12

Beloved Kai

You shouldn’t try to change anyone.

There was this girl. Kai knew her from school.

She was different. Not autistic—she was different in a different way. She sat there quietly, shy. When she looked at Kai, it warmed him.

When he left school, she remained in his head. Three years later, they met in town. She looked at him, and he walked over. “How are you?”

She showed him her bruises. She had a boyfriend.

Every time Kai ran into her, he asked how she was doing. And soon she didn’t have a boyfriend, or bruises, anymore. Soon she had a new boyfriend, Kai.

She, too, found it easy to love Kai.

So, how does she look, Kai?

“She’s a bit fat,” he answers, “but I love her as she is. I say to her: You shouldn’t try to change anyone. I love you as you are. In the beginning, she was a bit . . .” He makes a gesture: frightened. “Now she understands better. She has just got to be the way she is. And she loves me the way I am too.”

HENRY: It’s a challenge, a delicate situation. One thing is clear: they aren’t ready yet. In terms of his spirit and maturity, Kai is still a teenager. About fifteen, I would say.

KAMILA: Thirteen, tops. He’s like a child. Sure, he’s matured in many ways. He’s much calmer and has better control of himself than before. He doesn’t throw as many tantrums. He tries very hard. When you say, “Kai, breathe, calm down,” he withdraws and pulls himself together. But his emotional life and his mind are not like a twenty-three-year-old’s. He’s hitting puberty with all its problems. He is not only autistic, after all; he’s also a person. Sometimes you forget that. Like everyone, he has good qualities and bad ones that he needs to work on. And sometimes you can be a bit inattentive with him. You think, He’s autistic, and don’t end up pushing him as much as you should.

ANAT: As a mother, I make sure it doesn’t get to be too much. It’s difficult for him. He’s experiencing situations that create all this noise in his head. He doesn’t notice it himself. Or doesn’t want to notice it. He just wants to show her his love. But I can see how it builds up in him. I’m there to give him permission: you’re allowed to take a break. Or I tell her: Okay, don’t call him for the next four hours. And you can see how he loosens up again. I hope that he realizes when it gets to be too much. I hope he makes sure not to get hurt and that she doesn’t get hurt.

His first girlfriend!

Kai would take issue with that, of course. If you ask him, he’s had plenty of girlfriends. Girls who talked to him. He even went on a date with one of them. She was blonde. Kai always wanted a blonde girlfriend. Anat liked her. “She would have been good for Kai—intellectually, too,” she says. When Kai showed up with a new girl, she asked, as mothers often do, if he was sure about her. Didn’t he want a blonde girl? “He looked at me and said, ‘Mom, you have to look at the inside, not the outside.’”

He didn’t feel good with the blonde girl. He wasn’t sure why. Now, he knows, because he has something new to compare it to. It felt too cold. “Kai said to me, ‘I’ve never felt anything like this.’ He feels the warmth. She’s a warm person.”

And so, they sit there each Sunday, the girl sitting silently and hugging him the whole time, and he entertains and hugs her the whole time too.

“I sing songs for her, and I tell her stories,” says Kai. “I love her. I tell her that every day.”

Recently, Kai and Henry talked about it over a round of bowling, a man-to-man conversation. Kai told him that his girlfriend had warned him not to spend so much money. They would have to start saving. For a house. Kai looked very serious and determined.

“Yes, you always have to think about the future,” Henry said.

And he put his arm around him. His beloved Kai.