Naming My Father

Naming My Father

by Ren Cedar Fuller

Winner, Summer Writing Contest

Photo supplied by Ren Cedar Fuller

My father could look at a loose metal bolt and say if it was a three-eighths or a five-sixteenths, but he could not name his four daughters unless we were lined up by height. He taught my sisters and me to eat corn on the cob left to right, two even rows at a time, like little typewriters. He walked as though his head were tied to an overhead cable. When my mother asked my father if he remembered her friend, Marjorie, he asked, “The one with symmetrical moles?”
        When I was young, I tried to understand my father. I wanted to know if he loved me. I did not know he was unusual: our parents teach us how people are supposed to be. By the time my sisters and I started to name the things that made our father different, we were grown, and he was gone.
                                                                

In the 1940s, gator farms in Louisiana shipped live baby alligators through the mail, a dollar and a half for an eight-inch specimen. My grandparents had one shipped to Los Angeles and gave it to my father for his tenth birthday. He named it Al.
         “That alligator was your daddy’s best friend,” said my Grandma Leela.
        Baby alligators walk with their heads raised up, high-stepping their feet and slapping them flat on the ground. In a black-and-white photo, my ten-year-old father wore his hair slicked back. He crawled behind Al, both of them with heads held high and legs raised up for the next step.
        “He would follow that alligator around for hours,” Grandma Leela said. “I don’t know why he didn’t play with other children.”
        In 1944, the same year my father got his baby alligator, Dr. Hans Asperger presented a paper in Vienna about a personality difference he called autism. His young patients were “socially unconcerned.” Asperger described the children’s extreme reactions if something unexpected happened, but also their fascinations with negative numbers, poetry, and spaceships. He said one boy had “rich experiences and his own independent interests … one could really learn from him.” People with autism, Asperger wrote, “can fulfill their social role within the community, especially if they find understanding, love, and guidance.” His paper was written in German and would not be read by most American doctors for almost 40 years.
        The year before Asperger’s paper was published, Dr. Leo Kanner at Johns Hopkins published his own paper about autism. The children he studied valued people the way they did “the desk, the bookshelf, or the filing cabinet.” They were obsessed with “the maintenance of sameness.” Because he published his paper before Asperger, and in English, Kanner became known in the United States as the father of autism.
        In the early 1950s, at the start of the Korean War, my father graduated high school and was drafted into the Army. During those years, Dr. Kanner’s views about autistic children molded medical practice in the United States. Desperate parents took pilgrimages to his clinic and laid their hopes on his desk.
        “In the whole group, there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers,” Kanner wrote. He coined the term “refrigerator mother.”
        Believing parents were to blame for autism, Kanner supported parentectomies: children with autism should be sent to institutions and receive no visits from their families. He argued the treatment would be infrequent because autism was rare: at the end of his decades-long career, Kanner reported he had seen only 150 cases. (In 2021, the CDC reported more than five and a half million people in the U.S. have autism.)
                                                                

My father walked with flat feet, so the Army made him a typist. Twenty years later, in a dinner table monologue directed at my sisters and me, he described having to type with no errors.
         “If you made a mistake on a form, even if it was the very last letter of the very last word, you had to type it again,” he said. He was smiling.
        We sat beneath the world map tacked to the wall, the one he quizzed us on when he wasn’t giving a lecture. Not just the continents, countries, and capitals. He quizzed us on the colors, too. Name the green countries. But that night he lectured about military rules: how to clean a rifle, how to shine your shoes. My mother and sisters focused on their plates. I mixed my broccoli with potatoes to soften the bitterness and watched my father’s shoulders relax while he reminisced about the Army’s bounty of rules.
         A few years later, I found two shoeboxes filled with index cards in the garage and carried them into the house. My mother and I opened the first box and read cards about military vehicles and weaponry.
         “I haven’t seen these in years,” she said. “Your father typed them while he was in the Army.” Each card listed a piece of equipment, followed by lines of description. At the bottom of the card, my father had typed reference numbers for a system he devised. He could sort equipment by the manufacturer, the date it was first used by the Army, and a dozen other categories.
                                                                

In the late 1950s, the G.I. Bill sent my father to college, where he discovered accounting, then to grad school to become a C.P.A. He took a job in San Diego and joined a church with a large singles group. No longer cataloguing military equipment for fun, he started typing Bible verses onto index cards—those were in the second shoebox I found in the garage. My father designed another reference system, with lines of numbers and letters across the bottom of each card. He cross-referenced hundreds of topics. He listed each verse’s sentence type: question, exclamation, command. He noted the speakers. (G. meant God.)
        Meanwhile, the American medical establishment continued to follow Kanner’s lead, viewing autism as a behavior issue to be controlled. Besides parentectomies, over the next few decades therapists began prescribing tranquilizers like Thorazine and hallucinogens like LSD. Teachers tied children to chairs, slapped their hands, withheld food, and forced them to smell repugnant odors. Shock therapy was common: teachers, parents, and therapists attached electrodes to children’s skin and give them painful zaps if they did something the adult did not like. If you flap your hands: zap. If you don’t look your teacher in the eye: zap.
        I am glad my father was not diagnosed with autism when he was a child.
                                                                

My parents met in the church singles group in San Diego and married a few months later.
        “I was a spinster,” my mother explained. She was 26.
        She had four babies in six years, while packing and moving and setting up a new home each time my father left another less-than-perfect job. By the time I was ten, we had moved 11 times, up and down the state of California.
        While our father was at work, my sisters and I were free to play loud games and be rambunctious. At one house we climbed lemon trees; at another house we made a giant mudhole. Our mother enjoyed our wildness and emotion, until it got too much and then she swatted us.
        I don’t know if my mother recognized her husband’s behavior as odd. She must have known that noise and movement set him off, yet when we heard his footsteps clomping up the pathway to our house, I sometimes saw her walk to the stereo and turn the volume up.
        My mother did not talk about our father’s differences. She seemed as unenlightened as her daughters about how fathers should behave: from the age of seven, she lived year-round at a boarding school and stayed with her parents for only two weeks every summer. Still, it would have helped my sisters and me if she had been able to name our father’s strangeness and interpret his actions.
        It is easy to blame the mother.
                                                                

I knew by the time I was in kindergarten, if I was quiet and made no sudden movements, I could be my father’s little helper. When he made ice cream one summer afternoon, he let me hold the ruler inside the wooden bucket while he added the layers of rock salt and crushed ice. He patted each layer flat, then measured it. An ice layer, he insisted, had to be exactly half an inch.
        “Don’t breathe on the ice,” he told me, even though it was already melting from the rock salt and the sunny California day. I turned my head away, careful to hold the ruler straight, not wanting him to explode.
        Things that could make him explode: leaving a game on the floor where he walked A-to-B across the room. Laughing at dinner if he didn’t know why. Not eating an apple right. One of his children not using the color cup assigned to them at the dinner table. A house full of children who would dilly-dally, zigzag, hoot and holler, bebop.
        Exploding looked like yelling, kicking toys, throwing the cat, spanking, and screaming exaggerations. (“You took 300 pieces of Kleenex!” he said when a sister used two tissues to blow her nose.) His explosions were instantaneous, yet not unexpected. As ordinary as breakfast cereal. Now I understand my father could not appreciate the randomness of children. We didn’t lie where he left us like a hammer or a book.
        One night, while peeling the carrots, I asked my mother, “Does he love us?”
        “Of course your father loves you.”
        I kept peeling and thought, this is what it feels like to have my father love me. It feels like he does not. Still, when I was a child, I thought the way he acted was the way all fathers acted. And I loved him.
        Our father had us memorize the names of all the books in the Bible forward, backward, and alphabetically. On a Sunday morning in December, when my baby sister, Greta, was in kindergarten and I was in fifth grade, the pastor said our father had a surprise for the congregation. Greta followed our father up the two steps onto the stage of the church.
        “C,” called our father.
        “First and Second Chronicles, First and Second Corinthians, Colossians,” Greta said.
        “H,” said our father. He smiled while Greta called out the books.
        He’s spelling Christmas, I thought. I heard adults shifting in the pews and realized they didn’t understand. He should have told them what Greta would be spelling, I thought. I was ten years old, sitting in a pew at church, when I realized I could predict how others would feel and my father could not.
                                                                

By the time I was in middle school, I decided that my father wasn’t normal.
        “He can’t tell me apart from my sisters,” I told my friend Linda while we stood on a street corner, eating corn dogs from the gas station. We were in eighth grade and wore our long blonde hair in braids to minimize the catcalls while we rode our bikes around town.
        “Yeah, your dad thought I was one of you,” Linda said. “He goes, ‘You, Thora, Sigrid, I mean, Ren, hold the pliers.’”
        “When?”
        “Like, a month ago. I was getting my bike out of your garage.”
        “What did you do?”
        “I held the pliers.”
                                                                

I was confused by my father’s strangeness, but I wanted him to love me. Since he didn’t talk to me unless it was a lecture or a quiz, I asked my mother if I could have lunch with him and she arranged it. She told me to take the bus to Cattlemen’s Restaurant on State Street. I dressed up, thirteen and gawky, wanting to be pretty. I thought my father would ask about my friends, and I would ask what he liked about accounting. I had seen a father on TV hug his daughter and say “I’m so proud of you, honey.” Instead, my father talked, with points and subpoints, about the causes of the first World War. I listened and ate my barbecue sandwich.
        “What was it like?” Sigrid asked after I arrived home from the bus stop. Greta sat next to her on my bed while I hung up my plastic bead necklace.
        “He said I could order anything I wanted, and he talked to me the whole time.” I wanted my younger sisters to continue believing what I had hoped before lunch: if we did everything correctly it would make our father love us.
                                                                

In high school, I signed up for an internship at Greta’s elementary school. I spent a few weeks in a kindergarten, in my baby sister’s sixth grade class, and in a special education room for children who met Kanner’s criteria for autism. That class had four children and two teachers; one of the teachers wore a thick rubber band as a bracelet. A seven-year-old boy in the class, whose black hair stuck up every which-a-way, would squawk when he was happy.
        “Stop that,” said the teacher with the rubber band. She walked over to the boy, took off her bracelet, and snapped it against his bare arm.
        The children in the classroom played separately; one liked the color red, another enjoyed things with holes, and one of them loved helicopters. They seemed happy if I followed their familiar routines, but the girl who loved helicopters screamed when I put her water cup too far from her plate. One of the students had face blindness and did not recognize his mother. Two of them could speak, although they did not answer questions from me like, “Whatcha doing?” The three of them who had physical tics, like squawking or hand flapping, received most of the snaps from the rubber band.
        Back then, I did not know any children who were not smacked by their parents. The teacher’s rubber band snapping did not feel abusive to me. Instead, it made me curious. Was there a way to connect with someone who seemed to exist in a different world?
        The children in the autism classroom did not remind me of my father. He didn’t squawk or have a label, and he was the one who gave punishments, not the one who received them.
                                                                

My best friend in high school liked my father, and I liked hers. Diane’s father made bad jokes and put his arm around my shoulders. He asked about my classes and my job at McDonald’s.
        “Your dad’s a blast,” I told Diane.
        “No way. Your dad is better. He never bothers us. My dad’s an asshole,” she said, and I thought, maybe that’s all it is. Maybe fathers are different kinds of assholes.
        But I wanted my father to love me.
        In college, I spent an autumn weekend with my roommate Kris’s family in Northern California. On Saturday, Kris and I helped her father rake leaves, and soon the two of them were play fighting, laughing and stuffing leaves down the back of each other’s shirts. I held my breath: they were playing like my sisters and me when our father wasn’t home. Other fathers enjoy their children, I allowed myself to realize.
        I had squeezed that knowledge between my fists for many years. My father did not love me the way he loved his index cards, his ledger sheets, or sorting bolts by sizes. I had wanted to believe that someday I would do things so perfectly he would look at me the way my roommate’s father looked at her. Watching my roommate and her dad opened my fists. Back at our college apartment, after Kris was asleep, I looked out at the dark parking lot and cried into the living room curtains.
                                                                

A few years later, Greta left for college. With my sisters and me now grown and gone, our mother left our father.
        “I’m sure you have questions,” my mother said on the phone.
        “Only why you stayed so long.”
         “Children need a father in the home.”
        She was crying, so I did not argue, but I felt angry. How could she think his lack of interest in us had been good for my sisters and me?
                                                                

In the early 1980s, Kanner’s methods remained standard protocol, but the CDC published an autism rate of four or five out of 1,000 children—too many to give all of them parentectomies.
        During those years, I was out of college and working in San Francisco. Anger-sadness about my father filled my bus rides through the city, and I joined a therapy group called Rotten Childhoods. After therapy, no longer feeling bruised, I wondered if I could build a relationship with my father. Maybe he was waiting for me.
        I wrote him a letter. Within a week he mailed one back, three pages long, typed single-space. He detailed his work history, his fascination with computers, and his innocence in the face of my mother’s frustration.
        He said, “My feelings about you are positive.” I rubbed my fingers across the proof of that line. He loved me.
        I wrote my father back and invited him to visit me in San Francisco. A month later, he drove up and met me for dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf. 
        “Do you like oysters?” he asked.
        “I’ve never had one.” He ordered a dozen and taught me how to slurp them salty-wet from their shells. He gave me a history lesson about San Francisco, and said he didn’t know why my mother left him.
        “She’s the one who kept me from you girls. She’s the one who made our family miserable.”
        “Let’s not talk about Mom,” I told my father. I hoped he would ask about me, but he did not.
        My father drove up a few more times, meeting me at Fisherman’s Wharf, but I felt more distant with each of his visits. I wished he stuck to writing letters, where I could dig through the typing to find the few words that I needed to hear. My small efforts to see him, though, seemed to tell him we were close.
        “I know your sisters take your mother’s side,” he said while we walked along Pier 39 one afternoon. “But you are on my side.” He lifted his feet high over the wooden planks.
        My sisters and I sided with our mother. Around that time, I made a list of the ten worst things my mother had done (one, she’s so passive; two, she’s always crying). But her failings were small compared with the way she smoothed my hair or stayed up past midnight if I needed to talk. After one of my father’s visits, I set a boundary as I’d been taught in therapy.
        “I want to have a relationship with you,” I wrote him, “but I can’t listen to you say negative things about Mom.” If he wanted me in his life, he had to stop. “When you’re ready, I am here. I love you,” I said.
        I felt guilty about demanding that he change. I was raised to honor thy father.
        A week passed. A month. A year of checking the mailbox and believing he would respond. I wondered if I should write another letter, but I was new to placing boundaries and held tight to the one I had set. By the second year, the mailbox no longer felt like a zap each time I found it empty. Day by day, I let go of struggling to understand my father. It felt like drinking a cold glass of water on a hot California day.
                                                                

The next year, I moved to Los Angeles for grad school and found that substitute teaching paid more than my research assistant position. I taught a special education classroom, where my nine students, part-time aide, and I were segregated in a portable on the far side of the recess yard. The year before, the state of California outlawed corporal punishment in schools, but my principal said, “You can hit them if you need to.” I didn’t hit them, but I didn’t know how to manage a classroom, so I bribed them with cake.
        I hadn’t seen our father for several years when Greta invited him to her wedding. Thora, Sigrid, and I called each other before the event. How would we insulate our baby sister if our father unraveled? We designed hand signals to show which of us was closest to Greta, where our father was, and if he seemed calm.
        I spotted him from our line-up of sisters at the front of the church. His hair was slicked back, the same way he wore it in that childhood photo with the baby alligator. He seemed composed even though my sisters and I stood in the wrong order—youngest, oldest, middle, middle. During the reception, our father sat quietly at the back, and after a while, Thora, Sigrid, and I ceased our frantic signaling.
        Toward the end of the reception, Sigrid asked, “Do you want to go see him?”
        I nodded, and we clasped each other’s hands and walked across the dance floor.
        “Hi, Dad,” I said, at the same time as Sigrid.
         He stared straight ahead, then turned his chair away from us. It squawked on the linoleum floor.
        I had imagined while crossing the dance floor that he would be happy to see me. By my mid-twenties, I knew the risks involved in moving apart and later trying to reconnect. If he had simply stared at Sigrid and me, it would have felt familiar. I would have seen it as an opening. But when my father turned his chair, it severed us.
        Now I am a mother, and if my child turned the chair a thousand times, I would keep crossing the dance floor. With my father, after years of waiting and wanting, I accepted the back of his chair.
                                                                

Two years after Greta’s wedding, Hans Asperger’s paper was translated into English. His positive view of people with autism electrified doctors and parents. Within a few years, Asperger’s Syndrome became the diagnosis for people who had autistic traits yet no cognitive impairment. When the World Wide Web went public, adults with Asperger’s found each other online. They called themselves Aspies. The internet was a swinging vine that let people with autism connect without having to worry about traditional manners or eye contact.
         I was a public-school teacher then. One year I taught fifth grade in a small town in Oregon where the school district wanted to start mainstreaming—moving special education students into regular classrooms. I volunteered my class, and a 10-year-old boy on the autism spectrum soon joined us, with his aide. Joey used a picture board to communicate, hooted when he was excited, and was fascinated by wheels.
        At the end of the year, I wrote an article for the district newsletter about our mainstreaming success: how Joey sat with us during our class meetings on the rug, how the students took his hand and led him out to recess.
        I did not write about the challenges. When Joey saw a car drive past our classroom, he ran to the window to stare at the wheels, and, if his aide or I did not stop him, merrily stripped off his clothes. His aide worked on Joey’s communication with a buzz of narration: “Look, Ms. Cedar is writing on the whiteboard.” Some days his aide was absent, and I would hold Joey on my lap, cuddly and wiggly, while teaching the rest of our class.
        But I enjoy a lively class, and from then on I had multi-ability rooms. Teacher training for mainstreaming was high on hope and low on practicality.
        The trainers wanted us to use sticker sheets as bribes. They said we needed to grab the children’s faces to make them look at us, but I do not grab people’s faces. Instead, I cleared paths through the classroom for Marco, who needed to walk in straight lines, and I let Laura turn full-body circles in the back of the room. With my regular education students, I could tell when they connected with an activity or a new friend. With my children on the spectrum, I never understood how to help them grow, only how to help them not explode.
                                                                

In 1998, I got married. I did not invite my father to my wedding.
        “It’s easier to not have him here,” one of my sisters whispered to me while we hugged between songs on the dance floor.
        My father never met my child. I didn’t trust him to stay calm if my baby cried or my toddler romped across the room. I rarely thought about my father in those years. If someone asked about him, I could tell stories without feeling angry or sad.
        One afternoon when my child was two, my mother left a voicemail.
        “Your father had a heart attack,” the answering machine declared. My father died alone.
        I waited for a sadness that did not arrive, and I wondered if grieving through my teens and twenties had satiated me. I thought, what a loss for him to not enjoy me or my sisters. I pondered an absence that would now last forever.
        When he died alone, did my father believe no one wanted to love him?
        After my child started school, I opened a preschool in Bellevue, Washington. It was the land of Microsoft, and some of my little ones’ parents were software engineers. One year, a dad told me he was an Aspie. After drop-off one morning, we stood in the breezeway and talked about how he never felt like he fit in when he was a child. Now, at Microsoft, he felt like his differences were valued.
        At one point, he told me, “I get distracted by your hands.” I am a whole-body talker, so I clasped my hands behind my back and tried to stand still.
        That night, I repeated the conversation to my husband, Jason, who also worked at Microsoft. Jason remembered an article in Wired magazine called “The Geek Syndrome,” and found a copy for me. The author, Steve Silberman, wrote the article in 2001, the year my father died.
        “Clumsy and easily overwhelmed in the physical world,” he wrote, “autistic minds soar in the virtual realms of mathematics, symbols, and code.”
        Silberman’s words allowed me to wonder: what if my father was on the autism spectrum? It was like the maps of the world I used to show my fifth graders, with the Southern Hemisphere on top, or centering the continent of Africa. Let’s think about the world in a different way.
        When I realized he might have had Asperger’s, I called my sisters. For Thora and Greta the idea was new, but Sigrid said, “Of course he was autistic.” That was a decade ago. Today, we all use the label for our father. With a shrug. Probably.
        I did not ask my mother. She had squeezed her anger silent while married to my father, and now that he was gone, she had let the bitter loose. Sometimes to calm her, I would say camelia. Her favorite flower was our code word for stop, I don’t want to hear any more about how terrible he was.
        My diagnosis could be wrong, like when I see something in a poem that is not what the poet intended to say. But believing my father was on the spectrum feels hopeful, like blowing dandelions. If my father was on the autism spectrum, it means he may have loved me but was not able to show it, not the way other fathers do.
        I am glad my father was not diagnosed with autism when he was a child, that he was not taken from his parents and did not have electrodes taped onto his skin. Yet I wish his only friend when he was young had not been Al, the baby alligator. And I wish my father had learned how to explain what he needed, like the preschool dad who told me to stop waving my hands.
        “You girls look alike to me,” my father could have said when my sisters and I were young. “Please name yourself, unless all four of you are lined up in birth order.”
        I would have given him my name every time I saw him. I would have realized that before he drove up to San Francisco, he must have researched facts about the city as a way of connecting with me. I would have grown up confident he loved me, because he must have. He wanted me to know all the countries in the world, all the stories in his Bible, all the histories he could share. He wanted my world to be bigger, which is what we want for those we love.