Life On The Spectrum: Chapter 1

Sean Michael Callaghan was born on March 22, 1990, to Lorry and Michael Callaghan. Lorry and Michael had known each other for only about a year before they were married. Michael had grown up in a family of 6 kids in Northeast Philadelphia. Lorry grew up in West Caldwell, New Jersey, about 15 minutes from New York City. They met through a College friend of Michael’s, who had been a childhood friend of Lorry. As they spent time together, they fell in love and were married in May 1989. I came along less than a year later. I was 8 pounds 6 ounces at birth. They brought me home to a twin house in Horsham, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb.

During my very early years, I would scream and cry during the middle of the night, so my father had to watch me night after night after night. As I got a little older my father still had a difficult time sleeping because I would shout as loud as I could that my Disney read-along audiocassette was finished and I would not stop until he came in to turn the tape over so I could listen again. Disney and Dr. Seuss were very important in my childhood. I loved watching Disney movies and videos, and having my father read me the stories of Dr. Seuss and others. I would also frequently insist that my father play Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo Entertainment System and enjoyed just watching him. To my dad’s relief, I slowly learned to play myself but still I was even more intrigued to watch my Elementary School aged next-door neighbor play, as he knew all the secret passages and such.

My parents were very nice to me, though my mother tended toward being very impatient (and still does). Much of my early childhood was spent with my grandfather, who is in my opinion, one of the greatest persons who ever lived. He watched me mostly at my house during the early days but eventually I started going to my grandparents’ house, where we would watch Winnie the Pooh and go for walks around the neighborhood. (To this day, many of the residents of North Wales, Pennsylvania, where Grandpop and Grandmom lived after moving out of Northeast Philadelphia, remember me as the little boy who walked the neighborhood with his Grandpop every day.)

One daily routine with Grandpop was to go to the North Wales Train Station and wait for Grandmom to get off from her day of work in the city. I loved trains at the time; my favorite show being Shining Time Station featuring Thomas the Tank Engine with former Beatle Ringo Starr and later George Carlin (of all people). Grandpop also gave me the love of music as he would play his piano every day and I would watch, and play around with the piano when he was not playing.

Along with my dad and my Nebraskan relatives, Grandpop was also with me at my first formal Philadelphia Phillies baseball game, pitched by Curt Schilling in August 1993, the year the Phillies won the National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves but lost the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays. Obviously at that age what I remembered most was the Phillie Phanatic. A love of baseball was sort of a part of my early childhood but it would not fully blossom till my early teens.

I tended to pay very acute attention to detail and change as a young child. I would go grocery shopping with my mother at Genuardi’s, a prominent area grocery chain that has since been taken over. At some point in the mid-90s Genuardi’s changed its corporate logo and I would say, “Mommy, the Genuardi’s looks different!” Details like that seemed very important to me.

When I was 3, in 1993, my younger brother, Kevin was born. Unfortunately, my parents didn’t want Grandpop to have to deal with two of us after having raised his own six. So Kevin and I were introduced to the world of pre-school care. I remember vaguely going to a daycare center where teachers enjoyed picking on me in good fun, though I thought they were serious at the time. We would frequently watch movies, have a daily nap (which I was terrible at) and play on the playground. As time went on my Mother noticed (and I didn’t) that there was something not quite right about my development. From the time I was 2 or 3 years old, I would play with pieces of string and refer to them as my “twirler” (which I continue to do to this day, though I mostly use rubber bands in certain situations.)

As time wore on my Mother started to worry about my eccentricities and at age 5, I was diagnosed with what was then known as Asperger’s Syndrome. It was this knowledge that would drive my mother into a paranoid frenzy that would affect the rest of my life.