Welcome And Why This Matters

James Guttman 0:51

Hi Pod, it's James Guttman, the host of HiPod I'm Dad, the dad behind Hiblogom Dad.com. Thank you guys once again for finding me. It is the end of June. It is 2026. It is a Friday. And whether you found me on Audible, whatever, I mean, I name them all, all the streaming services, that's where this podcast is. I appreciate it. Maybe you're coming here from TikTok. I post the videos teasing the new, the new shows every week. And this is the episode that I've been waiting to do. I don't know, man, since I started doing these podcasts. I talked about it last week. I touched upon it a little bit. This is a big deal. I'll tell you why. I have two kids. I have Lucas, who I talk about a great deal. Lucas is 15. He is nonverbal. He has autism. Severe autism, profound autism, however you want to put it. And it's important for me to talk to you guys about him and explain him to you and post pictures of us because I think so often people hear severe autism, profound autism, and they they make assumptions about what our relationship must be like. They think he must be kind of like a

Lucas And What People Assume

James Guttman 1:55

burden for me or a chore or somebody I take care of. And again, these are other people's ideas of what it is, and it's not. Lucas is a member of the family. I love him. He requires work, yes, but what he brings to the table and what he brings to our lives far, far outweighs anything that I have to do for him. And I love him and I want to show you guys all the wonderful things about him. But when this blog began, it wasn't about Lucas. When this blog began, I couldn't answer questions about Lucas. I didn't know why he did the things he did. I don't know answers to questions that people would ask me. Is he going to talk? Does he like school? I don't know. So when I first started writing, I wrote about him. But you could even tell early on that I was still figuring things out and understanding him. This blog was about Olivia, mostly my daughter, who is three years older than Lucas. Um, she was around nine when we started the blog, maybe eight. I gotta do the math in my head. I'm really bad at math. Forgive me. I know her birth year. Don't get on me. Uh in fact, if you go to the blog page and you look at our logo, which is a picture, and it's a real picture. That picture, the coloring picture, hi blog, I'm dad. It's all colored and everything. That's a real genuine piece of paper colored. It's hanging in my room right next to me right now. I've had it up for years. I printed that out on the computer, and I went to my daughter, who, again, at the time was like eight or nine years old, and I said, Can you color this for the blog? Uh that's why her name is in the corner of it. If you look really closely, it says Olivia. Uh, and she's the reason why there's a little man waving. She put that on there herself. And I remember when she did it, even being somewhat disappointed initially and thinking, like, oh, what is this? And that little guy waving has become my favorite part of the picture. Um, and I think about it all the time. I wrote about Olivia because I I understood Olivia when she was eight or nine years old. I understood her better than anybody. Um, when my daughter was born, I remember talking to my friend Matt. Shout out to Matt Dogs if he's listening to this. Matt had a son about a year or so before my daughter. And I remember when I was telling him about her being born and how great it was. And I remember he said to me, He goes, My son is my best friend. I've remembered that for like 20 years because as a as a parent who didn't have a kid, I think to myself, your son is your best friend. He's like a baby. What are you talking about? And then Olivia showed up, and I totally got it. Olivia was my best friend. Olivia is my best friend. Olivia, it was on a different level, the relationship that I have with this girl. The second she arrived, it was almost like I knew I need to turn this person into the best person ever, and I need to protect her from anything that I can protect her from. And for those wondering what that means, as the father, um, it's not about protecting her from anything bad ever happening to her. It's about making sure, well, protecting her from bad things happening to her, obviously, but also making

Olivia And The Blog Beginning

James Guttman 5:05

sure she has the tools that when bad things happen in life, she gets ahead of them. And I I feel like I've done all that. Um, that's been my my goal and my um my end game since she was young, just like Lucas, is to eventually create people who can survive without me. And it sounds so morbid and it sounds so terrible, but it's true. I talk about my heart surgery, talk about it all the time. Quental bypass, uh, 2012, I was 35 years old. It was crazy, no one expected it. Three hours' notice, yada, yada, yada, changed my life. Um, made me appreciate my son far more than I ever thought I could. I wanted to know who he was. I wanted to understand him, and I talk about that a lot because it's a big part of our story, right? Why am I like this? Why am I so like, oh, happy? Um, and a part of it's me, but also a part of it was this life-changing moment. But it was Olivia when I was in that hospital that I thought to myself, I'm leaving this girl. If I die in this hospital today, her story ends with me dying when she's like three years old. And every great thing I did is going to be put into a different frame. This is terribly morbid, and this is real, and this went through my head a lot. Where I'm like, here's this girl I, you know, gave all this love to and spent all this time with. And that story could possibly be one day, my dad is my best friend, and he did all these things with me, and he was always there for me. And that's the road we were on. But if I was done that day, if I died that day, as I was told I could have, you know, by multiple people, in my head, I'm thinking this story ends with my dad really loves me. Well, he died when I was three, and it was a sad story. And in many ways, right, I came out of that surgery wanting to learn about Lucas. So Lucas was the focus of my new way of thinking. But I gotta tell you, 100%, I knew this was gonna be like an emotion I want to tell you guys about, but Olivia is the reason that I I if I had any hand in surviving my own surgery, and if I had any hand in surviving that day, Olivia was my motivation to do so. Because that's all I thought about. I did not want to leave that girl. I wanted to be there, I wanted to see everything she did, I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to help her, I wanted to experience her life with her. I was in awe of this girl. She was a part of me. She looked like me, she looked like my wife at the time. The whole thing, the whole idea of fatherhood to me is the biggest blessing I could ever be given, right? I love being a dad. People have said to me, man, I went to therapy years ago and things like that. When they hear, whenever anybody hears what I do for a living, they're taken aback by it. They go, you found a way to marry your two passions, which is parenting and writing. I love writing. I wrote for years. I've been writing since 2002. I wrote about wrestling, I've written about pregnancy, I've written about Las Vegas, San Antonio, all this different stuff I write about. But I want to write about my kids because I love my kids. And the things I do for my kids and the life that we experience together is so important to me. And I got to do that. And I wrote about Olivia, man. And if you go back to those early ones, my God, it was such a memory of just what we went through. She's one of the funniest people to this day, very dry, um, says shockingly funny things sometimes. I always talk about when she was little and she had made a pun about ego, and she was like seven. And I'm like, I asked her to explain the thing. I'm like, what do you mean? And she goes, hmm, clever wordplay. Like, did you say clever wordplay? So it's things like that that stun me still about her, where she'll just come out of nowhere with funny little things. We we name things, right? Like if we make a character, we'll put a name on it. And there's things that she does that I know are from me, whether it's learned, uh, nature, nurture, as they say. And there's definitely, dude, there's nature in your kids, right? Like nurture

Heart Surgery And Fatherhood Fear

James Guttman 9:15

is a big deal. And there's things that I've taught both of them that they do. But one of the things that I've discovered by having a nonverbal child is that there are certain things that were never explained to Lucas that Lucas does, that we all do. I have pictures, one of my favorite pictures is Olivia was like maybe like one or two, and she was in the living room and she was laying on the floor, like completely flat, like a reverse plank, but she was face up just watching TV. And I was like, You're all right. And she's like, Yeah. I'm like, okay. And I took a picture of it. Uh, then like five years later, I went into the living room, and there's Lucas doing the same exact thing. And if you guys know Lucas, you can't explain to Lucas. You can't be like, hey, Lucas, watch your land, you won't do it. Just something hardwired into us. And I see that in her the way she acts, her reactions to things. And um I was scared for a while about where things were gonna go. I am a single dad who went through a divorce when my daughter was 13 years old, and I feared so much that I would lose her. And maybe it was timing, but maybe it was her age, but right at that moment is when I started to see her slip away, as kids often do, and it freaked me out. I worried and I thought about it, and I didn't know what was happening, and I didn't know if we would ever get back. And I am so glad that I stayed next to her and with her and tried to be there for her when she needed me, because now today, at 18 years old, I have the relationship with my daughter that I always hoped I would. I love that kid, and I am so, so proud of her. Not for what she's accomplished. She has accomplished so many things. She has won awards and gotten grades that I can't even dream of. But I told her one day, I said, Olivia, I don't, I don't care how many awards you get, how many diplomas, how high your grades are, if you're not a good person, I won't be proud of you. I need you to be a good person. And in that moment when I said that, like I knew I was gonna say it, I knew what I was gonna say, but that was the moment where I realized my priorities, how I prioritize things. Because I would rather have her be uneducated, unemployed, and known as the sweetest, most wonderful woman in town than to be, you know, some mid-level middle management person. And everyone's like, what a grumpy lady down the block. I want I want to raise good people, and my daughter's a good person. Um, she's loyal, fiercely loyal. We talk about not wanting our kids to do the same mistakes that we made, right? But and as a kid, I always liked to loyalty, that was important to me. Um, to this day, I try to be loyal. If I give you my word, you have my word. I'm on your side. I'll be honest with you and I'll tell you what's right and wrong, but I don't betray people. I feel very strongly about it. And I I once heard a quote that I loved that said, Loyalty is the most disposable virtue. And it's so true. And my daughter is loyal beyond words. Um, and I've seen her go through situations where she's defended friends and lost big groups of friends because of it, because she won't allow injustice, she won't allow people to um exclude people or pick on people. And I've been in awe of it. And even during her grumpy teen years when she was still like, you know, giving me one-word answers or hard to track down to get a reply to a text. I was watching her become this person, you

Divorce Teen Distance And Loyalty

James Guttman 12:50

know, indirectly from afar, that I wanted her to be. And this past week, it was on display for me, right? Because this was the week, and I talked about it a little bit last week, and that's the whole point of this. I don't know, maybe I missed, I buried the lead, I didn't start with it. The reason why this podcast this week is about Olivia. Uh, and the reason why I've been given permission to post her pictures and put all that up, and I've been given more permission as time has gone on, it's been great. Um, this was a marathon week. Olivia turned 18 at the end of May, and this past week has been Olivia week. Uh it started earlier in the week with scholarship presentations at the school. There was two straight days of scholarships being presented for academics and then sports. And oh my God, it was literally the first night was four hours. I sat there, I was like, is this for real? And if you've never been to one of these, just take a quick detour on this so I can explain this to you. Um I sat there, and what ends up happening is they have all these scholarships they give out. You guys know scholarships like, you know, uh Scotts Tots. If you watch The Office, you get what I'm saying. So what'll happen is they'll they'll announce a scholarship, give it to somebody, but what they do is they bring up the people behind the scholarship who then give you a backstory on the person that it's in the memory of, in honor of, and it's sweet, but it's like 150 of them, and every speech is like five minutes. I'm like, this is gonna go on forever, and you're sitting here to be rude, and it's like, I get it. He likes snowboarding, it's wonderful. Thanks for the scholarship. But it's hard because it's one of those things where we all do this, you go through like a boring um presentation or a boring thing, and you sit there and you want to like zone out, but uh you listen to these people and you're like, oh my God, but this is important. I want to hear this, you want to be respectful. Um, and I sat there for four hours, not on my phone, not doing anything, paying attention. But to be honest with you, my head, my head had a chance to think, and it bugged me out to just see my kid up there, knowing that it wasn't that long ago that I saw a different kid up there. I saw this little girl up on that same stage, looking over and waving, sticking her tongue out. And that was the start of the week, right? So Monday, Tuesday, we went through these scholarship awards and she got scholarships, and I was so proud of her, and I got to see all her friends. Wednesday was the weird one, right? Wednesday was the prom, and it was her senior prom. And I kept saying it was like the series finale of a TV show. Because for some reason, they were able to get everybody to come back, right? Kids that she stopped talking to years ago, she's now talking to again. There was like a hundred people at this uh pre-pom uh pre-prom party at my ex-wife's house. And I kept saying it's like a series finale because all the old people from the show show up, but then after that, I'm never gonna see them again because I'm not. There's not gonna be too many. I mean, you'll see them here and there, but there's not gonna be any more large gatherings of this group of people. There's no more getting ready to go to a little ladies' dance or a basketball game. We were done. That was it. And not only that, but I'm seeing these kids growing up, her friends. You know, she has friends that I've watched and say we're babies. Her friend Lauren is like, I've watched that kid since she was tiny, and she's there with a date and introducing me to her date, and she's this lady. I'm like, this is crazy.

Scholarship Nights That Last Forever

James Guttman 16:10

You guys are all babies in my mind. And I wrote about this in the in the blogs. I wrote about her in the blog this week on Monday. Uh they tell me that my baby is an adult now. But what's crazy was sitting there the next day, right? Because now the next day, we're still doing this marathon, was her graduation. It was at Hashra, we went down, and um, I looked down into the audience and it was huge. And I see her sitting there. And I mentioned this in the blog, and I don't know if it came across right when I explained it because it's it's so true. I saw my baby sitting in the crowd. And when you say that, if you don't have a kid or you have a young kid and you don't understand it, you think that I'm being kind of like poetic. Like I just I saw my baby in my mind. No, I literally saw my baby because just like Lucas, she grows up inch by inch by inch by inch in front of me, right? I see her every step of the way. So what she looks like now in my head is my memory of what she looked like at 10 or not. Like, I I don't see this big jump in what she looks like unless I see an old picture and I'm like, oh, same thing with Lucas. So I'm looking down and I'm seeing my baby in a cap and gown graduating from high school, and I'm like blown away by it in so many ways, blown away by it. And I've been taking that in this week, and now she's getting ready to go to college, and we have to go take care of that too. And I don't know, man. I'm I'm taking it in. Um, I'm trying to understand it. It's it's so weird because I've had 18 years to prepare for this. And now that we're here, I don't know what to make of it. I just can't believe that my baby is an adult now. And I can't believe how great it all turned out. And just like I talk all the time, because a lot of this stuff is centered around Lucas and accepting special needs and the the plight of a of a parent with a with a child that has an unknown future. I always say, if I could go back, I wish I could tell myself it's gonna be okay. I wish I could go back and tell myself that about her too. Hey, it's all right. Hold on, because when this kid reaches adulthood, you're gonna see that she's everything that you know she's capable of. I always knew she was capable of anything. I still think, and mark this down, man. If if you have this audio and it's 30 years from now, 40 years from now, if I'm not around anymore, listen to it, because I think my kid has so many great things to contribute to the world. And I'm so excited to see what they are. You know, I don't live through my kids. I don't have any unrealized dreams. Literally, I have no unrealized dreams. I did everything I wanted to do. I wrote books, I wrote for magazines I want to write for. Um, I'm proud of my family, I'm proud of myself, I'm proud of everything that's happened. I have nothing left undone that I need someone else to do to make me fulfilled. So I don't know what specifically she's going to do, but I know she's going to do big things. She wants to go into law and she wants to, you know, she's into justice and I don't know. She's an amazing, amazing, amazing young woman. And I'm so proud of the fact that I raised her. And I'm so proud to just, I don't know, share her with the world. Just like Lucas, man. I talk all the time about wanting to share Lucas with all of you. I cannot wait to see the impact that Olivia's gonna have. And you know what? Even if she doesn't, even if she decides she doesn't want to do anything of, you know, stature and and you know, business or anything like that, if she just continues to be the person she is, she's gonna bring light to wherever she goes. Whether she's the uh the mom that everybody

Prom Then Graduation Hits Hard

James Guttman 20:05

loves in the community, whether she's, you know, um the best you know lawyer bringing justice to those who are voiceless, or whether she's, I don't know, the most popular greeter at Walmart, whatever she wants to do, people are going to love her. And that to me is the sign that you raise the right kid. The fact that your kid doesn't need to be anything to be memorable in that capacity. Wherever she goes, she's going to shine. And that you want to breathe a breath of fresh air that's right there, you know, that's the easiest way to do it. I love this kid, man. And um I'm proud of her. She's been through a lot and she's dealt with a lot, and she's she's always come out stronger, which is so important. Um, the love that she shows for her brother, and I don't know, man. She gave me a Father's Day card this last week. Again, it was Father's Day, it was on Sunday. That's another part of this marathon week. And I remember she wrote me a message in the card. I don't know. It was beautiful. And um, I don't know. I'm just sitting here with a smile on my face, guys. Because honestly, it's um when you reach this point and you feel like you've done something good, it means a lot. This was most of my adulthood was spent trying to raise this kid to be a great adult herself. And I did. And I couldn't be prouder of her. Uh Olivia, I love you if you're listening to this. And you better you better be listening to this. If you're listening to this, I love you. Um, I want the world to know, and I want all you guys to know too. And yeah, and then just like I always try to give some sort of comfort to those dealing with a situation similar to my son, how things will get better and don't worry. Same thing with those going through those teen years, right? And we didn't go through, and keep in mind, too, I'm not talking like it wasn't terrible. You know, she was a great kid, but she was distant and it changed a little bit, you know, and obviously it has to change. They're not gonna treat you the same way at seven that they treat you at 14. It's a different, it's a different environment. But what came out the other side was this relationship that was um based on adulthood, mutual respect, and that's who she is now. And I'm so lucky for it. I'm just so lucky for it. So yeah, hold on, just stick around, be there for them. And when you reach the the age where the the teenage angst has paid off well, then you end up in a in a better spot, and we're in a better spot. Um, I'm just so proud of everything I've done with her. And that's it. And I want to tell you guys about it. So yeah, good graduation. So happy I got to write about her. So happy I got to share her with you guys. And hopefully going forward, there'll be more, more of these. I feel like it's a lot

Hold On Through The Teen Years

James Guttman 22:55

easier to write about her now um than during some of those earlier years. So thank you. Thank you for being here for the journey. And that's the other thing, too, man. You guys have shared this. You know, Olivia has grown up, Lucas has grown up on the pages of this blog. And I've been doing the blog now for almost 10 years. It'll be 10 years in February. So you've watched her grow from eight to 18, and you've seen the transition, and you've been there through the difficulties and through the hard times and through the good times. You've you've lived through our, you know, the divorce and all these different things that have happened in that time period. And I don't know, I couldn't be any happier than I am in this moment. This is the happiest I feel like I've ever been. And um, I don't know. Hashtag blessed, right? Thank you guys. Thank you so much for taking this journey with me. Thank you for listening. Thank you. Come back on Monday. I'm gonna have a new blog on Monday, uh, a new podcast next Friday. Follow me on social media, Hi James Gutman, H I James Gutman. Go to TikTok, right? Like I don't promote them individually, but like Instagram, Facebook, we have those, but TikTok, I'm really proud of. I put videos on there every single Friday, sometimes a little bit more in between, but you can see all the teasers for these podcasts. You can see, you know, videos of Lucas and my daughter and the things that we do. Thank you. Thank you for all your support. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a great day. Till next time. This is James Gutman saying, be well. Bye, Pod. I'm dad.