When you have a child with autism, you learn to do a lot of things for them that they cannot do for themselves, at least not yet. You say "Goodnight Dad" to them at night to try to get them to echo you, and reinforce them when they finally do, so that eventually they say it at the sight of you tucking them in, not just because you told them to. You hold up a juice box you know they want without giving it to them, prompting them to approximate the "j" sound, then the "ju", and eventually the name of the thing itself, shaping responses hundreds and hundreds of times until eventually one day you hear "juice box please" from down the hall. You break down taking a shower into 67 individual steps and teach them all in a long chain, one by one, in order, so that as scrubbing the left bicep five times becomes mastered, it acts as a stimulus to move down to the left forearm and scrub it five times. It can take months, it sometimes takes years, but eventually what you do for them becomes what they do for themselves.
The day we met Aaron for the first time was January 21, 1993. We had to drive about an hour from our home to the hospital where his birthmother had delivered him. We had only found out the afternoon before that our prayers were finally going to be answered and that we would have a son. We stayed up all night deciding on a name. We drove home from the hospital that cold January morning, my wife Michele in the back of our small car with Aaron so bundled up in an oversized light blue baby blanket you could hardly see his face. Approaching the Throgs Neck Bridge, we slowed to a crawl in the toll plaza, as men with stacks of newspapers worked the lines of cars that had formed behind the row of toll booths. It was the day after Bill Clinton's inauguration. Plastered across the front page of the copy of the Times we bought to commemorate the day was a headline that perfectly described what had happened in Washington the day before, and was happening now in the back seat of our Ford Escort that cold morning drive. "Hail to the Chief".
My son Aaron is almost 16 now but he cannot ask for me to vote for Obama for president, at least not yet. So this morning, I put Aaron's favorite T-shirts out of sight, and got him dressed for school in something more appropriate for the occasion. I had him read the shirt out loud, and gave him a few fill-in-the-blanks, like President of the United ___. He spilled a little pancake syrup on it before he headed out to school, but all in all I think he did pretty well.
It may take a while for Aaron to fully understand the importance of today. For now this is something we have to do on his behalf. We do it for him because, for now, he needs us to, but also because, some day, we hope that he can do it for himself.