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When I joined a tech company after working for myself for 20 years, the corporate world had changed in many ways. One, in particular, struck me. My old jobs had existed in environments so laddish and rowdy that even I, as a man, had felt uncomfortable in them. So I’d gotten out.
For 20 years, I ran my own businesses. I prioritized impact over profit. I prized adherence to a set of beliefs over survival. If marketplace disruptions made pivoting to an ugly business model the only way to keep a company going, I shut that company down—even when I wasn’t sure what I would do next.
After shutting down enough of my companies to convince me that maybe “business” wasn’t my strength, what I did next, in 2019, was to join Automattic, Inc.—the people behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Simplenote, Tumblr, and other web-based empowerment tools.
It’s nothing like the places where I used to work.
We believe in Open Source. Follow a Creed. Instead of laddishness, we support and even celebrate difference. One way that support flows is through Employee Resource Groups, which we at Automattic call Automattician Resource Groups, or ARGs—so that’s the name I’ll use here.
ARGs are communities, formed around personal identity and situation, where colleagues connect with and support each other and work together toward common goals.
At Automattic, we have several of these ARG communities. Eventually, as the lead of Automattic’s Employer Brand activity, I plan to join them all. Initially, I joined two: Neurodiverseomattic and Queeromattic. I saw myself as an ally. In joining these two ARGs, I hoped to become wiser and kinder; to increase my ability to support, live, and work with family, friends, and colleagues; to deepen my interpersonal skills; and to grow in compassion and understanding.
I accomplished those goals, but I also gained something I hadn’t expected.
It started with Neurodiverseomattic, a group that provides support and resources for neurodivergent Automatticians (including but not limited to autism, ADHD, dyslexia) and their allies.
As the dad of an autistic daughter (who also suffers from an alphabet soup of additional diagnoses), I have the joy of loving, living with, and learning from one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever encountered. But I also have the challenge of supporting someone whose life, through no fault of her own, is often painfully difficult.
I must listen when she needs an ear. Advise when she seeks help—and occasionally when she doesn’t.
Autism, in my daughter’s case, simultaneously includes remarkable, magical, wondrous capabilities, along with painful, mostly social, disabilities.
Some Neurodiverseomattic members are neurodiverse themselves; some are neurotypical but support neurodiverse family members; many, maybe most, are neurodiverse themselves and also support neurodiverse family members.
Over months, the more I shared experiences with members of my ARG, the better I became at meeting the challenges of parenting an autistic, depressed, anxious, dyslexic, artistic, gifted, emotionally intense, profoundly insightful teenager. And the more I came to realize that other members of my family had also been on the spectrum. Like my late father. And maybe my late brother. And, in a different way, my late mom. And…
And the more Ava shared her past experiences of being bullied, misunderstood, abandoned, and confused, the more I realized that I myself had had many of the same feelings and experiences growing up that she was having.
Like Ava, I had gone through a period of crying every day at the thought of going to school. The terror of brutal bullying and the shame of not fighting back. The shock of trusted friends laughing at me, not with me, or pretending not to know me. Lubricating their rise in the social ranks by pretending to find me ridiculous. Or maybe not pretending.
Like Ava, I’d concocted strange fantasies to try to understand why these things happened to me. Had I committed some crime? Was I a mistake? Had my parents been bribing my school friends to pretend to like me, and then run out of money?
So much of what Ava experienced, I had experienced. And so, it seemed, had many of my neurodiverse colleagues who courageously shared their stories.
And, finally, reader, it sank in:
I’m not just the president of hair club for men, I’m also a customer.
I’m on the spectrum. Of course I am. And always have been. Of course. And just never, ever knew.
Once I saw it, I was amazed that I’d never realized or even wondered about it.
Once I saw it, I was grateful to work at a place where we’re afforded the kind of support that can not only help us improve our people skills, but can also introduce us, on a deeper level, to ourselves.
And meanwhile, as an ally, I also joined Queeromattic. Need I say more?
Okay, I will.
The world I grew up in was so homophobic, and the romantic films I grew up watching were so prescriptive, that I got in touch with my heterosexuality long before I reached puberty … and didn’t recognize my queer side for decades.
Not even when I made out with a boy. (Hey, I was drunk.) Or years later, when I made out with another boy. (Hey, I was drunk, and, anyway, he looked like a girl.)
My new self-knowledge is mostly academic. Divorce has freed me of certain illusions, a spiritual practice has brought a taste of inner peace, and aging has eased up on the hormonal gas pedal, so that I no longer confuse attraction for a plan, or feelings for fate. Parenting keeps me plenty busy and fulfilled, and singlehood may not be exciting, but I’ve had enough excitement for multiple lifetimes.
Romantic love is for those still willing to risk everything. I prefer to hold onto what I have left. Because I know it’s a hell of a lot.
Thanks to the wisdom, vulnerability, truthfulness, and compassion of the friends I’ve made through my company’s ARGs, I have come to better know myself. It gives me pride, no pun intended. It even grants me serenity. And for that, I am grateful.
Illustration by Ava Zeldman. This article also appears on Medium.
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When he was eight years old, my dad taught himself to take apart watches and put them back together. He supported his mother by doing watch repairs at that age out of her little jewelry stand, and a few years later by delivering clothes for a Chinese laundry.
As a laundry delivery boy, he earned no salary—he lived off tips. Emanuel Romano, a starving modern painter and customer of the laundry service, could not afford to tip Murray, but in lieu of cash, he offered to teach the boy how to paint. My father accepted the lessons and painted for most of the rest of his life. (Our home in Pittsburgh would one day be filled with Murray’s paintings. All would be lost in the flood that later destroyed his home.)
In his early years, Murray couldn’t read. He was probably autistic and dyslexic, but nobody back then knew from that. And a public school in Queens in the 1930s was certainly not going to have the resources to help a child with those issues. When beating him didn’t improve his skills, the school labeled him “sub-normal” and stuck him in Special Ed. He would likely have remained there and become a janitor, or a grifter like his father (my grandfather). But one remarkable public school teacher spotted Murray’s gifts. “This boy is brilliant,” he said.
That changed everything.
(Everything except my grandfather, from whom my dad got nothing but violence and psychological cruelty. When Murray was one of two kids from his neighborhood to be accepted into Bronx Science—a rigorously academic public high school specializing in engineering, mathematics, and the sciences—his father said simply, “They’ve made a mistake.”)
Murray enlisted in the Navy at 17 to fight the Nazis, but they surrendered before he reached Germany. The navy then shipped him off to Japan, but the atomic bomb got there first.
On returning after the war, he attended CUNY on the G.I. Bill, studying electrical engineering. He eventually took his Masters—not bad for a slum kid from a poor family. He would go on to work in robotics, fluid hydraulics, and even early typesetting computers. He came the director of a Research & Development laboratory in Pittsburgh, and afterwards, spent 25 years working for himself as an author, consultant, and lecturer.
Below is his biography from twenty years ago. At the time, he was still vigorous, still flying all over the world as a consultant and lecturer. If you wish, you may skip down to the bottom, where I tell what became of him.
Maurice Zeldman, President
A world authority in the field of project management, Mr. Zeldman has consulted and led seminars for over 180 client organizations. His in-company and public seminars have been presented around the world. Advanced project managers use his special techniques to create realistic estimates, time frames, and implementations which enable the completion of these development projects on schedule and within budgets.
Before launching his EMZEE Associates consultancy, Mr. Zeldman served with Rockwell International as the Corporate Director of Technical Development for the Industrial & Marine Divisions. Responsible for all of the division’s new product and process development projects, he designed, built, and staffed an Engineering Development Center for the corporation.
Previously Mr. Zeldman served with Perkin Elmer in the development of an Atomic Absorption Spectrometer, and with American Machine & Foundry as Chief Engineer of the Versatran Robot business venture.
He is the author of “Keeping Technical Projects on Target” and “Robotics: What Every Engineer Should Know.” (Book links at Amazon.)
My mother died in 2000 after seven years with Alzheimer’s.
My father remarried the next year.
His second wife divorced him when he came down with dementia at age 91.
He was also experiencing seizures. While he was hospitalized for one of them, his house flooded, and everything he owned was destroyed.
My brother Pete found our father a clean, decent nursing home to live in.
There, his dementia progressed quickly.
The last time he saw me with my daughter, he mistook her for my wife and asked how we two had met.
He accused the nursing home staff of soiling his underwear while he slept.
He often sneaked out of the facility to buy scissors, which he smuggled back into the home. (Scissors were contraband because the home feared that their demented patients would use the blades to harm themselves. He had no practical use for the scissors, but was incensed at being told he could not have them.)
During the first year of the Covid pandemic, he contracted pneumonia.
He died at age 93 while in palliative care. He was alone.
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We laid my brother Pete to rest today. They brought him out in a bespoke coffin his wife Cheryl designed. It had a red top, and its white sides were covered in Pete’s quirky figure drawings. He’d have loved it.
Several of us had written about Pete, and the officiant read our statements to the assembly. Our words were sweet and funny and loving and not at all conventional. (How could they be? The man was anything but.)
Then Pete’s friend Andy Davy delivered the eulogy. It was not about the musician’s musician or the beloved music teacher but the private man: his warmth, his intelligence, the intensity of his friendship.
Cheryl wrote the final tribute. It was the saddest and most beautiful of all. The officiant read it to us so Cheryl would not have to speak.
Then, as the auditorium loudspeakers played—what else?—a Pete Zeldman drum solo, the curtains closed on the lonely little red-topped coffin, and the people rose and filed slowly away.
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When my mother was pregnant with my younger brother Pete, my father took her to see West Side Story in New York. My mom said every time the orchestra played, Pete kicked in her womb, keeping perfect time. Some people are born to play the drums. Pete played before he was born. He never stopped.
He loved music and courted danger. At age two, one day, he took my father’s LPs out of the record cabinet, spread them on the floor, and walked on them. When my father came home, he spanked Pete. The next day, Pete did the same thing again. And again, my father punished him. Every day it was the same. One day my mother tried to intervene as my brother was just starting to lay out a fresh pile of LPs. “Peter,” she said. “Do you want Daddy to spank you?” My brother shivered in fear. And continued to spread the records on the floor. Finally, my father put a combination lock on his record cabinet. My brother picked the lock.
Pete had his own ideas. Most were better than walking on Dad’s records. Many were brilliant. Some people march to their own drum. Pete marched to a whole set.
You could not stop him. He was full of life, full of energy. My idea of a great summer vacation was inhaling the musty aroma of books in an air conditioned library. But my brother was out from sunup till sundown—running around, making friends, buying candy for all the other kids in the neighborhood out of his tiny allowance. He loved other people. He paid attention to them.
I have a lifetime of stories about him. So does everyone who knew him. He was full of life, full of energy, a clock that never wound down. And now, he’s gone, leaving a Pete Zeldman shaped hole in the universe.
Goodbye, brother. I love you. I will keep your memory close. And maybe when time ends for me, too, I will see you again.
Written for Funeral Service, 31 March, 2023.
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