They seemed like the perfect family with their attractive faces and athletic frames, and whenever we caught a glimpse of them, which was quite often, they were almost always flashing sparkling Chiclet teeth for the ubiquitous cameras. Those cameras were everywhere, because the father of the family happened to be an ace pitcher for the Red Sox, and Boston worships its baseball.

But if Curt Schilling had allowed us a peek behind the family's curtains, here is what we would have heard: yelling, sometimes deafening yelling, and harsh words that led to tears. We would have seen a family in crisis, uncommunicative and unsure of where to turn.

It's understandable why appearances were so deceiving in the Schilling household. We never really know what happens with other folks -- whether they're public figures or private citizens -- beyond closed doors. Everyone has stories to tell and secrets to keep, but the Schillings' saga touches tens of thousands who might not follow baseball, or care that a bloody sock can have such mystical meaning.

Their tale centers around a young boy named Grant. He was the third of the Schillings' four children, born in 1999, and for a long time Curt and Shonda thought he was just a bright but willful kid who had trouble interacting and understanding simple requests. It was years before the Schillings learned the nature of Grant's idiosyncrasies and behavioral problems: at age 7, he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism.

Shonda Schilling has written a brutally honest, warts-and-all book --"The Best Kind of Different"--about Grant's journey with Asperger's. More than that, it's about her battle to keep the family from falling apart while Curt was on the road, an often absent father forced by his occupation to parent via the phone. Curt writes the introduction, but the rest of the book flows with Shonda's touching anecdotes and raw portrayal of a family coming undone.



Share The pitcher who helped the Red Sox snap an 86-year-old jinx by winning a World Series in 2004 and another three years later doesn't get an easy pass in his wife's book. There was a moment during the magical summer of 2007 that encapsulates Shonda's struggle. She was attempting to get the kids off to day camp but Grant wouldn't brush his teeth, wouldn't get dressed, wouldn't even look her in the eye. He was maniacally obsessed with his Legos.

"I didn't get it, and I wanted to kill him. I knew that if I put my hands on him again, I'd hurt him," she writes. Sobbing, she called Curt, who again was in another city, preparing for another game. He told her, "You just have to show him who's boss. He needs to respect you." Curt's answer was always the same: Grant just needed more discipline. She hurled the phone against the wall, curled up into a corner and bawled.

"It wasn't long before we were both on meds," she writes.

Shonda is a survivor of malignant melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, and writes candidly of her attempts to ignore and hide bouts of depression. At one point the Schillings' oldest son became anorexic, and three of the children have ADHD, along with Curt, who has been on medication for decades. Baring the family's collective soul was a household decision.

"The children decided if their story helps even one kid, whether they have Asperger's or an eating disorder or whatever, it's worth making their story public," she tells FanHouse. "It's about our family and our differences, but doesn't every family have its share of issues? We aren't any different just because their father happened to be a professional athlete."

She is speaking from her daughter's softball game, and in a few days the Schillings will leave for a family vacation in Puerto Rico. With Curt now retired and a stay-at-home dad, they have slipped into an easy rhythm of typical, mundane chaos. But they also have money and access to resources that most families can't imagine. So why did it take three years for the Schillings to discover the roots of Grant's behavior?

"A couple of reasons," Shonda says. "Like so many people, I had never heard of Asperger's before. When kids get to be about 3 or 4, they do stuff without a filter. We started putting rules into play, but it took a while to learn that they weren't sinking in. It really is a process for parents to feel out why something is different, especially if they're not aware (of syndromes like Asperger's or autism)."

She discovered Asperger's is the result of peculiar wiring in the brain's frontal lobe, causing blips in the processing of social cues and making interactions difficult. Children with Asperger's can be loving and clever; they can also be extraordinary obstinate, socially clumsy and lack awareness of what others are thinking or feeling.

Shonda writes about the guilt she bears for "having missed the clues for so long and (treating Grant) harshly under the assumption that he was simply disrespectful of me. I will probably wrestle with that for the rest of my life. I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself."

(Click here for exclusive video from the Schilling family.)

Curt is more practical, drawing on an athlete's instinct to let go of the past, but he admits to feeling "immense guilt. Everything would have been different given what I know now," he tells me. "For a long time the solution for me was to be firmer, stricter, tougher -- the exact opposite of the approach you should take with a child with autism or Asperger's.

"I was all about the male psyche and coming from a place where the dad is the authority figure. I grew up in a house with a strong male figure, and I thought my son could be raised the way I was raised," he says. "When we finally got the diagnosis I flashed back to everything I had done physical. I spanked my kids less than 10 times combined in their lives, but I thought of all the yelling and the timeouts. In one fell swoop I realized Grant never intended to be disrespectful. It was just gut wrenching.

"It's still a challenge for me," Curt says. "It was an incredibly trying time in my relationship with Grant and it still is because he's so smart and normal. There's nothing visibly wrong with him. A lot of it comes across as immaturity and disrespect, but you dig deeper and find out it's neurological, the way a child with Asperger's brain is wired."

Married in 1992 in the Maryland church Shonda began attending in second grade, the Schillings made a pact that no matter how bad things got, neither one could ever leave. But in the years before Grant's diagnosis, when Curt couldn't stop yelling and Shonda felt like a resentful, lost single parent, their relationship bottomed out. She'd find herself sobbing in the aisles of suburban Boston grocery stores -- the frozen food section was a favorite haven -- praying people didn't notice that Curt Schilling's wife was having a nervous breakdown. At the ballpark, she'd smile through the pain and hope the fans bought into the illusion that the Schillings were the perfect family. After all, didn't they have everything? She didn't want to seem ungrateful.

"At some point after (our) arrival in Boston, I made a conscious decision to avoid situations where Grant and I would be walking around in public, " she writes. "In addition to his safety I was also concerned about making a scene. If I yelled at him, I called attention to myself and to him, and with the increased scrutiny of our family that came along with Curt's playing in Boston there was nothing I dreaded more than calling attention to ourselves."

Kids with Asperger's often dislike trying anything new. Grant was shuffled between Little League teams, preferring to dig in the dirt rather than catch a ball. Shonda writes: "One time an exasperated coach said about Grant, 'His father's a major league baseball player and he doesn't even know how to hold a glove?!'

"There was a difficult truth that I wasn't admitting to myself: I often felt embarrassed by Grant. That led to feeling shamed and guilty about feeling embarrassed."

In the summer of 2008, their oldest child Gehrig stopped eating. "Curt blamed me for always worrying about what I looked like, and I blamed the media for always focusing so much attention on Curt's weight," she writes. Like most anorexics, Gehrig was using food as a way to exert control in his life. He began going to therapy, Curt and Shonda went to parents' therapy and couples' therapy, and slowly the family climbed out of the abyss.

Everyone in the family had to rewire their brains. "Grant is a happy kid now but there are still challenges. We just know how to deal with them," Shonda says. He thrives best in structured environments, his days made easier with charts and schedules and routines. Her journey is no less remarkable: Shonda has transformed from a vain, rigid, uptight woman (her words) whose identity wasn't complete until her hair was immaculate into a woman and mother who is gloriously comfortable in her own skin.

Peek behind the family's curtains these days and it's amazing what you won't hear.

"The yelling is almost completely gone from our home," Curt says. "I'm infinitely more patient with all my kids. I'm probably the only one who yells to a degree and I'm trying to manage that because it doesn't work. Children with Asperger's are so sensory motivated, the worst thing you can do is yell and scream because they shut down. Grant can still have his bad moments like most kids, but as a father my relationship with my son is on a completely different level now."

The other day someone sent Shonda a story about Clay Marzo, a professional surfer who also happens to have Asperger's. He might be a future world champion not in spite of the syndrome but because of it. Asperger's allows him to hyperfocus on specific tasks; his uber energy levels enable him to handle more surf sessions than the average rider.

"And he's with the hottest girl I've ever seen in my life," Shonda says with a laugh. "It was a joy to see."