by David Finch
Unfortunately, I tend to be more analytical. My exceptional need for control and order often defeats my ability to be present and to feel. Feelings, like children, are disconnected from order and reason. Although feelings (like children) may have their own sort of logic, they tend to go wherever they want. But unlike children, there’s no control over feelings; there’s only chaos. Chaos begets uncertainty, and there is nothing scarier to someone with Asperger’s than uncertainty. Logic, on the other hand, brings the world under control, and routine—sweet, sweet routine—keeps it there. That’s why I rely so heavily on logical thinking and rigid routines. Lining up the items on my desktop; working Monday through Friday without exception; executing my morning regimen without interruption. These rituals create order; they pacify my mind. No surprises, no behavioral triggers, no meltdowns.
Because I tend to overthink everything, it’s rather easy for me to isolate myself from a moment. That’s me in the orchestra hall, unfolding my copy of the score and following along, measure by measure, while the music swells and the people around me dab their tears dry. That’s me during the Fourth of July fireworks trying to identify trajectory patterns in the expanding bubbles of sparks while the other spectators gasp about whatever it is they find so moving. It may have been what Kristen was trying to tell me all along, but experiencing joy—with children or with anything—requires one to feel. In order to feel, one must suspend analysis and critical thinking. Routine might also go out the window and—as I wrote in my Journal of Best Practices—you have to learn to allow that to happen. You have to learn to hand yourself over to the moment.
When I was a kid, being present was much easier. I don’t remember resorting to logic and analysis as a child. Maybe that’s because everything was already under control—my parents took care of that, so I was free to experience things as I pleased. I really didn’t have anything to think about, and yet there was a lot I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why I loved the smell of my dad’s work shirts. It didn’t occur to me to consider why I could fall asleep on my mom’s feet while she folded laundry. I didn’t have any theories to help explain why I could stand for what seemed like an eternity in one spot in my dad’s pasture, staring at the tall grass as it swayed back and forth in the sunlight or moved like waves across the hillside when the breeze picked up. In my childhood world, the grass was shiny, the sun was warm, and everything around me could be transformed into a medieval kingdom on a moment’s notice.
Now I have my own kids, I thought, watching Parker try to tickle a long night crawler he’d plucked from the flower bed. This is their childhood. It’s happening right now, whether I’m present or not. They just want me to be in it. I had finally reached a turning point.
I made a conscious decision to start surrendering myself to Emily and Parker’s childhood at every available opportunity. In doing so, I found that there was some procedure to it after all—something I’m certain that even Kristen did, but she wasn’t aware of it because it came naturally to her. The procedure involved two steps. First, I had to constantly remind myself to participate in their childhood whenever I was with them—whether we were at home, buying vegetables at the farmer’s market, or running errands in the car. Second, I had to ask myself every time we did things together, What is this moment really about? Is it about building the perfect tower of blocks? Is it about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without leaving a mess all over the counter? No, it’s about enjoying the experience with them, so do that.
I must say, it worked out beautifully.
“Okay,” I said, trying on a pair of swimming goggles. “I think I’m ready.”
It was a sunny Saturday morning in June. For three months I had been working on giving Kristen more time to herself in the mornings. I’d realized that the secret to doing so successfully was to learn how to engage with the kids, and by Mother’s Day, I’d learned what engaging with them really meant. Now Father’s Day was around the corner and I was standing in our upstairs hallway in my swimming trunks, watching Kristen gather towels and dry clothes for me and the kids.
“Looks like you’re all set,” she said, giving my waistband a little tug. “I’ll send up the kids if you want to start running the water.”
“You got it.” I gave her a thumbs-up and headed into the bathroom.
I had offered to administer baths to the kids after breakfast (“You kids are in luck, because Daddy is giving you baths today!”), but Kristen was reluctant to let me.
“It always ends with you getting pissed off, or someone crying or going to time-out, and I just don’t feel like dealing with that today,” she said. “I’ll just do it.”
Her comment was still ringing in my head when I turned on the tub faucet and watched the water cascade into a shallow pool around the open drain. I couldn’t remember the last time I had given the kids a bath, but I knew exactly what Kristen was talking about. I have a sensory issue with water. I don’t mind being immersed in it or showering in it, but when water splashes me unexpectedly, I go insane. There’s the surprise of the sensation—unsolicited wetness—and the uncertainty of the next hit: when it will land, where it will land. I’ve always had an issue with this. When I was young, we went to the beach a few times each summer and I loved it—especially swimming. But then other kids would start splashing and I’d scramble out of the water to sit by my mom under a towel until it was time to go home.
I stuck my hand under the faucet. The water was warm—just right—so I pushed the stopper down and began filling the tub. The rush of the water was so loud that I could no longer hear what was going on outside of the bathroom. My entire world had been reduced to that bath for the time being—just like when I was a kid.
If you’re doing it right, giving babies and toddlers a bath is nothing but splashing. You might have a few minutes right at the beginning when they’re simply mesmerized by the rushing and rising of the water. But then you have to dump water from a cup all over them and scrub them with soap, an activity that is sure to get you wet. Wet clothes are also a problem—I can’t stand being in them. The sensation of damp cloth clinging to my skin sets my nerves on fire and I can’t function. I become temperamental and impatient. Because of this, bath time with the kids had always been a tremendous challenge. (Despite the fact that every parenting book on the planet says that bath time is one of the best times for a dad to bond with his children.) A ten-minute bath would result in a half hour of tears from our inconsolable children after I’d removed them from the tub for behaviors that I’d deemed unacceptable, such as splashing or standing up. Our crying children would be Kristen’s to deal with. This was what she had meant whenever she told me that when I was around I made things harder on everyone.
“Can’t you just fucking relax and enjoy things with us?” she’d ask as I’d storm away to our bedroom to towel off and put on dry clothes. “Next time, do me a favor and don’t help.”
But that all changed with my backyard epiphany. I hadn’t stopped hating the splashing, but I’d found a solution: the bathing suit and goggles. But those were just the price of admission to the real party, which started the moment the kids came rushing into the bathroom, completely naked, tackling me and showering me with laughter and hugs.
The bath was going rather well. My slippery kids were laughing at each other and sharing toys, and I wasn’t exhausted by a sense of rage or regret. Instead, I felt fulfilled.
While Emily fashioned a hat out of bubbles, Parker examined his belly button; I couldn’t help but laugh. They had finally pulled me into their world—the kingdom of childhood—and it felt profoundly familiar. The world in which I tend to isolate myself, my painful, lonely, hyper-controlled world, isn’t without its charms. But as comforting as my routines are, I’ve never had one look at me with soap bubbles on its nose and tell me that it loves me.
Kristen came into the bathroom and kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to take a shower while the kids finish their bath,” she said.
; “That sounds nice,” I said. “Take your time.”
Just like that.
Chapter 12
Parties are supposed to be fun.
Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable. But after fifteen months of hard work and soul-searching, Kristen and I were finally able to look forward to this season with real anticipation. We were communicating again, and I was beginning to hit my stride as a father and as a husband. I was folding laundry, Kristen was taking her first uninterrupted showers in years, and when America’s Next Top Model wasn’t on during its regularly scheduled hour, I stayed cool as a cucumber. And that gave us plenty of reason to break out the streamers and party hats. Heck, we could have made a layer cake.
In light of all this, I decided that June would be the best time to embark on my most ambitious Best Practice yet: being fun. A few months earlier, during the at-home performance review in which I forced Kristen to participate, she had cited a general absence of fun in our marriage as a major disappointment. “The fun is just . . . gone,” she said, “which is confusing because before we were married, all we had was fun. I thought I married this totally social guy, and then I discovered that’s not you at all, and then I felt duped.”
She was right, of course. She had been duped, though not intentionally. She had fallen in love with the best version of me that I could muster—that charming, fun-loving, sociable character that I truly thought I could sustain. I was now determined to bring him back, to reintroduce the fun in our marriage. Because we’d come so far in our journey, this goal felt like extra credit, and unlike with my calculus exam in high school, I didn’t intend to leave valuable points on the table. I decided to focus my efforts on being fun at parties initially, for two reasons. First, Kristen needed me to be fun in general, but especially at parties, where the only point in showing up is to have fun. Second, it was June. Party season.
In reality, I’ve never been one to extract any measure of fun from a party, and that’s why this Best Practice seemed the most ambitious. When I was very young, for example, and my mom would have kids over to our farm to celebrate my birthday, I thought it was strange and wondered when they would ever go home so that I could finally just play with my toys by myself, the way I liked to. Even at the age of five, I was critical of the behaviors of other kids; watching them tear around our backyard, which was where I liked to sit peacefully with my Tonka trucks and compare blades of grass, gave me the feeling that everything on the farm was running amok. Generally, I liked the other kids; I just didn’t care to have them on my turf—even if I got some cool presents out of it.
Besides the usual birthday parties and family events, I avoided parties until I got to college. Once there, I fell in with a group of nerdy musicians whose “parties” were something I could manage: sing a few songs a cappella toward the beginning of the party while our voices were fresh, then debate the significance of composers like John Cage until someone got so drunk or homesick that they started to cry. That was my posse; that was how we rolled.
I went to college in Miami and never once made it to South Beach. South Beach seemed to be for the population who didn’t tuck their Rush concert T-shirts deep down into their pants, so I figured it was best to avoid it. South Beach was for clubbing. The few times I was invited to go with people, I declined and was branded antisocial. It didn’t seem fair, considering how clubbing is, by its very nature, the single most antisocial activity imaginable. How much interacting and relationship-building can people accomplish standing waist-deep in foam and screaming at each other over Lil Jon?
“I LOVE THIS SONG!”
“WHAT? THE MUSIC IS SO LOUD! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
“HOW ABOUT THAT CHICK?”
“WHAT?”
“THAT CHICK OVER THERE!”
“WOW, THEY’RE DOING MAGIC OVER THERE?! HOW UNEXPECTED!”
But that’s clubbing. At least you can stand for hours without saying a word in a club or sneak out without being noticed. But you can’t do that at a party. At a party, you have to be present. At a party, you have to engage. Mingle. This is where my game falls apart. The social situation at a party falls way outside of my normal daily parameters. Things are not on my terms; events unfold by the terms of the gathering itself. In the midst of this, I feel that all eyes are on me—my own included—monitoring and judging my performance from start to finish. Don’t do anything wrong or unusual, because everyone will think the worst of you for the rest of your life. It’s pretty fucked-up in my opinion.
One thing that I find challenging about a gathering is the disruption to my schedule, my routine. If it’s at someone else’s house, we’re doomed, because that’s not where I usually am at four P.M. on a Saturday. I’m not familiar with their silverware, their hand towels, the sights and sounds of their home. Maybe they make their stuffing differently, or I’ll be forced to sit on a couch where I have to turn my head to watch their TV, which looks and sounds different from my TV, and whatever sporting event or TBS movie marathon they’re watching on mute might not be worth the stiff neck. If it’s a family event, at least it’s not terrible form to flip the channels. Even then, if the family member lives more than an hour away, their newscasters look different, their weather radars show a different part of the state, their local car dealership commercials are jarringly low-budget, and it all messes me up.
If Kristen and I hold a party at our house, then I’m really screwed. My whole environment is disrupted. Guests tend to hog all the good seats. They make the rooms look different, sound different, feel different. On the day of the party, our refrigerator is crowded with large, sealed bowls and dishes filled with prepared foods that I’m not allowed to touch until the guests arrive. And I don’t know what to do with myself between the moment in which we finish our frantic cleaning and the moment the doorbell rings, so I pace by the front door for hours, wringing my sweaty hands and spying out the front windows to see if they’re here yet. I can’t do anything else. I’m anxious to open the door; invite them in with a well-rehearsed, cordial greeting; and then follow them, inevitably, to the kitchen, where I’ll wait on the periphery of their small talk, looking for the perfect opportunity to escape to a dark, empty room upstairs.
There’s only so much relating I can handle. Usually after six minutes, I’ve had enough. I have to get home, to my own thoughts, to my own TV shows on my own couch. That’s where Kristen and I differ. She thrives on interaction. She derives energy from parties and talking to strangers about their recent trip to Vietnam or what it’s like to be an accountant. For all she knew, I was the same way. For all she knew, I wasn’t the sort of person who would shut down at parties, who would insist that visits be limited to one hour, who would cling to her side during a function, demanding that we leave.
As I geared myself up to approach this Best Practice in the months that followed our performance review, I couldn’t help but think that at one time having fun with Kristen had seemed natural and effortless. We had fun together before my misguided persona ever entered the picture (dressed as he was in a toga and beer helmet). I recalled hanging out as friends. Back then, Kristen stirred everything inside of me, and because I made her laugh, made her feel like talking for hours, made her feel good about herself, I was on her mind a lot, too. We didn’t need any particular reason or occasion to get together and have fun.
I’d call Kristen on a Saturday morning. “I’m going to Ikea, K-Pan
ts. Wanna come?”
“That sounds fun. I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
It was as easy as that. Any subsequent discussion about the day’s plans would be mostly for the sake of staying on the phone with each other a little longer. Later, browsing the chaotic furniture displays at Ikea, we would decide we were hungry and have lunch together. We’d follow that up with a two thirty matinee and grab coffee afterward.
Back then I did everything I could think of to get her to invite me places. I probably could have chilled out and let her come to me—a tip that showed up a few times in Cosmo—but that wasn’t really my style. When I like somebody, I’d rather latch on like a crab and not let go. “Oh, you’re going to the ob-gyn? What’s the address? Maybe I’ll swing by and we can people-watch.”
My natural personality suited our friendship just fine. But then we started dating and I began psyching myself out, thinking that now she was mine to impress or to offend, to grow old with or to lose. My friend was now my girlfriend. I’m Kristen’s boyfriend. Every day felt like an audition. The mantra that I repeated over and over was challenging, if not paralyzing: I’m Kristen’s boyfriend, and Kristen’s boyfriend must be perfect. Perfectly dressed. Perfectly groomed. Perfectly behaved. Perfectly fun.
I was, of course, doomed. The house of cards I’d built as a sociable person could never bear the weight of real life. Before we became an item, I had been successful in disguising my social incapacities partially because I could accept or decline any invitation that came my way. Kristen celebrating the first week at her new job? I’m there. My company’s Labor Day picnic? No chance. Fourth of July at Grant Park in Chicago? Please, shoot me in the face. I could go out with my friends and leave after precisely one hour, or sooner if everyone was talking about sports. But when you’re the boyfriend of an amazing woman, you say yes to the Labor Day picnics, you say yes to the throngs of people in Grant Park, and you don’t tell her that you need to leave a party precisely one hour after you arrive. I must be perfect, I thought. Regardless of whether that’s fair to either of us.