My 35-Year-Old Son Is Learning to Drive. It’s Complicated.

He lives in the suburbs with his wife, Gisette, and their sons, Sky and Isaac, who are seven and three. Gisette has a car, but Sam doesn’t have a driver’s license. Getting one would make his life—and Gisette’s—easier; instead of walking, or taking the train into the city, or getting a ride from her, he could simply drive his own car. For a long time, this possibility has been before him. There is a small problem, though.Sam might not be able to do it. He is autistic.

A dozen years ago, here’s how he described his first driving lesson with me in a parking lot at a nearby college:

I look down at the controls, and I get a little dizzy looking at all of the knobs, gears, pedals, and the steering wheel. The thought of having to move my hands and feet in sync to get this bucket of bolts going is scary.

After checking that all the mirrors are to my liking, I start the car, which roars like a lioness on the hunt. I want to scream, Why does this seem so loud when I am in the driver’s seat?!?! I reach into my pocket for my trusty headphones to block out this horrible noise, but they aren’t there. Sweet baby Jesus! Am I going to have to listen to this car the whole time? How can anyone focus on driving with that noise?

By lesson five (or so):

As the car speeds up, I see a beautiful tree to my left, which has orange, red, and yellow leaves. This tree sits beyond the big parking lot where my father and I are practicing laps. I start to wonder: How long has that tree been there? Why haven’t I seen it before? I wonder if any couples have carved their names in it. I wonder if some freshman had his first beer beneath that tree. I wonder what the tree’s species is. I used to know this stuff because I remember reading about trees as a kid—damn, I cannot remember now.

Suddenly, my father grabs the wheel and jerks the car to the right.

“Stop the car, Sam,” my father demands, which I do abruptly. Our heads jerk back and forth as we come to a stop.

I rest my forehead against the steering wheel and wait for my father to be angry with me—little did I know that while my mind was zeroing in on the tree, the car was still moving onto the grass leading to it.

I am fully expecting to see steam coming out of my father’s nose with an announcement to the world: “Sam Huber should never drive again.”

But he is cool as a cucumber as he turns to ask, “What was going through your head just now?”

I can’t answer.

“Sam, did you hear me?”

I’m still silent.

“Sam, can you please back the car up so we can start over?”

Finally, I say, just barely above a whisper, “Dad, please stop talking.”

Then we sit there in silence.

Sam’s teenage diagnosis of Asperger’s—once considered a form of high-functioning autism before the DSM put all autism spectrum disorders under one umbrella—helped me better understand his way of being in the world.

The world comes at Sam in a particular way, taking the form of any number of glitches in his awareness. For instance, perhaps I walk up to the front door of his house with him; I am carrying a heavy box of books I want to give Sam, and he is talking to me about the Grateful Dead cover band he saw the night before. Sam loves the Grateful Dead. At his door, we both stop. He is waiting. So am I—it’s as if what he needs to do hasn’t come into the picture for him as we stand there. That’s the challenge of having Asperger’s, and I try to say this as gently as I can:

“Are you going to unlock your door, Sam?”

As a young boy, Sam didn’t have friends. He subsisted largely on chicken nuggets. He was an eager athlete but awkward, the last player picked. He got bullied. He struggled in school. There were a lot of “nos” in his world, and I felt the greatest risk for him, as I tried to help him negotiate failure, was the growing idea of what he couldn’t do and how that might define him—not making the baseball team was one thing, a momentary (if painful) blip; the idea of I suck taking hold was much more dangerous.

Yet he would make surprising leaps.

At 15, Sam had been playing basketball at the private school he went to for kids on the spectrum, and one winter night, he wanted to go to a playground with me. Why, when it was so cold? That night, one-on-one, 35 degrees on hard macadam, Sam held his dribble, side to side, teasing me, before juking one way and then going right around me. What had just happened? A year later, he took a school trip to Belize, and the boy who got off the plane at the end of it was not the same as the one who’d gotten on six days earlier: It had to do with Pink Floyd and sitting on the edge of the Caribbean Sea at sunrise, without having spent the previous night in his bunk. I suspect he never bothered hitting his bed the entire trip, and he came home both quite dirty and with a growing sense of self-assurance.

These leaps supported the view of a psychologist when Sam was younger that he simply needed time, more time—that he would get there and take his place in the neurotypical world.

He would dispute that now. Who he is, he began to believe about the time I started teaching him to drive, when he was in his early twenties, is just fine; he thinks how he thinks, and his neurodiverse perceptions, the way he goes about things, are utterly legitimate.

I support that, and Sam’s push to be accepted as the person he is has given him a certain toughness. The way he relates to others is not a referendum on his competency at things like eye contact but a negotiation, always ongoing, something he is learning to control.

But some tasks are not like that. Driving, which many of us take for granted, is a little like conducting brain surgery in one crucial respect—it does require a bottom line of competency. You have to get it right.

Searching a few years ago for why tasks like driving can be so hard for Sam, I came upon this in the online outlet Spectrum: “For a person with autism, the world never stops being surprising.” That is, new. Which means the instantaneous deciphering, even in a situation he’s been in before, of what Sam should pay attention to or ignore isn’t instantaneous at all, because he’s constantly figuring that out all over again.

I asked Sam, once more, what he was thinking during that early lesson in the college parking lot when he drove onto the lawn toward a tree:

The best way to describe it: There’s no filter, a pretty tree and operating a car are one continuous thought, like I’m improvising when there’s a script I should follow instead.

That’s why driving is so hard for him. And…dangerous.

We still go to the nearby college to drive when the sun is well below the tree line, because it fits our schedules and there are fewer parked cars for me to hit.

I have never been able to keep my eyes focused on one area for more than a few seconds—at least not on command. When I force my eyes to focus on one thing, it makes my body tense up, as though someone dumped cold water on me. Sensory overload hits me fast, and I have a hard time knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. What would be on the periphery for most people—like a car horn in the distance when you’re driving—on some level you take it in, but you know without thinking that it’s far away and meaningless. For me, though, that horn seems like it’s blaring for me NOW until I consciously make sense of it: no. It’s far away. It’s not for me.

It seems like I have to think my way through the simplest things.

I have a strategy. In order to focus, I often look around and try to take in everything; I almost welcome an overload of perception to come back to the one thing I need to zero in on.

It’s a way of building tension, like I’m blowing up a balloon to pop it. The explosion stops the noise; the sensory overload has been squashed. And then I can consciously zero in.

In the parking lot, when I need to see the lines and borders of the lot, I first have to look at the red banner with the school’s name blazoned across it, hanging from the street lights, and take in the lecture halls that look like Gothic churches or mansions above us on the hill, eerily silent apart from a few night classes—and the trees and the grass and shrubs and other street lamps. It is a sort of game, almost, that I have to take all of that in, and check on the controls of the car, and then take in every part of the campus within reach again. (Meanwhile, my father keeps giving advice. The most important being: “Where your eyes go, so does the car.”) That balloon fills, and fills, and fills more—some student cutting across the parking lot, a car starts, birds—in order to burst it: Bam!

Now I see a parking lot. I see lines and borders and where I need to go. I can stay within that, focused on that, once I get there. I just don’t start there.

Once Sam had mastered ovals in the parking lot, we started driving on nearly empty country roads northwest of the city. I had him focus on the line in the center of the road, telling him not to cross it. Which sometimes had him veering too far to the edge on my side. But gradually, over months, he began getting it. Sam could handle my car.

With driving, weird stuff happens, of course—somebody veers into your lane, or you don’t see a car in your blind spot, and you have to respond. But Sam took that fear—my fear of the unknown descending on him—and made it his own. One night, months into our lessons, when he was driving on a two-lane road with cars parked on both sides, he kept drifting too close to the cars on my side. I warned him a few times about it and reached over to the steering wheel to get him centered, but he would immediately drift back.

“Sam! At some point, you’re going to hit these cars!”

“No, I’m not!”

I laughed. How was he so sure?

He volunteered this logic: “I need to be on my side of the yellow line.”

I realized: Sam was sure that all he had to pay attention to was staying on his side of the road, just inside the center line—as I had ordered him to do those nights when we first ventured out from the college parking lot. To him, there was no risk of hitting the parked cars on my side, because he was following my instructions. He didn’t even need to look over there.

After many lessons, Sam got to the point of taking the driver’s test. And flunking; parallel parking did him in three or four times. He’d get nervous and hit cones—end of test. I felt bad for him. And relieved.

A couple of years ago, Gisette started taking him on driving lessons. I silently passed the baton: The responsibility for taking Sam to the finish line of getting his license was no longer mine. One day she said to me, in passing, “He’s fine, driving. Until he does something crazy, like pull out into traffic without looking.”

After many lessons, Sam got to the point of taking the driver’s test. And flunking; parallel parking did him in. I felt bad for him and relieved.

A couple of years ago, Gisette and I were spending the day at one of our favorite parks. We love walking in nature—it’s one of our most beloved date options because. without other people around, we truly feel like we can truly be ourselves and just enjoy each other’s company.

We had a great day walking along the river. There was something green growing from every angle along the path, and the sun shined on us here and there. But then, the other side of life hit: text messages. Someone texted my wife, and it wasn’t good news.

Gisette sat on a park bench in the middle of our walk to text back. Her fingers flew across her keyboard, and as the messages began to go back and forth, she held her phone closer to her face. This is a sign that my wife is either having an upsetting conversation or she forgot to put on her glasses. Well, she was wearing her glasses, so this was about how she was feeling. Gisette started to cry, and when I asked her what was wrong, she hid her face in my chest.

She wouldn’t tell me what was in the texts.

Not knowing any other words to say, I said, “Why don’t I take us home?” I hadn’t driven for months, ever since I flunked the driving test for the fifth or sixth time. But I took the car keys out of her pocket and guided her to the car in a one-armed hug. I put her in the passenger seat and got tissues from the trunk and handed them to her. Then I approached the driver’s side slowly, determined to do right by my wife, to be her hero in this moment. I took three deep breaths before I reached for the car handle, which was cold to the touch.

(Why did I notice that? I don’t know.)

Before opening the door, I looked through the window at my wife, who was crying into her hands; it was at that moment that all of the things that could distract me on the road did not matter. All that mattered was getting her home safe and sound. I got in. I turned the car on, punched our address into the GPS, and pulled slowly out of the park. And as the car moved along the road, my wife told me what was in the texts.

We knew her father was dying, and she was texting with an aunt about his final arrangements. Would he be buried? Would he be cremated?

Now, I knew the tricky thing for me was keeping my eyes on the road and comforting her at the same time. It is my instinct to look at someone when I am talking to them so I can know when to convey empathy—I need as many signals from other people as I can get, including my wife. Yet in this moment, I had to ignore this instinct and trust my ears to guide me in soothing my wife as I drove.

And so, in a way, it was simple.

Gisette talked about how unfair it seemed: Not only was her father dying, but she had so many decisions to make, on how to handle his body, his service, all of it.

I followed Siri’s directions.

Gisette did not have to correct my driving or, God forbid, grab the wheel from me. She was able to stay within her feelings. With each mile and turn that I took, her crying began to ease, and let me tell you: I was staying in my lane, signaling all my turns, and staying under the speed limit most of the time.

Driving safely had to be my only mission as a driver. My wife being so upset was something that would, most times, distract me—but I knew I had no choice. I could say some kind words to her, but I had to focus on what I was doing.

Drive, Sam. Drive her home.

Maybe these things are obvious to most people. That’s my problem. Usually, the messages pour into my head so fast that I don’t know what to do with them—the filter between conscious and unconscious perception doesn’t exist for me—and it has always been like that. But my wife’s crisis changed everything. In that moment, with her upset, my role as a husband, the car, the road—when that balloon burst, and burst very fast, all of that chaos crystallized into clarity. I had my marching orders, and I heard a voice outside of myself.

Siri’s.

Time passed without Sam trying to get his license, even after his victory driving Gisette home when she was upset. It was a sort of inertia—he was used to not driving, plus he had already expended a lot of energy in that direction; work, marriage, and fatherhood now took up his time.

One day, I was sitting on the sofa with Gisette, asking her to drive me to some event, I can’t remember what. But what I do remember is that it would have taken 30 to 45 minutes by car and two hours by public transportation.

It’s the struggle of many autistic people: Relying on people close to us frustrates them, and it’s why autism is viewed as a disability—others have to take over for us, it feels like. We’re not fully adults. And sometimes, that’s a terrible place to be. It’s like we’re on the outside looking in.

A father should be able to take his sons to the doctor or the playground, but because I don’t drive, I don’t do those things. I want that responsibility. And when we’re out of cheese, I want to be able to drive to the supermarket.

So I texted my dad: “Can we practice driving again?”

Can Sam do it? If he can do it one time, can he learn to do it every time? I don’t know.

I know this: If we give up—if I say no now to helping him drive—it risks pushing Sam back to the boy who got the message, again and again, that he wasn’t good enough. A message that feels like the stamp of finality: You can’t drive.

Of course, there is the counter­argument: What the hell am I thinking, helping him go out on the road alone? Or with my grandsons?­

What scares me is getting distracted when I drive, but overcoming my disability is being in control of that. I do get anxious about that balloon filling at the wrong time—that’s really what scares me.

It scares me, his father, too.

I texted Sam: Let’s drive.