The Other Country

Michael Whelan
July 15, 2008
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When Michael Whelan couldn't find any books written by fathers about autism, he decided to write one himself. The Other Country shares the experience he has gained since he became a father to son Charlie twelve years ago. Here is an excerpt from Michael's book.

I had spent a good deal of the pre-natal period preparing baby accessories in a state of male gadget obsession. I knew every lever and catch on the new pram, and could assemble the portable cot blindfolded with the precision of a military drill instructor. I had also spent numerous hours testing the installation of the baby capsule into the car and then I set off for the hospital to collect my new family for the ceremonial drive home. We arrived home late on Sunday afternoon, we bathed Charlie and he went to sleep nicely at about 7pm. Helen and I had a quiet little moment together to catch our breath and marvel at our new lives as parents.

Thirty minutes later, Charlie woke up. In a pattern that would continue for the next few weeks, he didn't sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time. At 3am that night I went driving to find an all-night pharmacy where I could buy a dummy. During the previous week in the labour ward I had confidently declared to visitors that we had decided not to use dummies. 'Charlie won't need one.' At three o'clock in the morning on that first night at home I would have paid a thousand dollars for one.

Charlie had also seemed to become fixated with the light fittings of our home. At night before bed he would stare at them, then shake his fingers to create flickering shadows falling upon his face. In retrospect, at 22 months Charlie's communication skills were almost non-existent. As he was our first child we had no developmental yardsticks at hand. The cheery babble that had characterized his first eighteen months was now completely gone. It had been replaced with a sort of incessant growling. Some friends of ours had a three-year-old son who spent hours at a time chanting the word 'burger', while wearing a large cardboard box on his head. I assumed Charlie's growling was a similarly quirky phase, something he was going through and would soon get over. Continued...