Welcome And Why April Matters

Hi Pod I'm Dad. Folks, it's James Guttman. It's High Pod I'm Dad. Welcome back to another edition of the show. You guys know me. I host High Pod I'm Dad every Friday. I'm the dad behind Hiblog I'm Dad.com. Writing about autism appreciation, writing about parenting since 2017. This has been a big week for me in both respects. My daughter picking her college. And of course, as you guys know, it is autism, and I naturally in my head say autism appreciation month. For my son, he's nonverbal. He has profound autism, severe autism, whoever you want to term it. And it's funny because when I originally started writing this blog back in 2017, I wrote about both my kids, but a lot of the early ones are about my daughter, and not necessarily about my son, who was nonverbal then. He was, you know, God, like six years old. Just he wasn't even six yet. He was about a month away from turning six. And the reason I didn't write about Lucas so much early on is I didn't get it. I didn't understand a lot of how he acted. I didn't have answers for anybody on anything, which was always to me the biggest concern in the early days of autism parenting for me. And one of the things that when I write, I try to remember for the people who are reading this, listening to this. The scariest part of having a kid who's young with autism is that you don't know why things are happening or what the future is going to be like. And everybody asks you those questions. Why does he clap like that? I don't know. You know, does he like school? Is he going to go to kindergarten? I don't know. I don't know any of these answers yet. Every single day is another, you know, experience of finding out where we are. It's almost like waiting for a package in the mail. And for us, the package we were waiting for in the mail was language. When is this kid gonna talk? Because up until then, Lucas had done every single thing that we were waiting for, albeit at a delayed rate, right? So he didn't walk right away, but eventually he walked. He didn't sit up right away, but eventually he sat up. And these delays and these concerns, if you will, were right from the beginning. You know, my daughter was just shy of three years old when he was born. So we had just experienced what many would consider a textbook level of milestone achievement, right? And my daughter, in all honesty, was advanced with that. Like her milestones were quick and fast, and we were like, this is the easiest, man. Parenting, layup, we got it. This is how you do it. It's all us, man. This kid is rolling over because I mean people would congratulate us. Oh, she's she's talking. Congratulations. Good job, Daddy. Good job on the work you did. Oh, cool. Thanks. I'm amazing. I appreciate it. And then when Lucas came along and he wasn't doing these things, nobody was like, What a crappy job you're doing. Like, don't get me wrong, there were definitely moments where I felt terrible based on the reactions, you know. I had one relative once, I remember this to this day. Ugh, it still makes me like it's a hundred years ago. Lucas wasn't talking, and it was obvious. And when you have a child that doesn't talk, especially at an age when they should be talking, you deal with a lot of different reactions, right? You have some people who will offer to cure your child all day long. You know, they'll turn around, you know, I had a I had a neighbor, you have to give him this, you know, elderberry root, and you have to mix it with these crystals, and then you have to like put it on his astrological sign and tattoo it on his head. I'm like, I'm not doing any of that. He'll talk. And then you have people who are in denial when I'm not in denial, right? So I had a relative one time ask, or uh a distant relative now, ask, what does he call his sister? Does he call her Olivia? Does he call her sissy? And I'm like, first of all, he does not call her sissy. And I said, I'm like, he doesn't call her anything, he doesn't speak yet. And this relative, an older relative, picked up my son and goes, Oh, daddy's silly. You talk. Yes, you do, you talk. I've never wanted to clothesline somebody in my life, just like attack. I was like, Are you kidding me? And it bothered me so much because I wouldn't, if my son said even half a word, I would be like, he talks, he says half a word. I was so eager and so waiting for it that to have somebody else pretend like daddy's being silly because I'm admitting out loud this painful thing that we're dealing with bothered me. But that's what you deal with when you deal with people like that. So when the blog first came out, I didn't write a lot about him because I didn't have a lot to share other than we're waiting for him to talk. Hopefully soon. So every day you're waiting for that package to be delivered in the mail, and it was speech. So a lot of the early blogs were about pity, not wanting pity, which to this day remains one of my biggest issues. Those of you guys who follow me who have been on these blogs forever, you guys know that not only do I have Lucas, who is, you know, nonverbal with profound autism, that I know a lot of people will see as one of those, oh, it's so hard for you. I got it. I also had heart surgery at a quintuple bypass when I was 35. It is as insane as it sounds. It's a crazy story. Uh, every December I talk about it. That's when it happened. It's, you know, I've written about it, and I'll I'll go in depth sometimes. Major, major, major thing. People go, oh, hard for you. I went through a divorce. I've had all these different things. And I never want to be pitied. I hate it. I would rather you hear my story, see who I am now, see the work that I do, the way I see the world, the ways I try to help other people, and be inspired by the fact that I could go through things and come out of it the other side better for it, which I have. I'm you compare me now to me before Lucas was born, before my surgery in 2012, I'm a different person, all for the better. I've had people who don't like me tell me I'm better. He's better, he's just a different person. I know, I am, thank you. That's by design. And that was if I'm being honest with you guys, one of the reasons why I've I've changed because of my son and because of all these things that we've dealt with, you don't know what you can deal with until you deal with it. You don't know what you can survive until you survive it. And I've known people who eagerly anticipate breakdowns. They get excited for it. You know, oh, the next month is the anniversary of something, someone died or something happened, and they proceed to plan their breakdown. You know, I'm gonna be a mess the third week of June, and don't even talk to me because that's the day that like, dude, if you're planning it, it's not really real. Like for me, my goal, and maybe I'm a different person, and again, you do you, whatever you have to do. My goal in life is to not feel bad. I don't want to feel bad, right? I want to deal with reality and deal with situations and handle them as I can handle them. And the reason why is when you feel bad, I feel like it's harder to focus, it's harder to deal with something, it's harder to get yourself to the other side of something. And plus, and this is something for my heart surgery, we're we're all gonna die, right? Spoiler alert, I hope I hope none of you guys are surprised by that, but we're all gonna die, right? So we're here for a limited amount of time. So feel bad and stress and deal with the things that are pertinent in that moment that you have to. It's almost this emotion that we have to deal with, but it's on a need to deal with basis. It's not something that should be eagerly, you know, anticipated in your life. It shouldn't be something that you plan out. It's not a vacation, it's not a trip, it's it's misery. So sometimes I have to deal with something that's difficult to deal with. And I do. And in that moment, we handle it. It hurts sometimes, the decisions are difficult. And trust me, man, with a with a son like mine, with a future that is still in many ways up in the air, there are difficult decisions that I deal with when it comes to Lucas. But every time I see my son, I don't think like, oh my God, I have all these difficult decisions. No, man, we have fun and we laugh and we play. And he is literally like, you know, and I have a lot of people in my life, so I'll just say he's one of my favorite people in the world. Like, I love Lucas. I love running over and hugging him and squeezing him. She's a happy boy who shows me a side of the world that I never would have seen without him. Nobody else experiences life the way Lucas experiences life, and he allows me to be a part of that. And that's why I appreciate him. So I don't look for misery, I don't look for sad things. So the early days of writing this blog was focused on don't pity us. I don't want to be pitied. And that was a big deal. I hadn't yet appreciated his autism because I still wasn't sure what it looked like. Again, he was five. That was the age where I accepted that he had autism. And I've written about this in my book, High World, I'm dead. Pick it up if you want. It's there. Um, available everywhere. Digital, you know, I do a I do uh an audiobook, all that stuff. And I talk about it. I talk about the idea that I wasn't sure not only what autism was going to mean for our family, but I wasn't sure if he had autism or was nonverbal. I was aware of it when he was young. I noticed it, I saw it, saw warning signs, as they say. I accepted it somewhat begrudgingly when I brought him for a hearing test, and they told me that he wasn't deaf, and I was like, oh, damn it. Which is one of the weirdest. I didn't, I don't use that bingo card line. I didn't have that on my bingo card, but I definitely did not have being disappointed that my son wasn't deaf on my bingo card when he was born, but I was. I was like, oh, guess he's he's not deaf. But the appreciation didn't come until after he was five, after I told myself, this is the age where I accept and I know that the chances of him one day just being like, hey dad, how are you? What are you doing? Like that's that might not happen. And I gotta be honest, and I've written about it before, and people, I don't know, I clash with people because they don't really get it. Things were so much easier when I was able to finally say to myself, this is what you have, this is your situation, this is your son. But nothing is waiting. There's no package that's still gonna be delivered to them. It might still come, that'd be great. If it comes, fantastic. I want him to talk, I don't need him to talk. And I say that to this day. And once I was able to do that, I was able to look at him not as someone who was struggling and somebody we were still waiting for the complete version of. This is the complete version of Lucas. This is who he is. And once I did that, I was able to look at the beauty and the wonderful things that he brought to my life, the things that he brought to our family, the way he saw the world. And that's where autism appreciation came from for me. And a lot of parents who are going through this in the early days, I know, I know that feeling, I know that worry. Um, and it's so complicated. You worry if it's something that you're responsible for, I would blame myself. I brought this kid into the world, and now potentially he has such a difficult life ahead of him. I don't even know what it is. I'm to blame. I dealt with that. There's that pain. There's the worry, and here's the crazy one. Before Lucas was, you know, officially nonverbal or um definitely in have autism, I would be upset about it. And then I would be upset with myself for being upset about it. Because I was like, well, if he really does, like, what does that say about you that you're upset that he has it? It was like a circle of self-deprecating guilt where I was constantly looking at my own role in this. And I can tell you now, ten years later, 10 years of writing this blog, February of next year will be 10 years. I have never been more, I don't know, surprised is the right word, maybe, more surprised by my life and how this thing has affected us than I am now. Right? Like I never, if I could go back in time, and I've said this before, go back in time to, you know, 2016, 2014, and I say to myself, you know, hey, I'm coming from the future. I'm from 2026, don't ask about politics. Um, and I told myself, I can answer anything you want. The questions that I would ask myself then to now would be does Lucas talk? Um, does he have this life skill? Is he able to do this, do that? And all of my answers, hand to hand to my heart, are not good for myself back then. No, he doesn't. No, he doesn't. No, he doesn't. All of these things that I had on a checklist in my brain 10 years ago, he needs to do this for me to be happy, he needs to do that for me to be happy, for us to be good, for us to be great, for him to be okay. This checklist that I had is largely unchecked, and our lives are amazing, right? Is there heartache to come? Sure. There's difficulty for any parent with a kid. If you have a kid who's neurotypical, and that's another thing, too, that I think helps as the kids get older, too. When when you have a child who's three and four, everyone's kind of on the same playing field, right? Like we have babies when our friends have babies. And you exchange stories, you know, oh, he talked today. Oh, my kid talked today, too. Oh, you kid to his first step. Oh, my kid took his first steps. We went to the Wiggles concert. We did, and all of these things are happy-go-lucky parenting moments. It's not until your kids start getting older that troubles start to arise, even if your kid doesn't have, you know, autism or downstream or some sort of like considered ailment. And I'm doing finger quotes in the air, disability, whatever it is. As you get older, suddenly things start to happen. Oh, he's acting up in school, or oh, bad grades, or oh, you know, now you know kids are teenagers, you get doing drugs, drinking. And suddenly everybody else is not having this idyllic life that you assume they're having as you're struggling with your young child that you can't answer questions for. And suddenly now I go out with my son, and if uh another kid might be causing their parents trouble, oh, this kid gives me all this heart, he keeps crashing the car, he keeps, you know, getting into fights with cops, and I've got Lucas next to me. And Lucas might require me to watch him a little bit more, deal with him more, but he's hugging me, he's kissing me, he's he holds my hand as we walk down the street. It's I'm very lucky and I'm very fortunate to have such a loving and um pure soul in my life. I don't feel as needed with anybody. And I never have, and I never will, as I do with Lucas. Lucas needs me. Lucas needs me not only to take care of him, he needs me to help make decisions for him, he needs me to, in some ways, regulate his mood and like know I anticipate what he needs. I'm somebody that he knows he can go to, and he doesn't need words to get the things that he wants. And to me, that makes a huge difference in his behavior. There's no meltdowns, there's there's no I would get the feeling that early on when he would have these meltdowns, that he didn't know for sure if I knew what he wanted. And I've written about this, I've talked about this, and it required so much. It required to show him, Lucas, I know you want food. Look, it's cooking, and you bring him over to the stove. It took a lot early on to show him, I get you, I get what you want, and it's coming. And now we're at the point where we have this rhythm where he doesn't necessarily need me to show him the oven anymore in order to accept that I'm cooking for him. I just go, I'm cooking, go. And he knows that if he asks for something and I send him to go wait for it, I'm not sending him away to never eat again. I'm sending him away and it'll be here soon. And that means the world to me. And that's that's a big part of the role he plays in my life and the role that autism has ended up playing in, you know, the life of my family. And this is something that 10 years ago I couldn't answer. And that's why it took 10 years to not fully 10 years, but like now we have autism appreciation. Whereas in the beginning, and that's one of the things I love about having this blog for so long and having you guys listen and read it, you've grown with me and you've seen the way autism uh has affected our family in real time, page by page by page by page, article by article by article. And there's no way to go back in time and read that timeline of thousands of posts that we've done for the last decade and not have a sense of appreciation for autism yourself. It might not be the best thing, and I know I've heard from other parents that they argue, my kid does okay, that's your kid, man. I get it, I know. Maybe you don't appreciate it, maybe it's different for you. But this is the story of how autism has affected us. And every family, it's individual. And before you think it's an autism thing, parenting is affected differently in different houses, too. Somebody can have, you know, two boys and a girl, you have two boys and a girl, and you have a very different life. It's never the same. So, same thing with autism. My son has autism, severe, profound autism, however you put it, nonverbal. This is how it affects us, and I love him for it. You might have the exact same setup and hate it. I don't know. I'm just telling you our story, and that's all I've ever been able to do. And over the last 10 years, to read who he is and how he's developed and the things that we've learned and these struggles that we had and articles about things that he doesn't even do anymore. He doesn't run anymore, he doesn't uh steal food necessarily from people all the time anymore. All those things are gone. But I wrote about handling them and dealing with them, how he did it, haircuts, things like that. Yeah, man, my son is one of a kind. I love him so much, and that's why this month, April, every month I want people to do it too. Just appreciate, appreciate people like him. In the very least, right? And this is the one thing that I've always thought is across every spectrum. I've talked about it with when I was peered on Jubilee, and I was on this panel with high-functioning people on the spectrum. And one thing I notice with them, with my son, uh, even as he's considered low-functioning by many, it's a sense of honesty, a sense of purity when it comes to their emotions. Lucas smiles when he's happy. Lucas cries when he's sad. Lucas doesn't pretend. Lucas can't fake a smile. Lucas doesn't gas you up or just try to make you feel better to get something. He is the most honest and real person I've ever met. There's no one with less of a true filter than my son. His emotions burn brighter. Um, and he reminds me every day to be alive, and I love him for it. And hopefully, it's helped you guys too, man. It's April. So uh, if you get a chance, go back to some of the old ones. The blog, all the archives are up there. You can read every single old post and you can get an idea of what it means for different time periods and what you go through. But in the end, yeah, man, there's no one that I appreciate the way I appreciate Lucas. And I'm so lucky uh to be able to share him with you. So thank you. That does it for me, guys. I'm gonna be back Monday with a brand new blog. I'll be back next Friday uh with a new edition of the podcast. Do me a favor too, follow me on social media. Hi, James Gutman. It's on Instagram, TikTok. TikTok is great. We're doing great over there too. Uh, post little videos related to these podcasts. Um, but also every every weekend I post a quote on Instagram and Facebook. Hi, James Gutman, H I James Gutman. That's how you find me. Uh, and I'm everywhere. Also, if you want a speaker, I'm doing some speaking events, I'm doing some lined up for uh April and for uh going into the summer, whether you're a special education PTA offices, uh, if you want me to come kind of explain some of this in person. I love it. I love talking about Lucas. There's nothing I love more. We have a link to that on the blog's main page, and that does it for me. Until next time, this is James Gutman saying, be well. Byepod. I'm dad.