The Jacob Factor

Moving My Son to Southeast Florida

Blog # 17

Everything about my decision to move to South Florida felt great, and I was happy with the place I had picked for my new home, the friends I was making, and the choices I had made — except for one thing. I was conflicted about being far away from my kids. But I had picked Florida because it was just a little over a 2-hour plane ride away from them in Northern Virginia, instead of some place like California that would take hours to visit them, or to fly them here.

When I first left Virginia, my oldest, Jacob, had recently graduated from George Mason University, my middle kid, Lucas, had more college to go, and my youngest, Rachel, had just graduated from high school. I had hoped to get her into a university in Florida, but she ended up being accepted, at the 11th hour, to Virginia Tech, her top choice. Lucas would be a senior there, and she ended up joining him there in Blacksburg, VA. So my two youngest would be away at college after I moved, and the oldest would be starting his career.

Once in Florida, although I loved and missed all three of my kids equally, Jacob was the one whom I worried about the most. I planned to see these kids (actually young adults) as much as possible, flying them down here on their breaks and vacations and heading back to visit them as well. But I made a concerted effort to FaceTime Jacob every weekend and to check in on him.

Born six weeks premature in October 1996 (and just 3 lbs, 11 oz.), Jacob has always been my special child, who needed a little more time and attention from me, which I was more than happy to give. A sweet, shy little boy, he was diagnosed with selective mutism soon after his brother was born when he was 2½; he was suspected to have attention deficit disorder when he was in first grade; and social difficulties continued to go hand in hand with his attention issues, finally resulting in some outside testing and a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome when he was in fifth grade.

Along the way, we tried a few different ADD meds, I took him for a variety of therapies, he got an individualized education plan at school, and from middle through the end of high school, he had “team-taught” classes in the subjects he had the most trouble with.

Like most kids who are at the top of the autism spectrum, he was highly intelligent, and his teachers saw that. Math and science and music were his gifts. Writing, public speaking, and physical activities — especially sports and even bike riding — were not his thing. It was hard for him to make and maintain friendships. He often was behind his peers in maturity and development. But I worked with his strengths, had him try a lot of different activities, and encouraged him to work on socializing and doing things with friends.

But Jacob always had a tougher time navigating through life. Although he performed in musicals at a performing arts academy and throughout middle and high school, he taught himself how to play piano on his electric keyboard, and he excelled at the violin from elementary school through college, everything social was still quite an effort for him.

At GMU, where he was a commuter student, he joined the “Green Machine,” an acclaimed college pep band that had a strings section, which he enjoying being a part of with his beloved violin. But he did not feel comfortable socializing with the other band members after they played at basketball games and other events. They’d all go out afterward, and he’d come straight home, which often saddened me. Every semester at GMU, I encouraged him to join one new club or activity, but nothing really stuck, and he preferred to go home after his classes and play video games, watch his favorite TV series, or do homework.

After five years, Jacob graduated in May 2020 with a BS in computer science, and I couldn’t be prouder of the progress he had made. He had completed a computer software internship the past summer, and he got good grades in his computer classes and earned a few Dean’s List spots. He loved internet coding. And for the past several months, he had been waiting to hear about the results of a background check for a federal security clearance that he needed for a position he was up for. Once he passed that and took a polygraph test, he was expecting a job offer in computer software/engineering from a DC-based government-contracting company.

However, because of the COVID pandemic and maybe government incompetence (this was during the Trump administration!), the background-check process was taking longer than the 9 months that we expected. And there was still the polygraph to be scheduled after that. In the weeks before and after his graduation, Jacob contacted the company sponsoring him for the security clearance, to inquire about his progress, but he seemed no closer to getting the job offer. They needed the government’s process to be completed before offering him a position, and that was dragging on.

Although I had helped him with that whole clearance application process (pages and pages of online forms to fill out and personal references to acquire from all walks of life), and I had hoped he would get the job, I also really wanted Jacob to live near me in Florida. So I signed him up for online notices for tech job openings in the Fort Lauderdale area, where he could be within short driving distance of me. He also got himself on many job boards for DC-area positions.

And then we waited for whatever leads would come in first. While Jacob applied for jobs and did a few online interviews, he continued with the pet-sitting business that he had been doing for several years. He'd always had a special way with dogs and cats.

I helped him update his resume and cover letters, and hoped for the best. After a few months into the job hunt, he got an offer: to be the computer person for a small start-up company. It was totally local — he’d be working out of the basement of a home in the same town (Vienna, VA) where Jacob lived with his dad and had grown up. It was less than 2 miles from the house. Great! Everybody in the family was excited for him and hoped for the best.

The job lasted maybe a month and then it was decided, pretty much mutually, that it wasn’t a good fit for Jacob. The two men who had launched the new company and who worked around the clock to get it going had decided that Jacob wasn’t spending the same amount of time and passion on the job as they were. They expected him to work the long hours they did, and he was confused by their expectations and frustrated by their communications with him. Not a great place for a young man on the autism spectrum who wanted to please them but wasn’t sure what he needed to do there, and whether this high-stress situation was what he wanted. And for the first time in his life, I could not get involved to help him.

So Jacob left the job and went back to pet sitting. He continued to apply for more opportunities.

Eventually, and totally on his own, he got recruited by a company called Smoothstack, an “IT talent incubator,” which offered to train him on the Salesforce business software, which is used at so many companies nationwide, and then to place him in a full-time software developer job. Smoothstack would put him through an immersive 12-week training program — an intensive course with other recent computer college graduates — and then help with interview skills, studying for their certification exams, and getting placed in a full-time job. He would be paid for his time throughout the process.

Jacob signed a contract with Smoothstack and was guaranteed an IT job somewhere in the United States if he completed the program and passed his certification exams. He was willing to move wherever they sent him, which would be a huge step for him. It appeared that most of the jobs were in the D.C. area, though.

In the spring semester of 2021, at age 24, Jacob did the Salesforce course with five other young men, and it was completely online because of the pandemic. After the three-month course was over, the students started working on online presentations of what they had learned, for potential employers, along with studying for their certifications. Jacob passed the first exam but failed the second one, twice. It was frustrating, but he continued to study, and Smoothstack continued to support him, all remotely. Three of the six students in his class were offered jobs early on. Jacob kept plugging along, and his Smoothstack reps cheered him on, which was great. From Florida, I continued to check in on him and remind (nag?) him to take his medication to help him with his studying and his exams.

Finally, good news: The last three people in the class, Jacob and two others, were all offered jobs with the same company, Accenture Federal Services, based in Arlington, VA. They would be Salesforce systems engineers! Celebrations were all around when they had their next online meeting with Smoothstack. All of them were successfully placed, and the company had done what was promised.

Jacob started his new job in August 2021, and it was completely remote, except for driving over to the Accenture office for laptop pickup and to get fingerprinted for another government security clearance (this one was lower level and was processed much quicker). He would actually be an employee of Smoothstack — they would subcontract him to Accenture but issue his paychecks. His Smoothstack employment contract offered him a starting salary for one year, and then as of August 2022, he would get a substantial raise if he continued on.

This job was a much better fit for him than the last computer software job he had, and he got put on a U.S. agency contract. He likes what he does. After he had been doing it for a few months, I asked him if the job would continue to be remote, even as people were flocking back to office buildings across the nation as the pandemic receded. He said he was told it was completely remote for “the foreseeable future.” His two Salesforce classmates who were also hired did not even live in the DC area; they were in Chicago and Colorado.

So you may suspect what was going through my head at the time: If the position was to continue being remote, Jacob did not have to live in the VA/DC area. He could live anywhere and do his job, just like his two colleagues. Why, he could even live in South Florida!

For Christmas week 2021, I flew all three of my kids to my home in Florida for one week. While they were here, I worked on Jacob and showered him with all the highlights of living on this beautiful coast of Florida and being near me and my dog, a Pomeranian. He also has a Pom, and we loved having Lex and Leo together. I showed him potential apartment complexes around the area, the local beaches, and other features of the South Florida life.

After he returned home to Virginia, I continued to FaceTime Jacob every week. I told him how much I missed him and how hard it was being so far away from him and worrying about him. He still lived with his dad, who had a girlfriend he apparently spent a lot of time with, and Jacob wasn’t getting much attention from him. He had very little contact with the outside world and no friends that he did things with. Without me around to encourage him to branch out a little bit, I worried that he was just stagnating in his bedroom with his video games and not much else. And from what I heard from his siblings, that definitely appeared to be the case.

Jacob had always planned to get his own place once he was established in a good job, and it had been 5 months and so far everything was great with this position. He had a sizeable amount of savings in the bank, and I think he was really ready for his first home away from the family house he had grown up in. But I wanted to be nearby when he moved out, to make sure that the scary world of adulting would come with lots of support for Jacob. I loved him and wanted him near me. I was pretty sure nobody else would watch out for him like I would.

So after carefully cajoling him over time, and recruiting his brother and sister to campaign as well, I finally got Jacob to agree to move to Florida with his dog if I could find an apartment for him. He didn’t want to start in my guestroom and then apartment-hunt. If he was going to do it, he told me, he wanted to move straight into his new apartment from Virginia. I also made sure that he got the okay from his employer, which he did: They were fine with wherever he lived and worked from.

Then I sprung into action. I drove around to apartment complexes in my town and the surrounding area, I signed up for listings from Apartments.com and other rental sites, and I contacted some realtors who could show me condos for rent. I took photos of the units for Jacob and also FaceTimed him when I was touring so that he could see what I was looking at. Unfortunately, the prices in the southeast Florida rental market had skyrocketed after the pandemic, and the lower rental prices that I had originally tried to entice Jacob down here with, saying it was cheaper than the DC area, were not really realistic anymore.

It took me a lot of searching, and losing out on some good deals when everybody jumped at them, before I finally found a great one-bedroom unit in a nice apartment complex, Via Lugano, a few miles away from me. It would be more than his budgeted rental price. I would have to co-sign the lease and help pay a bit of the rent until Jacob’s pay raise kicked in in August, but it would work. There was even a sunny little room off the living room for his office. It was perfect!

Jacob and I both signed the lease online, and then I set out to get him some furniture so it would be move-in ready. I had left some furniture from my last apartment in the garage where he lived with his dad, knowing he would need it someday. So I arranged to have that moved down here. But he needed more things, as the unit was completely unfurnished.

As luck would have it, my 55+ community, Tuscany Bay, had a bunch of neighbors getting rid of things at the time. On offer through the Tuscany Bay Facebook page were a living room sofa, a large china cabinet, a nice wooden desk with matching chair, a recliner, and an older flat-screen TV — all offered for free. I just had to get somebody to haul it all over to the apartment. On top of that, I had a small, L-shaped sleeper sofa in my garage that would be perfect for his new study, and I found a TV stand on Facebook Marketplace.

Over two weekends, I hired guys with pickup trucks from an odd-jobs app (love that gig economy!) to go around to the various houses and pick up the furniture to take to Jacob’s new apartment and set it up for me. The bulky china cabinet was especially difficult — it was in three sections that had to be unscrewed and then put back together in his apartment. I also bought some lamps and set them up in the dark rooms.

The following weekend, a bedroom set, some other small furniture, his musical instruments, and his boxes of clothes and childhood stuff (that he would not yet get rid of) were delivered from Virginia by the cross-country moving guys, whom I met at the apartment. I got his new home set up how I thought he would like it, though of course he could rearrange it as he saw fit when he arrived. I even added a welcome mat at the front door :-).

Then his dad threw a small going-away party for him with family and friends, who were sorry to see him go. Soon after that, I flew up to D.C. for a weekend to get his loaded-up car and take it on the auto train down to Orlando. I saw my other kids and some friends for a while, but it was a whirlwind trip, and Jacob and his little dog were going to be flying down to meet me and his car in Florida. While I was traveling with his car, the family all accompanied him to Ronald Reagan Airport to see him off.

So as of March 6, 2022, Jacob has become a Florida resident. So far, he really likes his apartment, being near the beach, and having his own place for the first time in 25 years of life. Leo, his rescue dog, took a little more time to adjust to their new home, but he’s doing fine as well. They come over about three times a week to my house, where I make meals for Jacob and we watch his favorite Marvel shows and movies. We also go out to karaoke nights, where Jacob sings his heart out.

I’m proud to say that he has taken well to doing his own shopping, cooking, setting up the apartment, and paying bills, and he’s being a regular responsible adult. He has come so far.

Of course, he does things his own unique way. He filled up his china cabinet shelves with dozens and dozens of Bionicles and other creations that he built throughout his childhood. They are displayed beautifully — probably the only time that an ornate, lighted china cabinet has been used like that. I’m so happy that he can be himself, be independent, and, yet, be near me.

So now I have no regrets about living in Boynton Beach, Florida. I have Jacob nearby.

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