A Schmaltzy Story About Why I Love My Autistic Son Nate
- andreasachs1
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
By Amy Lennard Goehner / Hudson, N.Y.
Last week our friend Tom was admiring the artistry of our Christmas tree, which my son Nate had decorated. “It must be wonderful to always be able to see Christmas through a child’s eyes,” Tom said wistfully. Nate is 31 and is autistic. But his childlike excitement come Christmas is exactly what it was when he was five. Where Tom saw artistry, I had only seen piles of ornaments sloppily clumped together on the tree. But Tom’s words resonated. I stopped futzing with the clumps and left the tree as Nate had decorated it. I mentally added, “Nate keeps the Peter Pan in Christmas” to a list of things I love about Nate.
I was reminded of those things when Nate was with us for Thanksgiving. He lives 90 minutes from us at The Center for Discovery, a wonderful school and residential community where magic happens.
Nate makes me laugh
My parents strongly felt that the single most invaluable trait anyone could be born with was a sense of humor, particularly needed when life throws you a curveball. Raising Nate, I’ve learned a thing or two about curveballs — and how to use humor to fend them off.
So have other special needs parents I’ve met over the years. They and their quips have stayed with me, like the one from the mom returning her son to his residence after a looooong vacation. When I asked how the visit had gone, she smilingly replied, “Well, at least this vacation he didn’t pee in the fax machine.” Or a dad I interviewed for a story I wrote on autism who told me, “Holidays suck. People get together with relatives and friends and talk — which is sort of hard to do when your child has your sister-in-law’s gerbil by the throat and is about to flush it down the toilet.”
I can’t claim I passed along my humor genes to Nate, cause he’s adopted. But knowingly or unknowingly, he makes me laugh, always without any sense of sarcasm or irony, which are definitely not in Nate’s DNA. After an elderly friend of ours in the city passed away, I told Nate what happened, then asked, “Natey, do you know where people go when they die?” Nate’s unflinching response? “Florida.”
Then there was the brutally hot summer-in-the-city day I was perusing Facebook and reading through friends’ family trips with their perfectly behaved children. Vacation? Travel? With Nate? Imagine. (I couldn’t.) Reading through these posts, I gazed upon my only future outing circled on my refrigerator calendar. It read: Trader Joe’s.
Was everyone I know traveling or imbibing and definitely having more fun than me?
I picked up the phone to give Nate a call at his residence as he can always cheer me up.
Me: Hi Natey!
Nate: Hi Mom!
Me: What are you up to?
Nate: Eating pancakes. With tequila.
Nate keeps the music playing
Shortly after Nate was diagnosed as “maybe autistic” at 18 months, my husband Fred and I hit the jackpot when we found a speech therapist for him whom we dubbed our “captain.” She quickly hit upon Nate’s love of music, which she used as the key to unlock his language. I bolstered those lessons every night when I’d sing Nate to sleep — songs by the great ladies of jazz. I had no way of knowing that the lyrics were burrowing into Nate’s exceptional memory until the day he joined me in singing “Cheek to Cheek.” To this day, that is the name Nate calls the hugs he gives only me as he puts his cheek to mine.
Another Nateism is the way he personalizes every song by adding the name of one of his classmates to the end of each line, so Elvis Presley’s “I can’t help falling in love with you” becomes, “I can’t help falling in love with…Andrea.”
And he sings the lyrics as he hears them. During his Thanksgiving week visit, when “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” came on the radio, Nate’s loud baritone echoed through the house, “Swing Low, Sweet Cherry Eyes.”
Nate keeps memories alive
In 1999, when Nate was five and his brother Joey was 10 weeks old, life was good. But that year, my world changed one warm June evening. Nate was asleep in his room and Joey lay in his bassinet at the foot of our bed. As Fred lay beside me, Fred cried out once and then went silent. He’d had a heart attack and lapsed into a coma, from which he never woke.
I hadn’t yet taken any photos of the four of us. I thought we’d have more than 10 weeks together.
But I am so thankful for Nate’s photographic memory, because it contains a myriad of details of the five years he had with Fred. And he lets me get a glimpse at those times, as he often talks about Fred. He mentions all of our Upper West Side neighborhood places they frequented. “Daddy used to take me there,” is how he lists the places: to Central Park (the Diana Ross playground), Barnes & Noble (the 2nd floor reading corner) and best of all, the #1 train. Subway and train stations are Nate’s happy places. Fred took Nate to the trains daily and would patiently let him watch train after train after train. Nate would jump up and down and holler gleefully with each passing train. He still does that at the Hudson train station, or any train station.
If I were writing the script for a Hallmark Christmas story, I would use the line where Nate turned to me shortly after Fred died and said, “Daddy isn’t coming home anymore.” But honest to God, that is exactly how I remember it.
Nate creates new memories
Fast forward through the slog of 10 years missing Fred and raising my sons as a single mom. One glorious summer evening I sat on a barstool next to a lovely guy an old friend had fixed me up with. We were talking about his native Pittsburgh Steelers when the conversation turned to kids. He mentioned his three. Uh-oh. My turn. “I-have-two-sons-and-one-is-autistic,” I hurriedly said, praying he wouldn’t run for the exit. Because I really liked him. “Really?” he responded. “I have an autistic cousin, Dave. We’re great friends.”
Now, gently fast forward 14 years. Ask Nate to list the places his wonderful stepdad Rick takes him. And the things he’s taught Nate, from chopping down Christmas trees to pumping gas to filling bird feeders.
And ask Rick his favorite Nate memory. He will tell you that it was when we still lived in the city, on a routine family visit to watch the #1 trains. Only rather than just take along his calendar, that time Nate carried his huge Yamaha 61-Key Portable Keyboard with Built-in Songs — along with a frying pan.
Downstairs at the subway station, Nate placed the keyboard and his ever-present calendar on the platform, music blaring, but still held the frying pan. Rick didn’t flinch. He just laughed. And when a kindly woman exiting the train put a $1 bill into Nate’s frying pan, Rick laughed even harder.
I felt like the richest woman in town.
Amy Lennard Goehner has always had Lady Luck on her side in landing dream jobs — after college as a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea and years later as a reporter at Sports Illustrated, covering boxing and horse racing. That luck continued with reporting jobs at Sports Illustrated for Kids and at Time magazine. She currently is a contributing writer to AARP’s Livable Communities and is grateful for the opportunity to write about people who are making life better in their own communities.