A Rare Sighting

In the world of bird watching, there are many lists to keep. I know this because my mother is a big birder. BIG. She keeps a list of the birds she’s seen in a calendar year and then she keeps a “Life List” –a list of all of the birds she’s ever seen, organized in chronological order and dating back to 1990 when she started it.

This summer, I started a Life List of my own, of sorts.

This summer, I met a new friend for the first time in person. Her name is Kim and up to our meeting, I’d only spoken with her via e-mail, and once on the telephone. Our friendship came out of one of the hardest times in my life.

I am a writer and for the past three years, I’ve written a parenting column for a small private e-mail list. A few months ago, I sent a column to my regular readers about what I was learning in navigating the educational system for my daughter Ana, now five-years-old and, I suspect, profoundly gifted. I said that I felt like a nice placid cow who had suddenly given birth to a flamingo –and I don’t know anything about flamingos. So, I’d been gathering as much information as I could and had been really immersed in the whole issue of giftedness. I had reached a decision about Ana’s schooling and wanted to reassure my readers that if they were struggling with similar issues with regard to their own children, they needn’t recreate the wheel. I thought my readers might be interested in what I was learning about the issue of asynchronous development.

In what came to be something of a baptism by fire, I learned that speaking of one’s gifted children is somewhere below speaking of one’s penchant for pedophilia on the Acceptable Topics List. You can talk about your kids’ limitations, and you can talk about their athletic prowess, but you cannot, and I mean cannot, talk about your children’s intellectual gifts.

Well, I didn’t know that.

And, although I heard from only a small group of people who were offended by my column, because my intentions were good and many of my readers had been with me for years, I felt broad sided. I spent endless hours explaining myself via e-mail. I issued an apology.

And then the most amazing thing happened.

I sent my column to Kim and then I sent my apology to her and she responded to both but at the very end of her note about the apology, she said, “I cried when I read this.” And then she circled the wagons, by God. She introduced me to a vast network of supporters and after my column and apology were published on the http://www.hoagiesgifted.org web site, I heard from more than two hundred people who had been through similar experiences. Who wrote to tell me there was no need to apologize. Who wrote to console me. Who wrote to tell me, “welcome to your life.” I found out that there were many people who understood just what I was going through and/or had gone through something similar. It was like the last scene of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t sent my column to Kim. She introduced me to the smartest and most compassionate group of people I’ve ever known. People who believed me when I talked about my girls. People who embraced me and stood in outrage of the attack upon me. It fed my soul and frankly, my soul needed feeding.

So, then Kim and I decided to meet in person. I was so nervous -- I changed clothes three times. I took my two-year-old (Jane) as an ambassador. We showed up to the playground where we were to meet Kim fully fifteen minutes early and I chased Jane around a bit and then I caught sight of a figure crossing the field to where we sat.

And it was just the most miraculous, ordinary moment. She looked just like me. She talked just like me. I was a bit intimidated by her intelligence via e-mail but she didn’t come brandishing her slide rule or anything. She didn’t insist that I prove my legitimacy by demanding that my children do things only gifted kids do –like reciting Latin or square roots or something. In fact, as Jane stood there, picking her nose for about, oh, ten minutes, Kim did what I would have done: she made a joke.

At some point I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d met someone with whom I could be exactly myself. Just myself --not any of those other personas I’ve developed to try to camouflage my basic oddness. I told her when I said goodbye, “You know, it’s been just wonderful meeting you. It’s like I stopped holding my stomach in or something.”

Suffice to say that meeting Kim was a turning point in my life. It’s like I suddenly stopped apologizing for my own asynchronous self in this world. I don’t feel so alone or so naked or so acutely shy and I am not ever going to apologize for my incredible, fabulous and gifted children ever again. I am just going to be a little more careful with whom I discuss their gifts.

And actually, I learned so much through the experience that I have come to believe that a few of my initial conclusions were wrong, anyway. Which brings me to the point of this column: I want to share what I’m learning. A lot of the people who wrote to me told of horrendous experiences they had when trying to meet their children’s educational and emotional needs. Kim herself told me that her oldest son was “brutalized” in public school. A common refrain was: I wish I had known then what I know now.

I am beginning this new column, Flamingos, for those parents. The column will be much like my more mainstream writings (http://www.sothethingis.com) so it will occasionally be funny and occasionally it will be sad but it will always be an honest and personal chronicle of how I am trying to meet the needs of my children. In the next few months, we’re going to take a trip to Denver to the Gifted Development Center to have Ana assessed and then in August, Ana will start Kindergarten and we’ll begin our big experiment in public school.

Like most writers, I always hope that something I write might make a difference in someone else’s life—even if it’s only a brief smile. I begin this new venture with a dream that out of it, we can create a community of giftedness that celebrates our kids and ourselves and isn’t quite so underground. That we can fill up our Life Lists with people who really care about us and with whom we never have to hold in our stomachs. That we can meet them in person and know that we are among friends –for some of us, for the first time ever.

And so that all together we can create a sanctuary where our fragile, exotic, little flamingos can grow and thrive out in the open, but away from those who would deny them that basic right. Which seems like a dream as big as the whole world but now that I think about it, it’s not really asking so very much.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to this free e-mail newsletter, send e-mail to bjm@jump.net. (Your address will not be used for any other purpose.) If you would like to forward this column on, please do so in its entirety. Feedback welcome.

Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (5) and Hurricane Jane (2.5). She lives in Austin, Texas and other than watching the birds in her own household, is not a birder.

[Flamingos]