People have been asking if there is going to be another Flamingos column.

Well, gosh, it’s only been a year since the last one —stop rushing me!  No, no, I’m just kidding.  I’ve actually written about six other ones but they were so universally depressing, I couldn’t send them out.

I guess that’s the real story right there.  It was a hard damn year.

When my older daughter Ana (now six and profoundly gifted) was about four months old, I had a dream one night.  I dreamed she was lying in her crib and singing “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” in this low, very clear voice.  Naturally, I called my mother. 

“Do you think it’s normal that a four-month-old is singing Otis Redding songs?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said my mom.  “That’s perfectly normal.”

“Really?  Because, you know, she can’t talk yet.”

“I’ve heard of this before.  Perfectly normal,” said my mother and the dream phone call ended.

It didn’t take much analysis to figure out the significance of the dream.  I am the youngest of four children, so I never had a younger sibling to tortu –er --mother.  I was never even very maternal.  After a bout with cervical cancer left my fertility in question, I thought I’d never have children.  So I wasn’t paying very close attention to the children of my friends.  And then suddenly, there I was: pregnant with Ana.

Well, I immersed myself in books about children and I started paying attention to how my friends mothered their children and I joined a board at ParentSoup.com for the Mothers of March 1998 Babies so that after Ana was born, I’d have some yardstick by which to measure her progress. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because it occurred to me that one thing I’m really missing as I enter this world of giftedness, is a way to measure Ana’s progress.  I mean first I found that I couldn’t really talk about Ana’s gifts except with a very small, very discreet group of people whom I absolutely trusted.  But then even within the group of individuals who have gifted children, there are no children like Ana.  There is no ParentSoup Board for Mothers of Profoundly Gifted, Introverted, Six-year-olds Who Read on an Eighth Grade Level, Love Gilbert and Sullivan, and Still Suck Their Thumbs.  (Darn short-sighted of ParentSoup, actually.)

And yet, Ana actually fared the best of all of us in her Kindergarten year.  It was a pretty remarkable evolution from a kid who couldn’t eat the first two weeks of school, who was deathly afraid of getting into trouble, and who cried every morning, to this bossy, happy, outgoing girl with a snaggle-toothed smile and a new wealth of confidence and knowledge.  She was so lucky to have found in her first teacher an educator who really understood her sensitivities and initial shyness and who fostered filling Ana’s big brain with information as she was ready for it.  Frankly, given the disparate levels within the class and the lack of resources available to deal with the number of problem kids, I can’t even imagine how Ms. Walks on Water, as we like to call her, managed to tune into my quiet girl at all.  But she did and the result is this bubbly and excited little girl who told me recently that I “spoil all the fun.”  (Ms. Walks on Water was recognized by both our school and the entire school district as Teacher of the Year.  I think they should name a school after her and give her a car, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for me, I wrote the first Flamingos column and then I went straight into denial.  I didn’t want to write this column and I didn’t want to be the mother of a gifted kid and I didn’t want to ever have to seriously think about home schooling and I didn’t want to disagree with my husband about the best approach for dealing with our kids’ educations.  And I sure as heck didn’t want to try to sort out where my childhood issues were getting in the way of objectively finding solutions for Ana’s education.

Because for me, coming to the realization that Ana is gifted led me to a whole process of examining my own somewhat starved childhood as a gifted child.  I just kind of…forgot I was an asynchronous child in an environment that depended on conformity.  I think until I came to terms with my own giftedness, I couldn't really move on with …well, anything.  It was like working through the stages of grief or something --I even found myself really angry at my mother for having failed to provide a better educational environment for me.  (It wasn't her fault but I had to get really angry at someone to let go of my pain over spending twelve years of my life in classrooms with people who didn't speak my same language.) I was so appalled to find myself angry at my mother over things that happened thirty years ago that I drank a lot of wine and then dried out and saw my doctor for anti-depressants, which turned out to be the best help. 

Although the school year ended up being a very positive experience for Ana, it took a lot of work on everyone's part. I began to realize that there is simply no good solution for kids like Ana, unless it would be to have a school in which the student-teacher ratio was 1:1.  Home schooling?  No, we need to have lots of asynchronous kids all learning at the same time and at different paces so Ana would get the social interaction she needs.  Plus, she doesn't respond particularly well to me in the role of teacher and my husband is very opposed to the idea.  Grade skipping?  Well, I'd need to skip her into something like the 8th grade and she can't even tie her shoes yet.  Private school?  Same problems as public only more expensive and a lot more homework.  Status quo?  Well, then I bet when she's about to turn forty, she'll be completely angry at me for having kept her for twelve years in classrooms where she doesn't speak the same language as the rest of the children.

So, then factor in the guilt I feel that my younger daughter, Jane (3), isn't getting as much one-on-one attention as Ana got at the same age, and the war and the current political situation, and the inhumanity of people to each other, and the fact that I am about to turn forty and feeling really dumpy, and that I can’t even seem to keep up with the housework and you can see why it’s been a while since the last Flamingos column.

I’m over it, though.  Because, while this whole giftedness thing is really, really hard, it sure beats the alternative.  Plus, I have finally realized that Ana will have a totally different experience as a gifted child than I did because we’re in this together.  In fact, not only are Ana and I in this together, but we’re ALL in this together and we have to STICK together if things really are going to be different for our kids.

I guess this is my way of saying that it won’t be another whole year before the NEXT Flamingos column.