What my dad never knew about having an autistic son

To a son, his father is larger than life — the man with all the answers, the hero.Mine certainly is.But while writing a book about my father, I learned the truth: My hero was scared. Starting when I was young, my father felt alone and unsure of what to do, certain the world had turned against his son and that he was the only thing standing between his little boy and ruin.The man I celebrated every Father’s Day felt completely alone.He wasn’t.

Last fall I wrote “Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son and My Journey with Autism” as a love letter to one man; what came back to me was an army.“I’ve felt so lost for so long,” a father in Massachusetts wrote to me — he is his autistic son’s only friend, certain no one else on Earth was feeling the same.Hundreds have written since, almost every letter carrying the same line my father once believed about himself: I thought I was the only one, alone, hopeless and helpless. This Father’s Day, there is an army of fathers who feel exactly that alone — and not one of them knows the others that are out there.At 8 I was diagnosed with what we now know to be autism.The psychologist had told Dad there was “generally not much” a parent could do for a kid like me.Dad decided that was the wrong answer and spent the next 15 years proving it.He quit his job and began trying to adapt me to the world instead of adapting the world to me.To be fair, I’m in my 40s now, and my wife says it’s still a work in progress.Once the diagnosis was delivered, Dad told no one.

Not my teachers.Not his friends.

Not even me.The secrecy wasn’t shame — it was the method.He refused to let a diagnosis become my identity, so he carried it himself. I only understood how alone he’d been when I sat down to write the book and asked my parents about years we had never discussed.To me, it was all about me — the bullying, the emotional cruelty, the physical humiliation. He would sit in my room for hours listenin...