Struggling to Connect-- Fatherhood with My Asperger's Child. Chapter 6-- Finding My Big "Aha." Hello, my name is Kevin. I live in Massachusetts, and I have a 17-year-old son that is autistic, and I just love him to death. He was formally diagnosed at the age of 10 or 11. Prior to that, we were thinking it may have been ADHD or OCD.

When we got the diagnosis, I didn't really care. We were living real events, real issues, and it was what it was. I don't know that we had any real attachment to it, but it did give us a clearer path forward. And I think we were somewhat relieved with that. My wife is a nurse practitioner and saw early on that there were some learning and behavioral difficulties. She's the one who really started us down the path of finding out what the diagnosis meant and getting him services.

He is adopted, so being adopted from a foreign country and autistic as well meant that many of his challenges were a combination of him coming to grips with being adopted, as well as him also understanding that he is autistic.

In school, some of the challenges he had were based on his ability to participate as expected in a classroom environment. So he needed a lot of services. The learning part of it wasn't necessarily a problem. He's a very intelligent kid. It was more about how he functions within the rules and expectations of the classroom. I think that was the biggest difficulty that we had.

When he transitioned from an elementary school, or sixth grade to middle school, his inability to work within that class environment really became pronounced. At that point, we were able to get him into a specialized school. So since about sixth grade, he's been at a school for kids with disabilities.

At about that same time, when he just started hitting puberty, some of his behavior became a little more aggressive. And there were some physical issues, particularly with my wife. We had incidents where we needed to call the police to safeguard him and safeguard me. We've had many wrestling matches. There were times where he'd be damaging the house, and I needed to stop him. Sometimes I had to hold him down. He even pulled a knife on us once.

That actually is what kind of forced the issue to get him into another school. He struggled at first with the school, and we likened it back to the fact that he never really had closure at his original school. He had a group of kids that he considered his friends. He grew up with them from first grade, so they understood him to some degree.

But some of those kids, he's never seen since. So literally, it was one day, he's in middle school. And because of a specific incident, he could no longer go back. So he never had closure with that school, and that kind of drove his attitude towards the new school.

He also has a diagnosis of OCD. So he's a germophobe and is constantly washing his hands. For some reason, he would think that the new school was filled with germs. That really wreaked havoc with him to the point where he would come home from school and immediately rush in to take a shower. And that shower might be a four-hour shower.

He also wouldn't do certain things like he would never go in his room because he was afraid he was going to bring the school germs into his room. He still has some germ phobias, but he's built some really strong relationships with his instructors and a group of peers. So it's been good.

For whatever reason, the school that he was going to wants to start moving these kids into more of a normal program. So he will actually be transitioning into another school that he helped choose, and he's very excited to go. He's excited about it, which is really exciting to us. It's the first time I've ever heard him say, I'm really excited to go to school. And so that's awesome for us, so we're really looking forward to that.

When it finally clicked, over the years, our relationship at home has much improved, especially as he's over the puberty hump. He's been through some support with a psychologist and some other support groups that he's worked with in school. The aggression has stopped, and it is almost nonexistent at this point. It's probably close to a year and a half to two years now since we last had a physical event.

I call myself an old-school father, and I am my father. God bless his soul. I had certain expectations of my son. He was going to be the high school star athlete. I'm a big golfer, so he was going to be a great golfer with me. But those just simply aren't things he's interested in. And that's a hard thing to come to grips with.

I would say the big "aha" moment for me was about a year and a half ago, where I finally understood that he just thinks differently from me. That was the big "aha" moment. I'm still not a perfect father, and I still rely on my wife to help me. But that was the really big key-- determining that he's not wrong. He just thinks differently. So understanding what motivates him and what drives him and how he thinks was the big change for me.

I think, since then, I've accepted that I'm not going to have a Major League Baseball player for a son. But I've got a son that's an awesome guitar player, is really intelligent, and I couldn't be prouder of him. Certainly, he's still a teenage kid. And how much does a teenage kid get along with their father anyway? He wants to hang with his buddies. He wants to play his computer games and things like that, which is fine.

But one thing I would say we've kind of connected on is music. We have different tastes in music, but we've come together with going to concerts. We're using those types of events to continue and build our relationship. So that's been positive.

Here's a funny story. I'm a professional. I go to a lot of trade shows and things like that. At these trade shows, there are booths, and they give you handouts and free stuff to get you to talk to them. This one booth that I was in had this giveaway, and it was solving a Rubik's cube in less than 15 minutes.

It was a little bit different than a normal Rubik's cube. You could literally unlock it and make it like a long chain. Part of the giveaway was if you could put it back together and then do the Rubik's cube in 15 minutes, they would give you an iPad. That was literally the prize. You could walk away with an iPad.

For four days, they had close to a thousand visitors try it. Nobody got the iPad. So I could take the Rubik's cube, and I went home. My son loves Rubik's cubes, and I made the mistake of telling him, hey, if you did this at a trade show, you could get an iPad. He didn't have an iPad, so he said, well, Dad, if I could do it in 15 minutes, can I get an iPad? A lot of really smart people had tried this and failed, so I gave it to him, and I said, go for it.

I was going to the bathroom, and literally within five minutes, he said, Dad, I'm done. And I went in there, and sure enough, he had done it. So that's how he got his first iPad. I always tell that story because one part of the "aha" moment I mentioned earlier is that I experienced that he was smarter than me. And that's kind of a humbling experience for a father. He's smarter than me. He knows it.

What I would say to other dads would be that you've got to be persistent. You've got to find out that "aha" moment, discover what that is. They think differently. They're motivated differently than you. And you need to really understand that.

I think the other big thing is I think they want to have that same close relationship. They just don't know how to express it. So if you enter the situation or the environment with an open mind and understanding that they really want to have that as well, I think that might be helpful.