David Finch talks candidly about what it means to have Asperger’s Syndrome as a husband, father and man. And in the process helps us all see important insights whether or not we struggle with the same diagnosis he does.
When he was 30 years old, David Finch’s wife, Kristen, sat him down and asked him a series of odd questions:
“Do you notice patterns in things all the time?”
“Do people comment on your unusual mannerisms and habits?
“Do you feel tortured by clothes tags, clothes that are too tight or made in the ‘wrong material’?”
“Do you sometimes have an urge to jump over things?”
David’s answers to all of these questions — and more than 100 others — was an emphatic yes.
Kristen Finch had just given her unsuspecting husband a self-quiz to evaluate for Asperger’s syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum. Her own score was 8 out of a possible 200. David’s was 155.
“It was very cathartic. It was this unbelievable moment of self-recognition,” David Finch tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “It gave me such insight into who I am, how my mind works and why certain things have been such a challenge.”
In his new book, The Journal of Best Practices, David Finch describes how he and Kristen worked to overcome his compulsions and sometimes anti-social behavior.
Kristen shared David’s relief at the diagnosis — but she wondered how she had missed the symptoms for so long, given that she had been trained to work with children with Asperger’s and on the autism spectrum.
Some of David’s behaviors — his insistence that groceries had to be bought from a certain store two towns away, his inability to read the newspaper because he was too distracted by its texture — she’d chalked up to him being “quirky.”
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free“He was always quirky, since high school when we were friends,” she says. “He’s always just done things a little bit differently, and it’s one of the things that I loved the most about him … I knew that he didn’t love to go out, I knew that he didn’t love barbecues and things like that. But I had no idea before the quiz that it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it, it was that he found it very difficult to do these things.”
David had also learned to be a skilled mimic of “normal” behavior — but he couldn’t rely on his social personae at home. His inability to support Kristen, who was struggling to raise their two small children, looked like selfishness.
In order to become more responsive and fluent in social cues, David started jotting down notes to himself — on napkins or the backs of envelopes — a series of “best practices,” small ways he could manage his Asperger’s: “Don’t change the radio station when Kristen’s singing along.” “Let Kristen shower in the morning without crowding her.” “Give the kids vitamins without asking Kristen a million steps and directions on how to do that.”
But some of the notes had nothing to do with Asperger’s, they were about how to be a better partner, on learning to listen and communicate. They were reminders to “use [his] words” and confide in his wife when troubled.
He even kept notes on how to how to be a better father. But one of his “best practices” — “Allow the children to participate in your daily routines” — proved heartrending.
One morning, he invited his 6-year-old daughter, Emily, to help make breakfast, only to discover bright, observant Emily had the routine down pat — compulsions included.
“When it was time to fill up the pot for hard-boiled eggs — she closed the faucet, opened it, closed it, opened it, closed it, tapped her forehead, opened it and closed it the same way that I do. And she’s like, ‘Like that, Daddy?’ And I was like, ‘No, sweetie.’ ”
“It’s kind of a good lesson,” Kristen adds. “That’s just how Daddy does things. We don’t have to do it that way, everyone doesn’t do it that way, but that’s the way Daddy does things.”
Asperger’s (the term has been officially subsumed into the broader “autism spectrum disorder, btw) is on everybody’s mind these days. I think that while the diagnosis is very real, we can easily play dimestore psychologist and wrongly attribute the disorder to people who are simply a) shy, or b) socially awkward, or even c) possessing an advanced and specialized intellect. Which is not to say that people can’t learn to be better at working the room or flirting or salesmanship, just as long as we don’t overdo it and place the “social” skills on top of the hierarchy of human… Read more »
““Give the kids vitamins without asking Kristen a million steps and directions on how to do that.”” I do that for basically anything that has to be to the taste of someone else. Or even my own taste if I don’t know precisely how to do it. I’ll ask about toasts, shepherd’s pie and basically anything, because I learned the hard way that if I take initiatives for others (ie make someone food, do some given task, like clean floors) and they don’t like it or the way I do it, it’s my fault, I have to start over or… Read more »
I am a woman with Asperger’s and I have to say that the sense of disconnect from one’s physicality, and the emotional “seven-second delay effect” it lends one does, indeed, cause one to behave in ways traditionally thought of as gendered shortcomings of the male of the species.
Two things strike me about this. The first is : how would you react to the news? How would you feel if someone “diagnosed” you with some sort of “syndrome”? Is that a good feeling because it explains away any social anxiety you might have had? Would anyone like to have their faults relieved from their own ability to control in such a way? Let’s say you are prone to drinking too much. It’s caused a lot of problems for you and people close to you. Now it turns out you have XYZ syndrome? Turns out that sort of behaviour… Read more »
My best friend was in love and married a man with Asperger’s (and bipolar!) for 11 years….the marriage did not last…he just left the family suddenly because I think he felt he was competing for his wife’s attention with his son….after they divorced, he continues to insinuate himself into his ex-wife’s life even though they have both re-married (I think somehow he still misses her attention….she knew him so well and compensated for many of his quirks and obsessions, like doing loads and loads of laundry every day because any piece of clothing he touched was instantly “dirty”)…..her son has… Read more »
Totally agree Richard. Pretty sure my dad is on the spectrum but never diagnosed. He survived but it has always been painful to watch and made my parent’s marriage very challenging. I suppose I probably have some of those characteristics too. The last decade I’ve managed to overcome a lot of them with the help of my second wife. But before that I just drank myself silly to numb the pain of not fitting in. That, of course, did not work.
Given the circumstances,it seems like the best outcome. Paradoxically, being lower on the spectrum might be worse, since nobody’s going to diagnose it or suggest resulting changes. One annoying characteristic is always correcting somebody when he says something that might be, if the term “literally” were given steroids, might have just a touch of the metaphor. Used to have a guy in our office who mostly had it going on. But when the rest of us were cracking up over a joke, he’d be earnestly explaining why the premise was wrong. Felt sorry for him. Nobody’s going to give him… Read more »