don't promote it a lot. It's on Amazon, it's on Spotify, it's on everything. So grab it. Thank you. I appreciate the support. Got that out of the way. But yeah, man, it's been a year of learning. It's been a year of awakenings. It's been a year of life lessons. I think I've talked about this. You guys may have even noticed this week. If you go to highblogomdad.com where everything I've written about autism awareness, appreciation, all this stuff is all on there since 2017. I was thinking about it today. I've written twice a week for about eight years. We're closing in, and each article is about a thousand words. So we're closing in on the million-word mark soon of what I've written for this situation. I love it. I love being able to do it. I love getting to go back and watching, you know, Lucas and Olivia grow up. So it's been fantastic. But if you went to highblogomdad.com this week, you saw that I wrote about myself and kind of a different spin on things on Wednesday. I haven't done this in a while, where I wrote about kind of being a single dad in my situation. I have a 17-year-old daughter, I have a 14-year-old nonverbal son. My house runs great. You know, I'm not one of these dads where, you know, where do we keep the peanut butter? I'm not, I'm not a sitcom dad from Nick Jr., you know what I'm saying? Which used to make me really annoyed. The way dads are depicted on TV, this is a side rant, on TV and movies and commercials, it drives me crazy. Even as a kid, there were two different commercials that I'm going to complain about right now, real quick. Uh, the first one was Ring Around the Collar commercial, right? Um, I don't know if it was about Ring Around the Collar, it was about stains in the laundry. And it was a guy, and he's out with his family, he's out with his wife, and the wife spills something like on her shirt or on her pants or something. And she goes, Oh no. And they go to the husband, and I swear to God, the husband goes, Saw y'all wash them, like that. Not exactly, saw y'all wash them. And she like rolls her eyes, like, what a goober. And even as a kid, I remember being like, What the hell? Like, why do they depict this guy like that? That's the dad. The other one, and this one, this one hits me at my core. Um, it might not affect you as much. It's a commercial. Check this out. Because there's so much missing context here, and all the context is terrible. It's a dad, I assume he's a dad, and he's sitting on a couch or on a chair, and he's watching television. And he's like, Oh, he's got grayer hair, you know, kind of like me. And these two little girls walk into the room, and one of them goes, Dad, it's time. And the two of them present to him just for men hair dye, as if they are presenting the holy grail. And the other one goes, We think you'd make a really good catch for someone. And I'm like, This is before I even had the gray hairs that I have, which by the way, I like my gray hairs, but it's before I even had them. And I remember, what the there's no context. You don't know if his wife is dead or what the hell. But the the idea of the commercial is nobody's gonna want you with your nasty gray hair. So at the end of the day, gray-haired dads not always depicted the best in media and things like that. So I think sometimes people have this idea that dads need to be saved. We need to be helped. We don't know how to do anything. Now, granted, I'm not the best when it comes to colors, and I'll go, which sounds insane to say out loud, but you know, I go to my daughter and I'll be like, Do these match? And she'd be like, that's gray. That doesn't match. I'd be like, isn't this blue? She'd be like, oh my God, daddy. The amount of times I've heard, oh my god, daddy, like, I don't know. To me, maybe there is something wrong. Who knows? But that's about the extent of it. I keep my house clean, I keep my kids fed, I have Lucas on a schedule like clockwork, boom, boom, boom, boom. So I wrote on Wednesday about how I'm looking in my life as a single dad for the person who's gonna come in and be a part of our group. Um, and this was not a call to action where I'm like, I'm searching all over. I might have found it, might not have found it. I don't talk too in-depth about those things. I do know that I've had in my time relationships and people that I've I've been around and I've learned, man. I'm I'm in my late 40s. I've learned what I don't want, what I don't want to have in my life. And I've talked about it, and you guys kind of know it too, which is what's funny, because I've talked openly about having my heart surgery and wanting peace and serenity now, you know? That's my whole goal. Um, and I feel like a lot of times the readers know this more than these people who come into my life and are supposed to know it. People will pretend too. Oh, I'm very chill. You know, okay. All right, that lasts for what time is it? So I wrote a little bit about doing this because I never really address it. I never really talk about it. For years, people would write to me when I was still married and I was writing the blog. And if you guys noticed, I didn't mention my wife a lot. And I had a rule. If she's there for something that we did, she would be in the story. But I would never, I would never purposely not include her, but she had to actually be a part of the story. I wouldn't make it up. But between that and I don't know, I mentioned, you know, a past girlfriend who had been a part of of some of the blog posts in the past who is now cornfielded away. I wanted to at least give an update, give you guys an idea, because this is something that I've I've gotten emails from people and people have asked me about it because there are other single parents in the situation that I'm in. And the way that I raise my son is unique. And it's to the point where when I first started dating, I thought, you know, well, I should find people who have, you know, children like Lucas. And I find that in some ways, sometimes, that's almost a harder fit to make because people like that already have their own views on how they raise their kid. And I had said before, I'm unique. So I'm not going to come in and change your entire life. You're not going to change my entire life with it. In many ways, it's easier to find somebody who doesn't that can follow my lead and understand what we're doing, or in the very least, not insist on things, not insist that I raise my daughter a certain way, not insist that I raise my son a certain way. I do my thing. We have a good rhythm. We're happy. I'm looking for someone in my life to share this world with me, not somebody to complete it or to be, you know, my kids, they have a mom. They, you know, I don't need a mom. Like we're just, we're good to go. And that I thought, especially towards the end of the year, I just had the heart surgery anniversary. And you guys know too, I get a little, you know, all up in his feelings. So I'm on to come on there and kind of address it. Um, and I appreciate it. And the the feedback is always great from everybody. It makes me really happy. It makes me happy that I started this blog. You guys know before I did this blog, I used to, you know, write about pro wrestling, and the fans are rabid and nuts. Nuts for wrestling fans. I mean, you want to have an example of it. I've said this example a million times. Try writing an article and saying that Jake the Snake Roberts fought Rick the Model Martell at WrestleMania 6 instead of seven, and people will literally write to you and tell you how stupid you are. I wrote a thousand words and I got the wrong WrestleMania number in there, which I knew the right one. I just put the wrong number down. You know, I knew right away you were the dumbest person. I'm like, oh my God, why did I write this? They're not like that anymore. They're not like that with this blog. Once in a while, I'll get a troll, I'll get somebody, but no man, people for the most part are, you know, nice and kind. It's cool. This past week, too, I got a chance to kind of drift back into the wrestling world. You guys know I have a friend over at New York News Day, and every time a wrestling story comes, he contacts me. Can we quote you? I'm like, you know it's been 10 years, right? But I love it. I love getting to do it. So I talked a little bit McFoley this week. Um, that made me happy. And the feedback from that was great. So you guys are uh just really a fantastic, fantastic group of people reading the blog, and I appreciate it. And that's why I wanted to do this one special today, because uh there's something, you know, again, it's unique, right? Like, so I raise my son in a unique way, I look at it at a unique, you know, point of view. Christmas is coming up. And I gotta be honest, Lucas doesn't care about Christmas. My son is nonverbal with severe autism. So he doesn't care about Elf on a Shelf, and he doesn't care about Santa Claus, and he doesn't care about opening gifts, and he doesn't care about um, you know, decorating the tree. But he does all those things for us. He stands by and he helps and he smiles and he poses and I love him for it. So when the holidays come, the least I can do is make it something for him that is going to put his best foot forward. I don't have to put food on a table at eye level for him and expect him to resist the temptation to shove his face into it all day. Granted, big boy, Lucas, don't do that. You shouldn't do that. I got it. But for one day, maybe he doesn't get you know corrected over and over again. Maybe we take the food, we put it on a higher shelf. If he wants to go lay in his room while people are over, go lay in your room, Lucas. You're allowed, thank you so much for being a part of this, as opposed to, oh, sit down, big boy, big boy sits at the table. No, man, it's his holiday too. And I want to give him that. I want to give him the same respect that he gives us. And that at the end of the day, that's autism appreciation, and that's the back and forth that I've had with my son this whole time. I've told the story a million times about the first day that I started like this journey towards appreciating who my son was. And it was right after the surgery. I was sitting on the couch, incapacitated pretty much, watching him pull a toy phone in and out from underneath the chair while watching it in the mirror. And for the first time ever, I didn't correct him. I didn't pick up the phone and show him how we properly play with a phone. I did what he was doing, and I let him watch me and he hugged me after seeing me do this because for the first time somebody was playing a toy with his rules, as opposed to correcting him. For the first time, somebody was entering his world instead of pulling him into ours, and he appreciated it. And I've built this relationship with my son through that, through that idea of I'm asking things of him, let me do things for him, right? We all want things to be the way they are. We have, you know, all these notions about how they should be. Then you have a boy like mine who kind of throws everything on its ear. Lucas doesn't open presents, doesn't like to do it. So you could wrap a present, but then like even if you give it to him, go open the present. He'll maybe like, he'll look at me, he'll like pull on it a little bit. He doesn't really care. Even if he opens it up, and here's the thing, too, that gets people if he opens it up, even if it's something he really wants, he doesn't really react. He no sells it. It's a wrestling term, like The Undertaker, just kind of like no expression, doesn't care. Uh once in a while you get him something he really wants. Like this year, it's another tablet. I get this kid kind of similar things every year just because I know that he's gonna love it. So he might react to that a little bit. It has to be out of the box. He won't look at the box and be like, oh, there's a tablet in here. He won't care. And I understand that. But we've had people show up at our house and insist that he opens the present in front of them and then react in a weird way that he's not like jumping for joy. And it's like, hey, Karen, I told you he's not gonna care. But that's the respect, and that's what we let him do. Choose what he wants to do, be who he wants to be. Lucas is uh different with me than he is anywhere else. And I've earned this, and I will stand by this and I will tell you how proud I am of this. Lucas, I've heard in other situations with other people, will throw himself at food. I wrote an article years ago. One of the earliest kind of viral things that we wrote here on the blog was an article called I'm sorry my kid drank your coffee. I loved it. It was one of my favorite ones because it was real, and it was about Lucas' propensity for stealing people's food in public, grabbing someone's drink off a table and drinking it. And I'm like, oh my God, oh my god, he has hepatitis now. It was always that worry of like, and then you apologize, you're paying for coffees, and like he shouldn't drink coffee anyway, now he's up all night. That happened, and it doesn't happen with me anymore, but it still happens elsewhere. And I get these stories and these secondhand accounts about him acting in a way that almost sounds like Back to the Future. It's like he gets in the DeLorean, he went back in time and stole a donut off of a table. Who does that? He doesn't do that. And I remember the first time where I felt like, oh, I've made good choices with this kid. And it was a few years ago, it was at Easter. Me, him, Olivia, we went to this big buffet on Long Island, uh, Millridge Inn. Wasn't that great? Wasn't the Millridge Inn? I don't want to get them publicity. I didn't like it. It was terrible. Don't go to the Millridge Inn. It was a different place. But we had gone and it was this big hall of tables, and everyone's kind of wedged in. It was like being at a wedding reception, but they were like, How many tables could we get in here for this buffet? And when we walked to the table, we were literally walking through chairs where my son was at most two feet away from someone's plate. All he had to do was reach his arm out, and he could just grab French toast or whatever off people's plates. And he didn't do it at all. The whole walk through, he didn't try to take one piece of food. I got up to go to the buffet and I told Olivia, I said, Can you sit with him and just watch him, make sure he's okay? And I walked away, and I'm like, okay, there is going to be a catastrophe. And there wasn't. He was an angel, and he was an angel because he's learned with me to act a certain way. Certain things are expected. And most of all, and here's what's most important he's gonna get everything he wants with me all in due time. When I tell him wait, the thing that I tell him to wait for is always coming. If he wants like a piece of pizza, he goes, he comes over, he uses a device pizza, I'm like, all right, buddy, just can you wait? Wait, I put the hand up, wait. He might go, uh he does that kind of like a little whine, a little side swipe, but he leaves and he comes back and he gets pizza. And that's always been the payoff. He knows my dad might tell me to hold on a second, but he's gonna get it for me. I don't forget, I don't ignore. If he can't have it, I tell him no, and I try to explain why, even if I don't think he understands every word. And that I think is probably the most important part of it all. Explain everything. Even if you think your kid understands nothing, explain everything. Every word. Just talk, talk out loud, talk out loud all day. And I promise you, at least with my son, there are things that he just gets. He knows certain words, and I'm like, oh, he gets it. Like I could turn around to him as he's getting dressed, and I'll be like, all right, but we're gonna get your socks on, your shoes after we're done, and he'll leave and go get his socks and shoes. And I'm I'm thinking to myself, I didn't even realize that he was picking that up. It all goes back. There was one specific day where it happened. I was in his room and I was getting him like ready for the day. And I'm talking to myself. He was young, and I'm talking to myself kind of under my breath because it's early, I'm tired, I have a lot going on. I'm like, all right, buddy, let's get this on, get your pants on. Oh my God. All right, we're gonna, all right, give you some breakfast. And we're just we'll go, we'll go wash your hands, and then we'll do breakfast. It'll be all right. And as soon as I'm done talking, he runs out of the room. And I'm like, oh my God. Now I gotta go get him, I gotta go find this kid. I'm just kind of like just annoyed. And I walk out into the hallway, and he's standing in front of the sink in the bathroom with the water running, looking at me over his shoulder, like, let's go. And I was like, You got that? Like you understood that? I didn't enunciate because there's a lot, man. When you have a nonverbal kid, you do a lot of pantomime. You know, there's a lot of, hey, buddy, we're gonna go out, and then after we're gonna go wash your hands. And you guys can't see me right now, but I'm doing the whole, you know, like I'm doing the YMCA right now. Like it's it's all like hand motions or whatever. This wasn't that. This was simply like, all right, but I'm gonna wash your hands. Like I barely said it out loud. And since I've done it so often and he's listened so much, he got it. My kid knows to listen to me because he knows that I'm giving him information that he needs, and he might not get every word of it, but there is important things in there. And then on top of it, too, and it's the line that I've used over and over again. I talked to him when I didn't think he understood. I read to him when I didn't think he cared, and I showed him love when I didn't think he knew what that meant. And that's what's important. That's what you have to do with a boy like mine. It makes the holidays easier, it makes life easier. I don't know, and if there's one thing that I I really hope people take away from my blog, it's that it's really not as hard as I thought it was gonna be. Don't get me wrong, I'm gonna preface everything I say because it's important. I don't know your kid. Maybe it's harder with your kid, right? I don't know. I'm not sitting here, I'm not like, oh my god's great. I'm just telling you what I did that worked. And I will tell you this. And I know people hear the podcast now and they read the blog and they hear about my relationship with him, and they think, oh, he's always been great with it wasn't. When Lucas was a baby, I thought he was never gonna know anything. It's awful to say, and it hurts to say, and it's hard to say. But I genuinely didn't think he was ever going to know anything. I didn't think he'd know my name. I didn't think he'd be able to look up, I didn't think he'd be able to do anything. And every step of the way, I treated him like he was my age. We would just talk and I would just like talk at him in the car. We'd laugh. If he laughed, I would laugh with him, I would play games the way he wanted to play them. I would try to follow his lead on certain things, I would give him respect. If he had a meltdown, I would sit with him. He He knew and he knows that I'm on his side. Always, just like his sister knows. He has a neurotypical sister, and I I give the two of them the exact same respect. It doesn't matter if he acknowledges it, it doesn't matter if he gets it. I just kept doing it. And now, today at 14, does he understand everything? No. I just wrote a blog about that, I think on Monday, actually. He doesn't understand everything I say. He doesn't get everything I say, but that's fine. Because the things that he does understand are important. And the one thing that he needed to understand that he does is trust. He trusts me. He knows that Dad has his back. And that if Dad tells him no to cookies, it's because there's a reason. He's going to have more cookies later. He's going to have it at a different time. If dad says to wait, what he's waiting for is going to come. And that's it. And that's what makes us happy. And that's what life is like. And that's why I know this year, Christmas and the holidays and everything. It's always going to go well. I am the luckiest. I'm the luckiest man on earth, man. I got a second chance to come back and live my life in 2012 after my surgery. And I was able to rewrite it in the best possible way. I was able to, you know, alter the trajectory of my life. I was able to not only welcome people in, but then also get life lessons from that. And when things weren't right, see it and understand it. Every negative thing that's ever happened to me has been good because it's taught me something about myself. In the very least, and I think I've said this before too. Even if there's a situation that I'm like 100% right about where I'm like, I didn't do anything wrong. I still did something wrong because I ended up in this situation. How did I get there? And that becomes a thing to think about. Like, what did I do? What steps can I take to not find myself there again? And you do it. And I do it. And I thank you. I thank you guys for allowing me to kind of talk out loud here on the podcast. I thank you guys for allowing me to write my thoughts and share my family with you. I thank you for, I don't know, everything. Just making this the life I've always wanted to live. I appreciate it and I appreciate all of you. And I'm trying to think, 19. So Merry Christmas if you celebrate Christmas. If you celebrate anything else, merry everything, happy everything. Just have a happy end of the year. I say it all. When we're coming up on actual Christmas, I say Merry Christmas, but holidays, I don't know. Celebrate everything. This is the time of year that no matter who you are, where you are, what you celebrate, you know to be reflective and you know to look back on all you've done. So hopefully you're looking back. You enjoy the year. And if not, next year will be better. And that does it for me. Do me a favor, follow me on social media, hi James Gutman, H-I-James Gutman. I am everywhere. TikTok, Instagram, uh Woofer, as we said earlier. You name it, we got it. Thank you. Until next time, this is James Gutman saying, Be well. Bye bye. I'm dead.