The Best Kind of Different: Our Family's Journey With Asperger's Syndrome by Shonda Schilling, Curt Schilling

of the first day that he rode on the school bus, the bus driver called me over.“Grant did the sweetest thing,” she told me. “He thanked me and then hugged me before getting off the bus.”
    My heart was warmed. The sad part for her was that while she loved it, there are rules forbidding the drivers from making physical contact with the children. “I hated having to have a conversation with him about this, telling him he couldn’t hug me anymore,” she said.
    Unfortunately, in his sweetness, Grant would often cross social boundaries leading to all kinds of awkwardness. By the time he was in second grade he would still be trying to hold hands with the other boys in his class, something you did in preschool and kindergarten. He didn’t understand why the kids would say, “Get off me.” He was totally unaware that he was being ridiculed.
    This obliviousness to ridicule was at once frustrating and remarkable. It could cause him to dominate a conversation with kids and interrupt them at every turn, but it also meant that he was completely genuine in his affection for those around him. What really distinguished him from the other kids was that when deciding who deserved his love and attention, he never stopped to consider how other people would view him.
    Cooper, who is my brother’s son and Grant’s cousin, has many food allergies, and from early on Grant was always protective of him. When Cooper was around, Grant would constantly check ingredients on food we had in the home. “Hey,” he’d shout out, “does this have peanuts in it? Because Cooper can’t have it if it has peanuts.” Our meals and snacktimes were overshadowed by Grant’s desire to protect his cousin. His actions were more like those of an overly concerned parent. Yet Grant was just a child.
    In first grade, Grant became best friends with a boy named Stephen who has Down syndrome. Grant just naturally gravitated toward him. He stood by Stephen and watched out for him. Their first grade teacher, Mrs. Callahan, was struck by this and mentioned it in our conference: “His sweetness and sensitivity toward accepting others, especially those with disabilities, is an admirable quality in someone so young,” she said.

    She shared a story with me about Grant: In class one afternoon when Stephen had finished his art project, Grant saw his picture. He then took it upon himself to show off the project to the other kids in the class, telling everyone how nice a job Stephen had done. His actions were those of a parent or teacher trying to boost selfconfidence in a child. This behavior would have been advanced for a senior in college, much less a firstgrader. Grant was teaching his classmates how to praise and encourage Stephen.
    Mrs. Callahan told me another story about Grant that spoke volumes about how powerfully he felt sympathy in certain situations. “We were studying Columbus and learning how he had taken some Native Americans with him on one of his voyages back to Europe,” she said. “We had a whole class discussion about how those Native Americans must have felt being taken away from their families and being forced to live in a place that was unfamiliar to them. Grant didn’t say much during that discussion, but came to me later in the day and said, ‘You know, Mrs. Callahan, I was thinking. If that was me without my family going to a new land, I would be crying so hard that my tears would sink the ship.’ It was another one of those moments when I realized how sensitive and loving Grant is.”
    She said it was also a sign that he was a deep thinker who took time to process and digest information in order to make sense of it all. Not just that, but she also told me he could write poetry. At the time I thought, What kind of poetry is a kid going to write in first grade? But after I ran a marathon, he gave me a poem. It said, “Running is hard, jogging is, too. But you do it so fast, people thought you flew.” Not bad for a little kid.
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