I often talk about how I didn’t know anything about autism before having a non-verbal child on the spectrum. That, however, isn’t entirely accurate. It’s not that I didn’t know anything about autism. It’s that I knew things that weren’t necessarily true.

Media, in an effort to make something unique and individualized into an easy-to-understand catch-all, portrays neurodiversity as mostly the same. Kids with autism line up their shoes, ask a lot of questions and get very upset over physical touch.

My son does none of those things. He loves to hug, asks no questions due to his lack of language, and half his shoes are missing. You ever see those single sneakers, strewn about the side of the road and abandoned? I’m pretty sure he’s behind some of those.

The biggest piece of misinformation is that “all kids with autism are alone in their world”. The belief many have is that people on the spectrum exist in their own worlds, closed off from others. The things they do are a mystery and are only understandable to them.

It is the most depressing “reality” that the parent of a newly diagnosed child needs to accept. I’ll never forget those early days of worry with Lucas. Between the doctor’s warnings and television representation, autism felt like the end of the world to my family and a closed door on ever having a relationship with my boy.

early lucas and james

If you’re one of those parents right now, worried about the bond you won’t have with your child, I have some good news. Just like the shoes and questions, this one isn’t true in every case. In fact, it isn’t true for almost all of them.

Don’t get me wrong. Lucas is unique and the world he sees through his eyes is different than the one that I see. He notices things like glares in windows and reflections in metal that most of us overlook. He focuses on what we miss. He loves things we take for granted. There’s no one like my son.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch him interact with the world. He doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what he is. The things he loves, he loves. There’s no sense of playing it cool to impress anyone else or fit in. My son is true to himself on a level unlike anyone else.

For that reason, it would have been so easy to lose him to that mistaken view that he was unreachable. Watching Lucas start and stop YouTube videos seemingly without reason or playing with his toys in “inappropriate” ways could leave me feeling incredibly disconnected…if I never made the effort to connect.

That’s the secret. His “mysterious world” isn’t unreachable. It’s right there. It might not be easy to figure out, but it’s possible.

Teaching My non-Verbal Son Skills I Thought Impossible

Those YouTube videos, for example, aren’t so difficult to wrap your head around if you pay attention to what he’s really doing. One day, rather than holding my head and focusing on how annoying it was to hear Ernie say “Ohhhh” repeatedly as Lucas paused and unpaused on a specific video, I looked at what was happening. I tried to figure out why he was doing it.

It turned out that, at that precise moment, the scene changed with a sparkly swipe transition. A “woosh” sound played out as the whole screen was gobbled up by a star before shifting. He had discovered that, by pausing at that exact moment, the video would rewind half a second and replay the effect. That’s what he was doing. It was pretty amazing.

It also wasn’t something all that bizarre. This was the equivalent of me playing the same Spotify track on repeat or watching The Shining for the 100^th time. My boy’s “mysterious” behavior wasn’t mysterious when I knew what he was doing. In fact, it was kind of typical.

The same could be said for those inappropriate ways he plays with toys. When I entered Lucas’s world for the first time, it was after watching him pull his telephone toy by the string in and out from under a chair. He had been watching in the mirror as he did it. While the motion itself wasn’t exactly common, if you knew he loved reflections, it made the whole thing easier to understand.

At the end of the day, my son may be in his own world, but he’s not alone. I’m there with him and anyone else who makes the effort can be too. The door isn’t closed off, you just have to know to knock.

When I’m trying to see things the way Lucas does, all the nonsense melts away. Unreturned emails, bills to pay, and arguments pending don’t exist. All that matters is that, in that moment, my son happy. Seeing him happy makes me happy. And, for those few minutes, nothing else matters.

The choice was mine in those early days. I could have either spent my time watching him, wringing my hands, and wondering why he does the things he does or I could get up, walk over, and try to be a part of it. I’m glad I made the choice I did. Just as I guide him through the part of our world that he might not understand, he guides me through his. I’m the luckiest dad in the world for it.