Welcome And Summer Reality Check

James Guttman 0:00

It's the journey pod. Hipod I'm Dad. Hipod, James Gubman. Guys, thank you once again for finding me on Hipod I'm Dad.com. Any streaming service every Friday. I appreciate it. Uh we are here. It is August. It is it's August. It's August of 2026. The year is uh where's uh it's yeah, it's August. It's warm out, it's beautiful. We are inching our way towards stores telling us that it's pumpkin spice season. I hate that. Uh we get ready. We're always pushing forward. And as soon as it starts to feel like maybe it's okay to buy the pumpkin spice, they're gonna be selling you Christmas trees. I'm warning you now. But that's how life goes, man. Life is about moving forward, figuring things out, understanding things

A Blog Sparked By A Dream

James Guttman 0:47

better. And I wrote about that on Monday. For those of you guys who checked it out, on Monday I wrote a blog called I Had Another Dream About My Nonverbal Son. This time he wasn't speaking. Yeah, and this headline is maybe a little inside baseball, a little cheeky for its own good, but I wrote it for a reason. It's because I once wrote an article about how I had a dream that he was speaking. And I did, and that's a dream that stuck with me. I mean, it still is in my head. I can still vividly remember it. And just to give you guys some background, I remember not a lot of my dreams, but the ones that are solid, the ones that have an effect on me, the ones that make a difference or are trying to tell me something, I remember those. And for whatever reason, my dreams are kind of laid out a certain way, almost like a like a psychedelic mini-movie where there's uh there's definitely issues. Like one of the big things that I've always had is uh I have dreams a lot about having to get somewhere and there's not enough time to get there, and I don't have my stuff and I'm lost, and and I know where all that comes from, and people will say, Oh, that's stress and that's anxiety. And it's funny because early on in my life, I didn't know these things. We just dreamed things, we took them and we move forward. But as you get older and you think about why did I dream this? What was I thinking about at the time? What were the things going on around me? You start to realize that these dreams that we have are really just manifestations of our worries and our concerns and our life in general. And that's what this dream was on uh, well, it wasn't Monday, but I wrote about on Monday.

The First Dream Where He Speaks

James Guttman 2:19

Before that, though, let me bring you back to the first one. The first one happened like a thousand years ago. Lucas must have been maybe four, I don't even know. He was very little. And I know this because uh I was still married, I was still in the original house then when they were born. We lived in one place, we moved right before the divorce. This was the old school house. And in the dream, again, vividly, I remember it, I was sitting at my dining room table, which overlooked the living room. The room was surrounded with like kids' toys because back in the day, man, my my daughter, when she was little, that living room was covered in her toys. And it was funny because she literally thought it was her room. It was the living room. My daughter's name is Olivia, and she told me when she was like, This is my room, Daddy. I said, What do you mean it's your room? It's the living room. I'm like, no, it's living room. Oh. So in the dream, it was like, I miss, I miss that. All right. So then in the dream, sorry to get off on that. The uh the room was covered in their toys. Lucas was playing in the corner, and we're sitting at the dining room table and we're talking about watching a movie. And someone's like, we should watch a movie. And the kids are all talking about the food that they want, and then I hear Lucas going, movie snacks, movie snacks, movie snacks, like chanting for movie snacks. And we're all like, okay, and everyone's like, okay. And I'm like, Yeah, we'll get you movie snacks, don't worry. And then as I'm doing that in the dream, I realize, what the hell, this kid's talking. And I was like, yo, everyone I'm like, Lucas is talking. Hey, do you guys hear that? Lucas is talking, and no one was phased. It was as if it was just something that was just happening. And someone said, Oh, yeah, like he's been talking this whole time. And then I woke up. And this dream messed me up for lack of a more vulgar term. For a while, I was like, what the hell? I couldn't get it out of my head. He's been speaking the whole time. It was poignant. It was even now telling it, it gets to me because you know what bothers me? That bothers me, you know what gets to me the most about this is that this was a profound kind of piece of wisdom that I was giving to myself. He's been speaking the whole time. That's there's something about the phrasing of it, there's something about the idea of it. That if it came from someone else, it would be a moving thing. Oh, that's a good point. It literally came from me. So it was in there, it was in my head. And that changed a lot of how I I felt and how I worried.

Why AAC And Gestures Matter

James Guttman 4:50

I realized that my son can speak without speaking, and that the goal was receptive language. The goal was making sure he was understood, giving him devices, giving him gestures, giving him a chance to really say what he had to say. And I gotta, I'm I'm gonna tell you this too. Yeah, whatever, I'll tell you the story. So I am so happy that I gave Lucas this device to be able to ask questions. I'm so glad that I gave Lucas gestures and these things to do. And it was a struggle initially when he was little. I didn't want to at first. A lot of people don't want to. It's frightening. And the reason why is that in some cases, kids may maybe don't need it, might speak on their own. Everyone is a case-to-case basis. When it came to my son, I knew he's not gonna have words because with Lucas, it wasn't necessarily, I mean, not gonna have words in general, maybe one day, but it wasn't about lack of language, it was a lot of lack of understanding. Uh, even if he had the words, I don't know if he would be able to fully use them. He would only use maybe a handful. The important thing was making sure he was understood, making sure that he knew he was part of our world. Um, so I knew giving him the device ultimately was a good thing. This was like maybe a month or two ago.

A Date And A Harmful Assumption

James Guttman 6:03

No, it wasn't a month ago, it was like two months ago, three months ago. Um, I was out uh with a woman that I had met on a dating site. I'm single, I go on dating. Yeah, I go on dates, uh, lived around my town. I'm not gonna, I mean, I don't want anybody to figure it out. But anyway, this woman, I didn't realize we went on this date. She had a child who initially they thought was going to be nonverbal. And he had uh clawed his way out of it to the point where it sounded like he didn't really have too much of anything in terms of uh language issues. And she pointed out, and as she's going on this thing, about how they wanted to give him a device and how I told them you get that freaking thing away from my kid, and I'm not gonna let him have that goddamn. I'm like, all right, all right. I'm listening to her, you know, valiantly fighting not to give her kid a device. Now, I don't judge. In fact, I know that it's a case-to-case basis, right? Like, so I'm hearing the story, and I'm not getting offended because I have my kid, she has her kid, she made the right choice, the kid's talking, good for you, way to go. And that's it. That's that's the answer, right? Every kid is different, we all do different things. That's the point of her story, except she then follows it up with, you know, I hate to be judgmental, but I kind of feel like you know, all these parents, I don't know. You don't give your kid a device, like they all talk. I think every single one of them has the ability. And then goes on this long speech about how every kid can talk and you don't give them devices, and how parents do that. And the more she talked, the more is annoy the right word or second, I don't know what it is, but it bothered me because uh here was someone with a life experience that has such a message to it. She is the ultimate example of every kid is different. Know what works for your kid, right? That's her message. And for some reason, the lesson she got from it was the complete opposite of, oh, every kid is like my kid. They're not. Lucas is not like her kid. Lucas is not a kid that could talk, but I hindered him by giving him the ability to communicate. If I didn't give Lucas a device, if I didn't work on other forms of communication with him, he would literally still be sitting there in silence. Lucas can't speak. I've tried with him. I don't know whether it's the movement of his mouth or the words themselves or even just simply copying. He can't copy sounds at all. If I go, Lucas, bah, bah, bah, he won't do it. He can't do it. On his own, he could sit there all day, bah, bah, bah. But as soon as you tell him to repeat something vocally, he can't do it. He'll touch his mouth, he gets frustrated. I don't know why. And maybe we'll figure it out, maybe we won't. But all I know is that it's specific to him, right? So that was the point. That's why I wanted to tell you guys that story. So if you're one of those people, honestly, if you if you have a situation like that and you have a success story and you had your kid start speaking, and you're happy, I'm happy for you, we're all different. Um, but do me and do the rest of the world a favor. Don't apply that to everybody. It's not right. Um, it's it's borderline cruel a little bit. I think a lot of us as parents of kids with special needs or kids uh who have issues with speech and language or anything, we're so used to having blame halfway pinned on us, right? Well, what have you spoken to him? Like that kind of nonsense where you're just like, lady, you think I don't talk to my kid? Like I lock him in a box all day and I'm like, I don't know why he doesn't talk. And I did I talk to him constantly, more than anyone else in the world. I talk to Lucas all the time. I tell Lucas everything. I would tell him about my issues, I tell him about things that maybe I shouldn't even tell him about. I just talk to Lucas. He's like, I mean, he's my best friend. I love this kid. So yeah, don't do that. If you do that, don't do that. Anyway, bring it back to language. So at the time, I had all of those concerns about him speaking. This dream helped out. Now here we are.

The New Dream And A New Fear

James Guttman 9:56

Lucas is 15. It's like a decade later. And I have another dream. I hadn't had a real dream about this kind of thing in a while. I've had weird dreams through the years. I've talked about them sometimes here on the podcast. I dreamt about a friend of mine who had passed away and things like that. Those things happen. But I don't have a lot about Lucas in the sense of I'm learning something or I'm getting something out of it. So I have this dream. And in it, and this is how I know that our dreams are really just a manifestation of everything going on. I'm in a hotel for a college orientation. My daughter's going to college in like, what day is it? Oh my God, in like a week. Jesus. Yeah, a little over a week. I can't even, all right, a week, a little over a week. Wrapping my head around it. Um, and I'm in this hotel, and I'm standing there in the corner of this, this hallway, this corridor, and all of a sudden these people start gathering. There's no point to some of the parts of the story. This is one of those parts, but I always find it important to give all the details. It's true, and I think it plays into it. And I'm standing there, and this guy is standing there, and this group is gathering around him, and he looks at me and he goes, Are you here for the South Asian Studies Tour? And I'm like, No. And as I'm interacting with him, all of a sudden, my son walks up to me from down the hallway on his own. He's taller than I remember. He's maybe like two inches taller than me, looks the same, and he's wearing the outfit that he wore on Easter, right? And on Easter, he wore this little button-down shirt and these khaki pants. And I look at him and he's all done up. His shirts tucked into everything, and everything is perfect, except he didn't fully do his pants. So his fly is open and a bit of the shirt tail is sticking out. And I was like, Lucas, oh my God, did you do this? Amazing, bro. Good job. Let's get you fixed up. Wonderful. So in the dream, I'm impressed, but I'm not blown away. In real life, I would freak out like if this happened. Like, Lucas doesn't do this. So we walk down the hallway to his room. And we get there, there's the door in front of us. And I didn't really go into too much detail in the blog because it's hard to explain. But what ended up happening was the door's in front of us, the doorknob's on the left, right? So I'm standing in front of the doorknob, Lucas is on the right. And above the doorknob is that the swiper to be able to key yourself in. So I say to him, Lucas, we need the key. And as I'm saying that, I look over, and at the other end of the door, there's a wide slot. It just looks like a hole in the door. And he takes his key and he just throws it into the slot. And I was like, oh my God. I guess that's it. I guess we lost the key. And as I'm thinking that, we open the door. And I'm like, oh, and we walk in. This is the second part of the dream. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know what it is, but it's part of it. I look at the bed, and there is this um, I guess it was a crumpled up furry hoodie or something, black and white on the bed. And I go, yo, is that a dog? And then I woke up. No idea why that mattered. And what was crazy about this dream was that I got it right away. I didn't need to think about it. I didn't need to harp on it. I understood it. I understood that I'm no longer worried about Lucas speaking. I haven't been for a while. Right? I'm I'm good with his communication. I would love for him to have a word or two. I'd love for him to be able to say hello, physically say hello. I would love for him to do everything, right? Not just speak. Everything. I want him to fly a plane. I want him to be president of the United States. I want him to win the Super Bowl. I want Lucas to do every single thing in the world. It's all on the plate for him. That's what I want. But I don't need him to do anything. He could do zero things, and I will still love him just as much if he became the president who won the Super Bowl. Um, so I'm not worried about language anymore.

Life Skills And The Weight Of Love

James Guttman 13:38

But yeah, I'm a little worried about self-sufficiency, which a lot of people, my you know, my age, my son's age, parents of children his age worry about. Is he gonna be able to take care of himself? Is he going to be able to dress himself, get himself ready for his day, shower, all these things completely unassisted. And I pause here because I know that I talk to you guys every week, and I know that I talk about my son, I write about him, but sometimes I think there's a there's a misconception about where his skill levels are. Uh Lucas requires a lot of assistance still across the board with a lot of things in life. And we've tried for you know 15 years, every day, repetition, dudes, and he's made progress in certain areas and in certain ones he hasn't. And it's to the point where at right now, Lucas can help. Lucas could probably get himself halfway ready, right? But he can he can't do it on his own. And now, as I'm getting older, as he's getting older, as we're all getting older, time moves on, the concern now becomes the thing that I was concerned about the whole time. I have to give him enough life skills that when I'm not here, he can do a lot for himself, and it's not completely relying on someone else. Or at the very least, some of the more important things he needs to take care of on his own. And this is my new, my new focus. And you guys know me, man. I'm hippy-dippy. I had a quintuple bypass at 35. I am Mr. Stress Free, chill out, uh, unless you disrespect me and then you know, scorched earth. But other than that, like in terms of my day-to-day, in terms of my love for my son, in terms of the frustrations that I have in life, I, you know, blow them off and keep going. You know what I'm saying? Just move forward, walk along. Um and a lot of my stresses and worries and anxieties come out either in dreams like this, or they come out physically. I've had that, where like I'll be stressed out, not even realize I'm stressed out, and I can't walk straight, like my back will hurt. Um, and I've learned like it always kind of plays into itself. I don't know how that works out, but um, so I don't outwardly stress. So this dream reminded me, like, like, bro, you're caring a lot. And I don't say that a lot, you know. I do these podcasts and I do the blogs, and people hear what I say, and sometimes they think that by talking about the positives of my son's personality, by talking about how much I love him, by talking about how I appreciate him, even the things that other people would see as uh as a disability, I appreciate how it affects his personality as a beautiful kid. So people assume that there's no work, there's no worry, there's no concern. You have no idea. It's there. I don't focus on it, I don't make it the overall thing. I don't wish for a different kid, I don't yell at God, I don't pray for a different situation. I love my kid, I love our situation, but it comes with worry and it comes with concern. And that worry and that concern is because I love him. And if I didn't love my son, I wouldn't be worried and I wouldn't be concerned. And all of us who have kids, whether verbal, nonverbal, neurotypical, neurodivergent, you worry about your kids. In my case, the worry is more tangible. It's not a, well, what would happen if? No, it's this is probably gonna happen now. What? That's my that's my worry. How do we go forward? And uh, and the answer is just keep doing what I'm doing. And that's what this dream showed me. His progress is there, he's making progress. Is he exactly where he needs to be? No, not yet. And that was the point of the blog. I said, that's the word. Yet. It's yet. It's keep trying. Will it happen? I hope so. Might it not? Yeah, it might not. Language didn't happen. But I know that as my son has grown and I've seen who he is and the work he puts into things, like no one tries harder than Lucas. You have no idea. I watch this kid in awe sometimes, how he pushes forward, if he's motivated, how he does things. So, yeah, I want him to have those life skills for the day that I'm not here anymore. But in the meantime, to be honest with you, I'll do it forever if I have to for him. Whatever he needs of me, I'll do.

Teaching Independence The Hard Way

James Guttman 18:12

And on top of it, and real quick, I mean, I hope this isn't like, you know, pivoting, but teaching your child to do life skills is so much more difficult than just doing them. People think that the hard part is like getting them dressed. Oh, I wouldn't want to get my kid dressed. Yeah, it's kind of a pain in the butt to help a grown man get dressed. Do you know what's more of a pain in the butt? To leave his clothes there and go, you put them on, and then he comes back and it's all messed up. And then I have to go and change it. But I do that. Um, I have him put his plate in the sink, right? Instead of going and getting his plate and bringing it over myself, go, Lucas, hand me your plate. You know what he does? He'll pick it up and he holds it vertically. And all the crumbs fall off the plate onto the floor, and he puts it in the sink. And I go, good job, buddy. Like, what are you gonna do, right? Um, because he has to learn how to do it. So that's it. It's more work for me so that he could be more independent as time goes on. And there's so much to it, and there's so many different parts to it. But I guess the the lesson here and the moral for everybody out there is that we all worry about our kids, even me, who's like, I don't worry about anything. I I'm always thinking about my son. Um, and it's important to push forward and it's important to understand what the important things are, and it's also important to acknowledge it, to acknowledge that yeah, I'm facing some difficult things. Sometimes it weighs on my mind. Um, but I love my son, and he's worth it, and that's why I do it. And if you had my son and you loved him like I did, which you definitely would, you do

Where To Find Me And Goodbye

James Guttman 19:50

it too. And that does it for me, guys. Thank you for listening. Hiblogomdad.com, Monday, brand new blogs every week. High Podomdad.com, this show Friday every week. Hi, James Gubman, H I James Gubman, that's on TikTok, that's on Instagram, it's Facebook. You name it threads, I don't know what Blue Sky, I think I have too. I have all this stuff. So follow me. I'm around. I love hearing from you guys. Please drop me a line. You can write to me through the contact form on the on the website if you're looking for a speaker or something for your you know, local school, whatever. I'm here. Hit me up. Thank you. That does it for me. I will see you guys next week. Until then, this is James Gutman saying, be well. Bye, Pod. I'm dad.