Hi Pod! I'm Dad.

What My Nonverbal Son Taught Me About Trust at 4 AM

• James Guttman • Season 2 • Episode 274

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This week, I’m talking about trust.

Not just the trust we work to earn from our nonverbal kids, but the trust they place in us every day, often without us realizing it.

It starts in the middle of the night, when my 14-year-old son Lucas wakes me up the way he always does. What I walked into wasn’t the part that stayed with me. What stayed with me was how easily he trusted me when I told him what to do, even when he didn’t fully understand why.

In this episode, I reflect on the responsibility that comes with being someone your child trusts unconditionally, and why autism appreciation means acknowledging both the weight and the beauty of that role.

This isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about showing up.

It's Here! Get the book – “Hi World, I’m Dad: How Fathers Can Journey to Autism Awareness, Acceptance, and Appreciation” on audio, digital, or print.

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Also, be sure to read the blog that started it all - Hi Blog! I'm Dad.

James Guttman:

I'm Dad. And there's the intro, folks. It's James Guttman, HiPodIm Dad. I am the host of Hi Pod I'm Dad. I am the dad behind HiblogIm Dad.com. I am up. It is early here this week. My sleep habits have been kind of crazy. It all ties in. I've been on a fitness kick since the start of the year, kind of some New Year's resolution. So three o'clock in the morning, my brain will be like, wake up, eat some Greek yogurt with blueberries. I don't want an amup. It seems like the only time that I am asleep is when my son, uh Lucas, is up in the middle of the night, banging on his gate, trying to get my attention. I wrote about it this week, and I'll tell you why. And I've written in the past about Lucas's middle of the night escapades. My son, as you guys know, 14 years old, he's non-verbal, so he doesn't have the ability to really call out to me with any meaningful information. There's no, hey, can I have some water? And then he said, Oh, you don't need water. It's always a banging on the gate, which means that I have to see him, physically see him, to know what he wants, right? Uh and this will happen wherever you are. He'll go into his room and close his own gate. As I've mentioned before, people hear gate and they go, he has a gate. He does, he has a gate. He's had it since he was a baby, um, right on the door, like a like a baby door. But he likes it. Like he goes into his room, and when he closes that gate, that's his way of saying, Don't bother me. I don't think he realizes that he's the only one that can't open it. Uh, he'll make me close it. If I go to the door and he's in his room and I'm like, hey buddy, what are you doing? He'll make this motion with his hand, like, yo, close my gate. I'm like, all right. So when he wants me and he's in that room with that gate, what he does is he rubs his hand along the bars like a prison movie. It's like this clanging noise that I swear to God, I'm like a Pavlov dog with this thing. I we have in the closets, we kind of have these shelves made out of the same material as his gate. And every once in a while I'll bang into it and it'll make the noise. And I immediately, like a puppy, I'm like, like it's surreal. Jump up and see what's going on. So he gets me out of a sleep with this noise on the gate. He always does. But if I don't, what he'll do is he'll start throwing objects out of his room. And this used to be a gigantic problem. We couldn't have a television in there because he would pick up the television, even when he was like, you know, eight, nine years old, throw it out. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? I'd come over, there'd be like beanbag chairs in the hallway. So he'll start throwing things out. Sometimes in the night, he will literally just start throwing things out. That'll be his first thing. And the first thing he throws is this music box. There's a lot of backstory. I wrote about it, you guys kind of read it if you didn't. When Lucas was a baby, the one thing that made him fall asleep was this uh mobile, like a rainforest mobile. Played music, but it was gigantic. And he would throw it over the gate and it would hit the hardwood floors that we had in the house at the time. And you would think we were under attack. You're like, oh, we're all gonna, we're all gonna die. You wake up in the middle of the night, you hear a crash. It's just him. He wants water or his iPad. Uh so I got him this little music box. It's tiny, it's something you put into a doll, throws it out usually immediately in the middle of the night. So that's all the backstory. So he wakes me up, I hear it, and I tell him to go back to bed. As I always say, buddy, go back to bed. Looking, no, it's four in the morning, go to bed. And he bang, bang, bang. I'm like, go to bed. And finally, I'm like, oh my God. Now I know I have to get up, I have to see him. So he knows that I see him, and I'm like, just go back to bed. So I get up and I'm like stumbling down the hallway. And as I am, he's kind of like turned around to go back into his bed. I'm like, all right, I'm like, hey, buddy, go, oh, you're going back to bed. Okay. And he sees me, turns back around, I see him point into the hallway, and there's his music box. And I hand it to him. And I swear to God, man, he was wearing this blue onesie furry pajama. And um, pajamas, pajama. Yeah, it's fine. And there was a splatter on it, almost like a 1980s graffiti pattern, you know, like like early MTV. Um, yeah, like just splattered paints. And I'm like, huh. He must have bought new pajamas. This is again, four in the morning. I literally was just asleep. This is how my brain worked. I swear to God, I remember the whole thing. I was like, oh, he must have gotten new pajamas. He changed. I'm like, this is wait, what is that? And then I'm like, oh now I'm looking at it. And again, you start telling the story of people with special needs kids, they're imagining all different colors, they're all terrible. It's none of those colors. It was white, bright white, all over him. And I'm like, oh my god, what is what is then I'm like, you know what? I must have put paint, like a can of paint, a white paint, under his bed. And then I was like, why would I do that? That's stupid. That didn't happen. It's like in real time, my brain is processing it, trying to figure out where white comes from. Uh then I'm like, oh, you know what? He probably had a cup of milk that fell under the bed and it exploded. And then I'm like, all right, he doesn't drink milk. Uh if he does, it would be almond milk. He drinks that. But on top of it, milk doesn't explode. That doesn't happen. So I don't know. There's no, you know, crazy milk bandit throwing milk grenades into children's rooms. Then finally, the final thought was a smart one. I was like, oh, maybe it's moisturizer. He found like a can of moisturizer, he f opened it. I don't know. But then I know there's no moisturizer in this kid's room. I don't keep it there. In the past, I've had it there. He's thrown it out of the room, it's gotten squashed, there's none in there. And that's when I saw it. It was a gigantic, and it's funny that I talk about this because I thought this was the rarest thing ever. I won it in a crane game. I am really good at the crane game. It is a little known fact about me that just people around me know about. And I won the kids this gigantic squishy banana right before Christmas. And it was big, it was like the size of like my forearm. It was cool. Lucas seemed to like it. He doesn't usually like squishy toys. It's not really his thing. So he had it and I showed him and he squeezed it. And I had noticed, I hadn't seen him play with it, but I had noticed it in his bed. I had noticed it near him. And I'm like, oh, he likes it. That's good. At some point in the night, he either squeezed it. My guess is he rolled on top of it and it exploded. All over the bed, all over the backboard or whatever that's called, a headboard, all over the blinds behind it. And it was, I don't know what the material was. It was, you guys know Ublok, that Ublak, that thing that you make for kids where it's like it's a solid when you hit it, but then it's like liquid if you touch it lightly. That's what this thing was. It was almost like, again, moisturizer, but it hardened when it hit things, like spackle. And there it was. It was everywhere. And it was all over him. It was not only on his pajamas, it was on his face, it was in his eyelashes, it was like all over. And I'm just, I'm like, what the hell? Now, here, now here's the thing, and this is why I get I don't say annoyed, I'm a little annoyed when I see somebody's things on Facebook. For many special needs parents, this would be where the story ends, right? This would be the part where they tell you, and this is, and I'm up crying and cleaning it, and why did God do this to me? And there would be a whole litany of things. And look, I got it, and trust me, I've had nights like that, I've had feelings like that sometimes. But it didn't end like that for me because I realized that when I told him to go back to bed with all this stuff all over him, all this crap in his eyes and on his hair, after like the third time, he was going back to bed. I mean, that hits me in a way that I don't even know if I can adequately explain. Like, it hits me that he trusts me so much that he would do that. And it's funny, the irony is that when Lucas wants something food, a snack, his iPad, he will be persistent, he will not stop, he will not listen. And people are used to that, they think about that. But when it comes to something like this, and it's a big deal, right? He thinks to himself, oh, I guess it's not important. Yeah, my dad says to go back to bed. And that's because I'm his guide for this world. We talk so much about not understanding what they do, children like my son. Not knowing why does he do that? Why is he playing with it like that? But they don't know our world in many ways. And I don't take that responsibility lightly that I'm here to show him what things are, how things work. And even in the absence of like any sort of knowledge as to what it is, even in the absence of an explanation, he will listen to me in many cases blindly. This is the ultimate, the ultimate um responsibility. And it is frightening and it is beautiful at the same time. You know, and I think that there's a there's an importance in noting that balance. We talk about the future of kids like mine, which the older he gets, the more realistic the options become. Um and the harder it hits sometimes. But those decisions that I have to make for him in many ways is like this kid is trusting me with his life, with his future, with his decisions, with the places he ends up, with what he learns, with what he does. And I think sometimes we get so bogged down in the responsibility of it. I don't know, we don't see how special that is. I know it was it was surprising. I will say that. Like the last thing I expected was to show up and he's walking back into this bed that's slathered in whatever the hell it was, man. You know, just because I said to. That was a big deal. It made me feel good as a parent and as somebody who's there for him. So yeah, so try to remember that. If you have a kid like mine in your life, if you know a kid like that, earning their trust is so important. Um, not just so they do good things for you, but it says a lot about you. That they believe in you and that they'll listen to you unconditionally. I mean, that's the biggest responsibility there is. Um, I don't take it lightly. Thank you guys for checking us out. Um, back next Friday. Follow, like, subscribe, all that stuff. Until next time, James Gutman. Be well. Byepod.