3

No Window Seat?

The airline hit Kai with a lifelong flight ban.

And somehow you could understand them.

“The office called. I have to return to Lausanne,” Dad said. He would have to leave a day early. The holiday was over. Kai was visiting South Africa for the first time since Henry and Kamila’s wedding. The country was so big and beautiful. He had never seen so many animals in his life. Even the light here seemed completely different than in Israel.

They were supposed to fly together. Now Henry had rebooked, and Kai would have to fly alone. That didn’t scare Kai. He had flown from Tel Aviv to Geneva many times. At age fourteen, he was a frequent flier.

But now his flight was being rebooked, meaning he had to fly back earlier. This was not as he planned.

“This is a challenge,” Dad had said with a serious expression. “You think you’ll manage?”

“Of course,” Kai had said. He wasn’t a baby anymore.

On the ride to the airport, Kai already felt it welling up inside him. He was going to fly KLM—not El Al, as he was accustomed. He wasn’t going to get the special menu he had preordered either. Oh well, he wouldn’t eat at all then. That call from his dad’s office had really gotten him in a pickle. Kai tried to keep his rage in check. Dad was always so proud when Kai flew alone. Kai didn’t want to disappoint him.

At the airport, they pulled his luggage out of the trunk and his aunt walked him over to check-in. An airline rep tied a little sign to his suitcase handle, and it disappeared on the conveyor belt. Don’t lose my suitcase now!

Kai received his ticket, his aunt waved, he waved back, and then he was alone. El Al would have dispatched an employee to escort him through the airport. It would be fine.

Kai stood stiffly in the security line: X-rays, being patted down. He doesn’t like it when strangers put their hands all over him.

He proceeded through the halls. That had to be his boarding gate. He stared at the screen in disbelief. What did they mean, delayed?

Kai hates delays. And not in the way other people hate them; you know, where they tap their feet and roll their eyes. Kai despises them to the core. An unrest grew in him. So rude: he had arrived on time, after all. He’d known since yesterday that he had to be there by 3:00 p.m. The airline had known about the appointment even longer. They had had all the time in the world to be punctual. Many people relied on them.

We’re only delayed by a few minutes, the woman at the gate assured him. A few minutes? What was that supposed to mean? Fifteen? Sixty? There’s a difference, you know.

Kai waited, but his rage was building: at the airline rep by the gate, at his dad’s office. Finally, the magic words sounded: “Please have your boarding passes ready.” On to the plane. Now he just had to look forward to the flight. Sure, he was flying alone, with a foreign airline, hungry, on the wrong day, not at the time they had agreed on—but he didn’t want to be like that. He would accept his lot.

The flight attendant smiled at him. Kai looked at his seat number. “That one,” she said.

“Wait, what? No window seat?”

“I’m sorry,” said the stewardess, “but it’s a good seat, and maybe—”

“I always have a window seat,” Kai said.

He always flew El Al, always got his preordered meal, always flew on the day he was supposed to and not a day earlier because his father’s dumb office had called. The signals that had been tormenting his neocortex started to run hot in his amygdala. The rage that had been simmering for the past day quietly boiled over, bursting out of all his extremities. No way! You can’t do this to me! Fucking phone call! Fucking father! Fucking airline! Fucking menu! Fucking seat! Fucking stewardess!

Kai lost himself. When he came to, he was standing back at the gate, and his suitcase was on its way to the baggage claim. He was hit with a lifelong flight ban. He called his aunt: “Um . . .”

Henry wasn’t mad at Kai or the airline—he was mad at himself. He had been thoughtless, letting them call him back to Lausanne like that. It wasn’t the first time he had underestimated how hard life with autism can be and how easily things can get out of hand. Poor Kai. Henry knew how rotten he felt. He always cried after he had one of his attacks and said how sorry he was. “That wasn’t me,” he would say. “I’m not sure who it was. I’m so sorry. I don’t want to be a bad boy.” It breaks your heart.

HENRY: He feels guilty and miserable: about how he behaved, what outbursts he’s capable of, the fact that he had a panic attack. He feels ashamed.

KAMILA: He broods over those situations so much, for so long.

HENRY: That helps him grow—self-reflection. We encourage him to think about it.

KAMILA: Kai is a challenge. Arguments, disagreements—they’re a matter of life and death to him. This causes you a great deal of stress as a parent: What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? You can’t stop thinking about it. And you worry, worry, worry—until you learn to just accept it as a part of life. As a parent, you always feel guilty anyway: What could I have done? I didn’t react well there! I don’t spend enough time with my kid! I didn’t say the right thing! I did the wrong thing! That’s how a lot of parents think. However, if you manage to put all that aside, children are just children, and that’s how it is with Kai. He’s just even more demanding.

HENRY: Yes, he has really pushed us to our limits.

KAMILA: On the other hand, there are all the great things you experience as a parent. All the things you wouldn’t have done without your children. All the things you wouldn’t have thought. All the things that enrich your life. Kai has enriched us unbelievably, changed everything: how we think about the world, how we think about people, how we think about the brain. And he also enriched the lives of his sisters.

HENRY: He taught them to empathize.

KAMILA: Kai is a gift to them. How does Kai see the world? Why does he behave the way he does? That’s how the girls learned to see others, to empathize. We learned that as parents too, and our daughters have benefited from it. We try to empathize with them more. When they throw a tantrum, for example. Or if Olivia finds her clothes too itchy. If she changes her clothes three times in the morning, because things aren’t the way she wants.

HENRY: With her, everything has to be perfect. When she gets mad, she’s almost like Kai. But she isn’t autistic.

KAMILA: Not at all.

HENRY, laughs: I guess you learn to deal with normal panic attacks too. Our children are lucky. They have experienced parents.

KAMILA, laughs: Lucky devils.

HENRY: I was twenty-six years old when I first became a father. I knew nothing. Once you reach adulthood, you’ve been prepared for so many things, but no one teaches you how to raise a child.

KAMILA: Kai taught us a lot.

HENRY: What an unbelievable amount of sensitivity is required, for example. We are continuously stunned by how much he has taught us. We talk about it a lot.

KAMILA: So much of that knowledge is theoretical, though. I can talk for hours about the Intense World Theory and the miracles that occur in autistic brains. But when your kid refuses to wear a particular pair of socks in the morning, you still think, No, not again, not every morning. It’s easy to forget everything.

HENRY: It’s not about never making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. You will never do everything right. But you can learn to deal with them, and you shouldn’t run away. You’ve got to think about what you did. Recognizing mistakes is how we develop. It’s the key to parenting. Your child is a multifaceted being. You will never know your children entirely. We thought we could, but it’s not possible. You can’t teach them to always do the right thing. But you can show them how to think about themselves, how to deal with themselves and their mistakes. If you can reflect on yourself, you can change. If not, you don’t have a chance. That’s very hard for an autistic child. He almost looks at himself like a third person.

But pity wasn’t all Henry felt when Kai was crying again after his latest outburst, saying, “That wasn’t me.” It also saddened him, because Kai’s introspectiveness, the key to change, had developed at a snail’s pace despite all assistance. In lieu of that, every one of their interventions was a Band-Aid solution.

Each family member had their own way of dealing with Kai’s attacks. Kamila got loud sometimes. That helped. Kai came to his senses. Linoy achieved the same result by crying. Kali took Kai’s hand and whispered his compulsions away. The ever-rational Henry reasoned with him.

Anat practiced the hardest and most virtuous emergency relief. “What helps, what really helps: go up to him and hug him tight. That’s it. He sobs briefly and begins to calm down. I get so mad at him sometimes when he says something stupid. I don’t want to hear it anymore, don’t want to see him, and so I do the opposite: I walk away from him, go to the door, but that only makes him madder—that’s when he really gets going. I know what the solution is, I know what he needs, but I’m not always able to give it to him. I get angry and don’t want to be close to him, don’t want to touch him. But we parents, the whole family, we always have to keep this in mind: always, always, always. That’s what autistic people need: they need that embrace, that compassion. They need precisely this security, this protection, this warmth. I counsel parents with autistic children and always tell them: if you want to calm them down, you have to be there for them in that moment, and you have to love and hold them. However, they’re very good at sensing whether you’re doing it mechanically, artificially, or whether your heart is really in it.”