Perhaps he was French in a former life
Scene: a mother and son, in the car en route to school, discussing yesterday’s school art project- clay snowmen, festooned with pretzel sticks, buttons, and felt. The results were lined up in the classroom window, each looking almost exactly alike- some with different colored buttons or mufflers and a few leaning like a tower in Pisa, but each with sticks for arms and nice little faces. Except for one armless soul, completed covered in buttons on his body, and his face on the absolute top of the small top ball, rather than the front of it.
“So did everyone make their snowmen yesterday?”
“It was art center, so yah. And they made sure everyone got a turn.”
“Cool. Your guy sure stands out and looks cool! Why’d you make him like that?”
“Well his face is looking up because he knows the sun is out and is going to make him melt and disappear. And he doesn’t have to look just like a snowman or everyone else’s snowman. Lots of the art in the museum doesn’t look like what it is until you squint, remember mommy?”
“Um….ok! Right!”
“Plus I just really like buttons and wanted LOTS.”
Ennui plus greed. Jean-Paul’s sighing deeply up in the afterlife.
——-
So I’ve been talking with friends about el whole gifted thing (running theme from these conversations: duh he’s gifted, are you softpedalling it because you don’t want to be seen as thrusting him into a set of societal expectations or overburden him with expectations of your own). And I guess a lot of what’s going on is pretty visceral: I’m gifted, and wow did it just bite. And if my kid’s a goddamn freak, so am I. While I do embrace the freakishness, largely made my peace with it, etc, know damn well I am smart, blah blah blah, there’s the whole…Well. Reliving the HELL of being THE smart kid in a place not chockablock with smart kids. There were very few gifted kids in my schools in Florida, and the shit we took was immense. In high school, there was no ‘gifted’ program, only honors classes and AP stuffed with little Johnny overachievers and Susie Specials whose parents screeched that their chilluns were advanced and needed to be in these classes for college- so while I had a ‘heavy’ courseload, by my school’s standards, it was not geared towards challenging a gifted student. College was the first time I was truly totally surrounded by my geekish people, as it were, and lo, that meant major portions of the first 17 years of my life SUCKED, SUCKED ASS. Don’t get me wrong, I had friends, but not a true sense of belonging for much of the time. And in seeing how people here regard Sean, I am also seeing how they regard me, and it is not simply a matter of I am a liberal freak who wears doc martens and thus is different, it is a matter of the very core of who I am- my brain, my wit, my smarts- is like a giant friggen wall between me and 99% of the people I encounter in this damn town. By extension, that applies to Sean as well, and this is something which I pure and simple cannot make ‘better’ for my child, ‘fix’, or otherwise protect him from. He is profoundly- twice!- different, and there ain’t no changing that.
And so I see some writing on the wall, and it’s nasty, and perhaps my slightly defensive ‘he’s gifted but he’s not THAT gifted’ is trying to shield him from the inevitable beating on the playground. Because lord knows any child who walks into class and announces he is going to go count the dragons at the special exhibit at the art museum and compare them to the dragons in his dragonology book did they know the Chinese lung dragon can be told apart from the In-do-nes-ian because the Chinese ones have more toes? is going to be set upon Lord of the Flies style ANY DAY NOW.
You wrote:
>it is a matter of the very core
>of who I am- my brain, my wit, my
>smarts- is like a giant friggen
>wall between me and 99% of the
>people I encounter in this damn
>town.
Yeah, the Lord of the Flies may come a-knocking. If Sean has an advantage, though, it’s his friendliness. If he has emotional intelligence and can be taught to use it, it’ll be the best offense (er, defense) against the otherwise inevitable feeling of being different and singled out.
Just don’t buy him Doc Martens (yet).
I get the sense that your kid has a slightly twisted sense of humor (gee, I wonder where that came from) from his snowman explanation. I think that’s awesome.
I used to do my art projects “wrong” because I’d get fits of the sillies that would result in six-legged clothespin sheep with eyes on both ends or a yellow-purple-and-green valentine box decorated with pipe-cleaner worms and oragami spiders. I usually got less-than-optimal grades on account of my goofing off, but I sure had fun while doing it.
The fact that he’s riffing off his art assignments makes me think, “right on, kid!”
[...] One of my friends recently wrote about her son’s creative endeavors at pre-school. He’s an imaginative and mischievous child who definitely does things his own way, and he [...]
I was also a gifted kid that was tortured throughout my public school career. That’s why my kids never set foot in one of those places, and why my own gifted kid started community college at age 11 (the other two started at 15 and 12). She had a chance to be a kid, with other kids, but to also safely explore her world at her pace, on her terms, without peer limits. I hate what the educational system did to me, and I have no qualms about abandoning it for my own children. I say this to you because your kid’s first 17 years do NOT have to “SUCK ASS.” It sounds like you’re being a wonderful advocate for Sean… good luck navigating these parenting waters, and don’t let ANYONE (including me!) tell you what you should do. You know your kid better than any other so-called expert… follow your intuition, you won’t be sorry!