The Best Kind of Sticker Shock

I was a genius when I was a kid.

I was reading before most kids my age even knew their letters. School came easy to me; I was always ahead of everyone else, always got the best grades. Gradually my pervasive awesomeness overcame most of my native humility and I got a little arrogant about how brilliant I was – rarely (although I can't honestly say never) as an excuse to act superior to others, but sometimes as license to goof off.

Then came the day I had to go home & tell my mother I was failing reading. “How can you be failing reading?” she retorted. “All you ever DO is read.” That was a Scared Straight moment for me and after that I resumed my previous trajectory, continuing at the top of my class all the way through.

It was really when I got to graduate school that I grasped the essential truth: that I wasn’t that special intelligence-wise after all. I was blessed with the ability to pick up new ideas pretty quickly; I was always very successful in testing situations; and I was motivated to succeed and/or scared to fail. Bright “enough”, quick-witted maybe, definitely faster with a punchline than was probably healthy (in multiple senses)… but no genius. I met people in grad school who had the sheer brainpower, as well as the will, to tackle complex problems and just chip away at them until they got to the other end. That was not me; I made it through my Master’s just fine, but no one was throwing incentives at me to get me to shoot for a doctorate.

Still, as kind of a geeky kid, and then adult, who loves to use big words, has a fairly (um…) complex sense of humor, and knows a fair amount of trivia about a variety of subjects, I’m probably most comfortable around bright, educated people – not because I’m a snob, but because they tend to “get” me better. Literally, they speak my language. And I always hoped that when my kids got old enough, I could introduce them to Twain and Thurber and O’Rourke, we could discuss the intricacies of baseball analysis, then sit around exchanging all sorts of obscure wordplay.

Then our son was born, and we gradually learned that he had some intellectual and emotional challenges. Not the kind that get you a telethon or label you “handicapped”… just the kind that ensure you’re always going to start the race from the back of the pack. And while nothing we learned diminished my love for him even an iota, it did kind of make my heart sink.

Not because I was disappointed in him. Not because I couldn’t point to what an awesome success my kid was. Because I thought it meant we’d never “get” each other. The things that make me who I am, in a sense, are things that will never be a part of him at all; the things I love are largely out of reach for him.

Or so I feared. He’s 11 now, and as a semi-part-time stay-at-home dad, I spend more time with him than anyone else and I know him better than anyone else. What I’ve learned is that he loves music, just like I do. He loves a good joke – granted he doesn’t always know why it’s funny, but he often seems to be able to feel the funny even when he can’t quite spot it. He has a particular facility for a very odd trivia subspecialty: if he hears a voice on a cartoon, he’ll often point out that it’s the same actor who did a different voiceover. In fact he’s almost infallible at that and at, “Hey dad, we heard this song last year when we were going…”

I wrote before about some of his school struggles and the way he was overcoming them or at least persevering. At this point he’s classified as Special Ed, so while he spends part of his day in the general classroom, he also gets extra accommodations and small-group instruction with individual help.

I was standing at the bus stop waiting for him one day several weeks back when a car went by with one of those “my kid is an honor student” bumper stickers and I thought, you know, if my boy ever came home with one of those, I think my head would explode. A few minutes after that, he got off the bus and we walked up the street to the house, where he pulled out his backpack and said, “Hey dad, look what I got at school today…”

Turns out it wasn’t that essential after all – but it’s sure cool having one more thing in common.