Raising Cubby by John Elder Robison Read Free Book Online Page A

practice, he just sat still, watched his mom’s hands, and smiled. I found his behavior perplexing, and so did his mom.
    As he got older, Cubby became steadily more aware. He looked at mobiles we hung over his head, and he picked up and played with anything in his reach. Soon he learned to crawl, and overnight he was on his way, grabbing anything he could see and sticking his fingers anywhere they would fit and some places they wouldn’t.
    He shrieked like he was being eaten alive when he became stuck, but when he got in the groove, he just played and played. I brought him into the garage with me, and he’d stay busy for hours, chewing the car parts I’d left on the floor. His mom would find him out there and bring him back inside, hoping to keep him clean. Whenever I got an interesting car in for service, I’d bring him out and set him behind the wheel. If there was a camera handy, I might even take his picture. By the time his birthday rolled around, he had driven a Gull Wing Mercedes, a Ferrari Testarossa, an Aston Martin DB5, and more Porsches than we could count. His favorite—or so I told him—was a Shelby Cobra with an electric blue finish and an engine that rumbled like a WWII fighter plane. He’d grip their steering wheels with his little paws and stare at the gauges as I wondered what he was thinking.
    The most peculiar thing was Cubby’s lack of interest in others of his kind. When we put him in a playpen with other babies, he mostly just ignored them. I would have thought a real live kid would be more interesting than a Playskool ring puzzle, but Cubby didn’t agree. He paid no attention to the child as he dominated the puzzle.
    Today I realize that behavior is another marker of autism. When we are small, our limited ability to sense the inner feelings or even just the proximity of other people causes us to ignore them, even though we want very much to have friends. How I wish I’d known that when my son was growing up! My own version of autism—Asperger’s syndrome—entered the diagnostic lexicon in 1994, when Cubby was four years old, and it took some time for that knowledge to percolate down to me. His diagnosis was still far in the future.
    In the meantime, like all hopeful parents, we glossed over his struggles and told ourselves he was better than us. He seemed happy and healthy, so we encouraged him when we could and hoped for the best.
    I never did figure out how to ascertain intelligence in infants,but the bigger he got, the less I worried. Instead, I thought about the bigger questions, like whether he would join me at work someday and what he might become when he was full grown. One day we were playing in the backyard and I announced, “I am the King of Bees and Rodents!” Cubby just laughed. Later, when he could talk, he remembered that and said, “I will be King of Everything. Even you!” He laughed even louder at that. I snorted, but I liked the size of his ambition.

For the first few months we managed parenthood by ourselves. Little Bear took care of Cubby while I was working, and she tended him at night. In between those times, I brought him interesting places and showed him things to occupy his mind. His mom would say she did all the work and I had all the fun, but I don’t think it was that black and white. I certainly gave Cubby many unique and stimulating experiences. In fact, like most dads, I believe I taught him every useful thing he knows.
    When Cubby was five months old, Little Bear returned to school. She had gotten her bachelor’s before Cubby was born, but that wasn’t enough to get her a teaching job, so she had applied to and gotten accepted into grad school in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. She’d started the program before getting pregnant and figured Cubby could just tag along for the rest of it. This ought to tell you how little experience either of us had with babies.
    At first she brought Cubby with her to class, but he made noises, acted