Hi Pod! I’m Dad is where I talk through fatherhood while raising a son with autism who does not speak.
I’m James Guttman, the dad behind Hi Blog! I’m Dad. This podcast isn’t about tips or solutions. It is about what life actually feels like when autism is part of your home every day, and you are trying to be present for it without pretending it is easier than it is.
Some episodes are about joy and connection. Others are about exhaustion, fear, patience, and the quiet moments that never make it into awareness campaigns. Everything you hear here comes from real mornings, real mistakes, and a deep love for my kids.
There is no takeaway. Just one dad saying the things he usually keeps to himself.
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My son Lucas will always be my baby. Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell his facial hair.
This week, I’m talking about watching both of my kids grow up, from my 18-year-old daughter heading off to college to the startling realization that my 15-year-old nonverbal son now has Fred Flintstone stubble, incredibly hairy legs and a very teenage desire for his dad to get out of his room.
I also get into why I’ve never liked assigning a “mental age” to Lucas, what his interests and communication actually look like, and why needing help with certain life skills doesn’t make him a little kid trapped inside a teenager’s body.
Plus, Lucas turns on the charm for his pretty young care manager, I explain what autism appreciation means to me, and I start thinking about the much bigger question our family is approaching: What does growing up look like for Lucas?
Because whether my brain is ready for it or not, my baby is growing up.
It's the journey made with hot iPod I'm dead. Hi Pod, it's James Gutman. That's right. You know the name of the show. I just said it. You know where to find it. You found it. So thank you so much. It's another Friday. It is September. The year is the year's getting away from us. I don't know. I don't know what's happening. I feel like life is like that though, right? Like I feel like now it's September. Feels like it was January yesterday, but it's not. It's been nearly a year. Um and we all grow. We get older. Um our roles in the world change. And I think about this. I have friends who have young kids, and I'm not one of them anymore. I used to be, yeah, man. I used to be a primarily a girl dad. I had a daughter. She was uh little. So when you have a young daughter, you do everything. You're always around them and watching girly shows and doing girly things. My daughter now is grown. She's 18, she's at college. I talk to her more now than when she was here. I gotta say, I might see her again very soon. So I'm excited, man. I love I love the the evolving relationships that you have with kids as they get older, and especially as my daughter got older, I saw that. I was like, wow, this is what what changes. You have a little kid, then you have like a medium-sized kid, then you have an older kid, and then you have an adult, and then I don't know, you're elderly. And I'm watching it across the board, right? My son is 15 years old. My son is nonverbal, he has autism, and it is so easy to, in my head, think of him as a baby. You might hear him clapping in the background. Lucas is my baby, he'll always be my baby, he's always been my baby, he's the baby of the family, the whole nine. Um and he's sweet. He's like a sweet, loving boy. And for so long, the the thing that I used to see people do, especially before I had Lucas, was they would put a mental age onto kids like him, right? Because Lucas has severe autism. And for people who've never met him or don't understand, who haven't been around him, uh, you don't have to guess. Like Lucas is never gonna come out to his friends one day, like, hey guys, I have autism. Like, you know, you meet him, you're like, oh that's who he is, it's part of his personality, it's what he does. Lucas has severe autism. So people would like to put a mental age on that because it's easier for them, right? And for some reason, and again,
look, I say things sometimes on here, how I feel, what I've thought. If you're one of them, don't get offended. It's just my opinion. But before I had Lucas, I used to always like, I don't know, a part of me didn't like hearing that. So hear a parent be like, this is my child. He's 12, but really he's like three and a half. And it's like, what did you where'd you get three and a half from? But on top of it, is he really like three and a half? Because, and I'll tell you, my son is 15. And he is 15. That's it. Mentally, I don't know. I'm not gonna put a mental age on it. And the reason why is because I don't think his struggles with certain things are part of his mental age. I think he he deals with things that he has to learn. There's certain life skills that he doesn't have. I don't think necessarily, if he was a neurotypical six-year-old, he would be this way, or five-year-old. He's nothing like a kid that age. Does he like Sesame Street? Kind of, yeah. He doesn't love Sesame Street, it's not his favorite show, he doesn't play with the toys. Um, Lucas watches things the way he watches them. He watches them for the transitions, he watches them for the music, he watches them for the lighting and the things like that. So there's certain shows he likes. So Sesame Street, there are certain videos of Sesame Street he will watch. But overall, and I wrote about this, I took him to see Sesame Street Live and he didn't like it. Because he's not in it for the characters, he's not in it for that, he's in it for his own reason. And because of that, even in terms of his entertainment, which is some of the more juvenile things that he does, he's still not mentally a kid. He's not a five-year-old or a six-year-old where he marks out for Elmo or gets excited about Cookie Monster. Lucas is just into the things he likes. That's just Lucas, right? So it always bothered me. He's six years old, he's really five years old. And I've written about that too. His mental age is not six, it's important. I started to realize Lucas was growing up. The first time I couldn't figure out what was going on with his face, right? Like Lucas is a very kissy, huggy kid. He likes to hug, likes to kiss, likes to always be around. He's a I tell people he's my squishmallow. He is, he's my squishmallow. And I went over and I gave him a kiss on the cheek. And I'm like, and this is how messed up it was. My brain couldn't figure out why his face was bumpy. My thought was it was acne. Briefly, and again, I'm totally honest with you guys, this makes no sense. My brain was like, is that braille? Why is there braille on his face? I swear to God. For like a half a second, I'm like, what? And then I'm like, what's wrong with you? Why would there be braille on his face? The last thing I expected was Fred Flintstone's stubble on this boy. And my kid has stubble. He's got a little five o'clock shadow stubble. And I think the thing that threw me off, and this is what's weird about my guy. He's such a little weirdo. I love it. It was only growing on one side of his face, right? So he has this little um 1977 inner city mustache, right? It's a little hair lip Steve kind of a thing going on. And he's got one half of his face has stubble on it. I'm like, oh my now it's starting to grow out a little bit more. But I didn't know what was out. I'm like, what is this? I reach in the back seat, right? So we drive in the car, and I like to always let Lucas know that I'm involving him, right? He's not ignored, he's not kind of just like put up with. Like Lucas is a main character. So even when we're driving, I can't keep conversation with, I'll talk out loud. I don't know if he's listening to me, I don't know if he cares sometimes, but I talk at him all the time. But in the absence of that, I will reach my hand back and I'll just kind of like tap his legs. What's up, buddy? You guys know he does your kids. What's up, buddy? How you doing back there? And this year in the summer, he's wearing shorts, and his legs are so hairy. Like I was like, what is what am I touching? I thought he was wearing like a fur pair of pants. Oh man, he's got a hairy leg. He's a man,
he's a 15-year-old man. And somebody goes, Oh, but he's sweet. He's like a little kid. Well, he's sweet. He'll hug me and kiss me or whatever. But I wrote in the blog this week about Lucas being a teenager. Very apropos. Well, my non-verbal son can be such a typical teenager sometimes. And I wrote about the fact that Lucas will non-verbally yell at me, right? We have gestures that we use to communicate with each other. Two fists together, boom, boom. Means more. Hand to the mouth means feed me or eat. It also means yes. It's his catch all thing is the hand to the mouth. And I'm trying to get him not to do that. I'm like, Lucas, do you want to tapping his mouth? And he gets frustrated. And I always end up at that point going to get his device, which he's pretty good with his device, but we don't bring that thing around the house. So I gotta go downstairs, I grab it, I go, here, what do you want? It's like pirate booty or pizza or some nonsense at like one in the morning. I'm like, I'm not giving you pizza at one in the morning. We go through this a lot. But there was one day I went in there and I'm like, Lucas, and I put my arms out, and I'm a you know, I'm a squishy dad. And I get excited about seeing him. I'm like, Lucas. Uh it must be so annoying. I can't even imagine how annoying I must be to this kid sometimes. And um, he puts his hand up and he pushes me away from him. I'm like, Lucas, come on, what are you doing? And he starts tapping his mouth, which could mean anything. And I'm like, what? You want me to go? He's tapping, tapping, and he's getting like so like insistent with this tap, and he's got eye contact, like he's hitting it. And I know it means go away. Like, I get it. I feel it. A lot of the gestures that we have are all based on like intuition and instinct. Like, you know, like, oh, he's doing this because he means that. And I always try to explain it to people. It's like having a friend across the room during a boring work meeting, and you look over and they make a face at you. And the same face can mean many different things, but you know, you feel what it is, and that's how him and I are. So he's doing this to me. He's like tapping his mouth, like, good, and all I'm hearing in my head is like, get out, get out of my room, get out of my room. I back up and he watches me until the door closes. Like, still like, get out. I'm like, ah, all right, pal. If you say so, the other story I told, which is one of my favorite ones, is uh we have a care manager for Lucas. We're trying to get services, OPWDD on Long Island. We're working with all this stuff. And this woman is in charge of helping us out, you know, figure out what we can get him, what he needs, hiring people, bringing people in to take him into the community, the whole, you know, the whole shebang. And she's young, she's a pretty lady, nice, very sweet, very kind, very calm. And Lucas is sitting at the table and he gets up from the table and he kisses her on the cheek. And I'm like, oh. And then he comes back to the table and he gets up again and kisses her on the cheek. Every
time he gets up, he kisses this woman on the cheek. And she's like, oh, that's sweet. She's like, does he do this for everybody? I'm like, no, no, he does not do that for everybody. I'm like, hey, buddy, why don't we uh pull it back a little bit, shall we? Little Mr. GQ smooth. And that's I don't, and keep in mind too, like when I tell this story, I know people are thinking of other people in my position who like to sometimes pretend like their kid has a crush, right? And I've never done that. There's only been one other time where I saw him do something that was like sweet with a girl that was close enough to a crush. He was at a pool party, and there was a little girl in the class, and the teachers used to be like, He loves this little girl in the class. I'm like, what does he? And I'm watching him, and he's sitting next to her on this bench by the pool. He was so little. There's a picture of me too with it. And he like looks over and he like taps her. And when she looks at him, he smiled and he looked away. And I wanted to melt it. It was the cutest like Hallmark card thing you've ever seen. So I don't. I don't like to always be like, Lucas has a bit of a crush on his teeth and just make it up. I don't make it up. Like if I tell you Lucas is being loving to Lucas because Lucas is being loving to somebody, it's very it's very much out there. A big part, listen, this is important, uh, at least as far as I go. Um, a big part of autism appreciation for me that I like to talk about is acknowledging the realities, right? Like, I don't pretend anything with Lucas. Lucas has the life skills that he has. Lucas is not telepathic, Lucas is not an alien, Lucas is not a magic trick. Lucas is my son. He's a human being. He has um beautiful qualities that no one else I know has. He also has struggles that are real and are there. I don't have to pretend like he can do things he doesn't do. I don't have to pretend like he's anything he's not. I love him for who he is. That's the whole point. That's what autism appreciation is. Because I've had people come to me and I'll say something to them and be like, oh yeah, Lucas doesn't care about that stuff, or Lucas doesn't notice about things that I know that he doesn't notice or care about. And they'll be like, oh, that's not you being dismissive. I'm like, no, I'm being realistic. I'm being realistic. If my son didn't have legs and I talk to people all the time about his
shoes, I would look silly, right? I would look like maybe I'm not accepting my son. But I do accept my son. His limitations, his obstacles, his struggles, they're all a part of who he is. And I love him. And I put his best foot forward here when I write about him and when I tell you stories about it all the time, but I'm also honest. I don't want you to think I have some sort of magic kid. I have my kid. I think he's amazing, I think he's wonderful, and I think all too often um the beauty of someone like him is not put on display in writing and in podcasts and in media in general, and that's what I try to do. Um, but I love my kid and I love, you know, they say warts and all. Like just like I know that I'm not a hundred percent great all the time, and he loves me anyway, and I have people in my life that are the exact same way. We have loved ones and family members and friends who they're not a hundred percent of the time always making you proud. Not everything is a success story, right? He's my boy. It's amazing, but I know who he is, I accept who he is, and I put it out there every single time. And the thing that I'm accepting now is he's an adult. Uh he's getting 15 years old, and he's got freaking Fred Flintstone stubble. And, you know, and you guys may have noticed in the blog and in the podcast that the themes kind of are changing because he's getting older, and now there's a lot of grown-up things to think about and wonder and what's next for Lucas. And yeah, man, I um this is a big big path that we're about to embark on. I'm glad that you guys are here. I'm glad I could talk to you about it. I mean, cards on the table. I don't know. I don't know how this journey would have gone without having the opportunity to kind of like use this blog and this podcast as a sounding board and being able to talk to you guys and hear back from you. The responses I get from people in similar situations, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, friends, I don't know, just siblings. It means it means so much to me. And um I appreciate it. There's a lot more to say, a lot more to come, but that does it for me this week. I will be back uh Monday with a new blog. Next Friday with a new podcast. Hiblogomdad.com. That's the blog. Highpodomdad.com is the podcast. I am on social media everywhere. Hi, James Gutman, H I James Gutman 2Ts, that's me. Till next week. This is James Gutman saying, be well. Byepod. I'm daddy, I'm gonna do that.
