Thanks, Simpsons and HBO!

Our middle son is seven years old, and I think it's taken me every day of his 7+ years to figure that child out. True confessions: He's been more difficult for me to unravel (figuratively, in my mind) than either of my other sons. With TH and Little, I got them--get them--without even thinking about it. It's like I've done a Vulcan mind-meld on them and share their thoughts and feelings without effort.

But the mind meld has failed with Dubya so far. It's not because I love him less--I love that great little boy with all the loving power I've got. It's because he's...so damned complicated. With TH, what you see is what you get. With Little, I'm learning what it might be like to be around a neurotypical child, and while that's novel for us, he's also a clear case of transparency. Dubya, however, is close. He does not speak of feelings except for the fear and anxiety he expresses in his confessionals. He does not show emotions until they explode from him. He's a tight little ball of enigma and repression, the latter of which unspools tornadically when the pressure finally overwhelms.

And then there are those obsessive thoughts, zipping through his brain like hummingbirds on speed, out of his control. His hatred for girls, his worries about Nazis, his fears that he's done something terrible when he hasn't. And while these things have angsted his parents for months and months, it took "The Simpsons" 20th anniversary episode to let us know that at least one of his behaviors must be pretty damned par for the course.

It's the introduction of a princess to the Krusty the Clown show. The episode flashes back and forth between the princess, warbling a la Snow White ca. 1930s, and two boys, Millhouse and Bart, sitting on the floor, rocking and moaning, their hands over their ears or eyes. Just. Like. Dubya. Does. Yay! It seems so disturbing when he's doing it in our livingroom, but I feel like "The Simpsons" just confirmed for us that it's a reasonably widespread phenomenon.

Having crossed "misogyny" off my list of concerns--I figure this evaporates someday to be replaced by a solid and lasting lust--I have Temple Grandin and the new HBO biopic about her to thank for my other epiphany about my little enigma. I've heard her mention her inner visual filmstrip in previous interviews but had never linked it to Dubya because, well, Temple Grandin is autistic and seemed to be describing something specific to her autism, and Dubya's just...complicated. But reading things similar to this Today Health interview with her made something start to click.

As we were checking out of a video store last week, I noted that Dubya had exiled himself into a corner of the store, face deliberately turned away from all the enticing or terrifying video rental covers and posters. He just couldn't stand to look at them. And it occurred to me that this behavior wasn't just 7-year-old drama. In a flash of brilliant insight that I likely should have experienced about 5 years ago, I realized that Dubya's visual world was probably not remotely like mine. No child who draws this or this at the age of six sees the world the way I do.

I realized that his visual world is probably overwhelming, that it must sometimes be right there, up in his face, visually shrieking at him, looming large, flooding his mind, sometimes painfully. Just as my ears cannot bear certain noises or noise combinations, his eyes feel things mine never will. What I see in this world probably looks like something off my parents old 1970 Zenith compared to the clarity of his HDTV world. I think he's so remarkably visual that he may be like Temple Grandin in that sense, mentally scanning an image catalogue like a Google Images search, and seeing things that the rest of us do not.

So, I told him my ideas. I told him that because he's a visual artist, he may see the world in ways that regular non-artist folk like me do not. That he may feel more, literally sense more, than us non-artist types, and that I was going to try to remember that so I could understand him better. He agreed and has taken to the idea. I'm taken with the idea that thanks to Temple Grandin's new biopic on HBO, Bart Simpson, and a fortuitous observation in a video store, I may finally be unlocking some of the secrets of my middle child. Yes, it's true. It took the visual arts for me to begin to understand my most visual of children.