Glad to Be Charlie’s Mother: On raising my autistic son in the age of Paris Hilton

I have one older sister: When I found out, some 11 years ago, that I was going to have a boy, I panicked to Jim. What am I going to do with a boy!

Jim was easily reassuring—”Don’t worry, you’re going to love him!”—and he parked the car and we went into Schnuck’s to shop for groceries.

That was when we living in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, and I was teaching Latin to middle- and high-schoolers at the kind of school where the boys wear blue blazers with brass buttons, and Jim and I were driving around various parts of St. Louis and going to Open Houses. Flash forward to now: We’re still in the suburbs, but in Jim’s native NJ and in a rental condo, and I teach Latin, ancient Greek, and anything and everything about the ancient world, and a student wearing a button-down shirt means he has to rush off to work after his last class.

The boy whose big round head and eyes, whose long, spider-leg fingers, were visible already on the ultrasound had already been given his name, Charlie, and that same boy is my one constant from those days. He is (as all of my relatives exclaimed) clearly taller than I am now, carries his own backpack through the airport, and turns his head at the sound of his name—something he did not really do in the time before he was diagnosed with autism in July of 1999. Life with Charlie is a journey that renders a GPS device useless. We’re constantly finding that the path (such as it is) lies directly through a thickly wooded forest, or straight over or through a misty mountain, or across a chasm with no bridge, no rope, and no magic in sight.

To paraphrase an ancient philosopher, the unexpected life is more than well worth living.

A December 27th article by Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Paul Nyhan about his two-year-old daughter reminded me of why life with Charlie, and with autism, is a different life than I had imagined, and a rich and richly rewarding one. Nyhan writes about the “nation’s dysfunctional dialogue with a woman’s body image” and his worries about how our society’s obsessive fascination with women’s bodies, and especially those that are “beautiful,” and thin, is already affecting his toddler daughter. He writes:

My New Year’s resolution is to help my daughter prepare for the mind-numbingly complex, sometimes fictitious image of the female body. Unfortunately, I am out of my element.

Today, involved dads are entering unfamiliar territory, such as body-image anxiety. They want to help, but don’t always know how, says Harvard Medical University researcher Dr. Nancy Etcoff. When Etcoff gives a speech these days, dads ask a lot of the questions.

“They don’t know what to say to their daughters, how to help them,” said Etcoff, who also runs Massachusetts General Hospital’s aesthetics and well-being program. “Right now there is a really troubled body image. It is really hard to feel confident.”

It is also a scary time to raise a daughter. Girls as young as 7 are now treated for anorexia, more than 40 percent of girls in first, second and third grade wish they were thinner, and the number of reported cases of anorexia and bulimia is rising, according to the Seattle-based National Association of Eating Disorders.

As dads take on more at home, they can help their daughters to deal with these problems. For example, when she complains about her weight, don’t dismiss her by saying, “Oh, don’t be silly, you’re beautiful,” Etcoff urges.

Listen. Help her digest the messages she absorbs on YouTube, the E! channel, MTV and ever-growing media outlets.

It’s not that boys don’t have eating disorders (about 10% of those with eating disorders are male, according to some surveys). It is the case that autistic children can have problems—for very different reasons—with eating from neophobia to pica. Nonetheless the worries that seem to be attendant on raising a girl in today’s world—the glut of images of slender young things and cosmetic surgery enhanced celebs at the newsstand and all over the Internet, cyberbullying (as Nyhan points out) on Facebook, MySpace, and who know where else, and the clothing industry and the size 00 jean—are pretty much absent from our life with Charlie. He cares little about what is “in” and fashionable: He has taken a liking to a black Puma t-shirt because it somewhat resembles a black Pittsburgh Pirates t-shirt that Jim has. He carries around his iPod not to be cool but because he likes to have it, and his various other “favorite things” (photos of various family members), close by at all times. He has the “droopy drawers” look because he’s slender at the waist and the elastic tends to dip in the back. He likes what he likes and that’s what he wants and, when I remember my own cluttered adolescence—I had often worn hand-me-downs from my sister and an older cousin with pride, and now these seemed simply so wrong, and I fretted, I worried, I had long black hair—and discomfort, and deep confusion, I feel relieved that Charlie might not have to go through that: Adolescence will come with its new challenges, strain, and problems—the days of carrying and “playtime” are over—-but some of what will be worrying so many other dads and moms will most likely not visit us, the parents of a boy who walks his own path, and who shrugs off “peer pressure.”

Of late, Jim has noted that girls Charlie’s age do a double-take when he walks by them, precisely because he walks by and does not stop and shows no interest in looking at them. The girls turn their heads to see why Charlie is so oblivious (or seems to be): They are looking to be looked at.

I am not the mother of girls; I’ve no real advice but I’ll hazard a thought from my own experience. When I accepted that Charlie was Charlie, that Charlie as he was—struggling so to read, making interesting sounds that might be words on the train, writing his name and then handing me the pencil and saying “yay”—-it was the start of a change. A change not so much in Charlie as in myself, and in our relationship; Charlie, I think, could sense that I was giving up the struggle that he be a certain way, that I was coming to understanding him as himself—with the rumpled black t-shirt and jeans, fleece hood pulled so far over his head that his face cannot at all be seen, and my scribbled on and thoroughly stained laptop case under his arm (Charlie took the case for his iPod and other treasures). I saw that Charlie was most unlike me and yet most similar, and I was glad for it.

I’m glad to be the mother of my boy.