How's That, Again?

I excerpted this essay for one I previously posted, about my feelings on education. I think the idea is more completely expressed here in the original, along with a few others. I also think that my kids hate it when I talk about them, but hey, they occupy more of my time and attention than anyone else does.
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I'd expected my kids to occasionally drive me crazy. I did not, however, expect them to do it in the ways that they do.

I'd watched kids and parents while I was growing up. I thought I had a pretty clear picture of all the things kids can do that will aggravate adults. I prepared my possible responses to many, many imagined scenarios long before I ever had children. I added many more while I had my first infant in the house. So, naturally, my children rarely did anything I'd prepared for.

When Lana, my oldest, was sitting up but not crawling, we'd sit her on the floor and hand her toys to amuse herself with. If they rolled out of her reach, she'd watch them go, reach out towards them once, discover they were out of her reach, and give up. She'd sit there, perfectly content to just look around, until we picked her up again, no matter how long that might be. She would not try to get the toys, and really didn't care that they'd gone. Other moms would watch this and be thrilled. "When my Joey's toys roll away, he screams until I bring them back! You're so lucky to have such a contented baby. You can actually get things done!" I'd smile, and agree that yes, she was very happy, and inwardly think, come on, girl! Go get it! Get angry! Tip over lunging! Something that makes sense and shows some drive! But no. She'd sit and smile.

Maybe if I place them just outside her reach, I thought, she'll want to go get them. No dice. In that case, she seemed to think they were scenery, visual stimulation like the mobile over her crib, for looking at only. Even when she started scooting and crawling, if I put a toy even an inch beyond her grasp, even if it was a favorite toy, she seemed sure it was there just to look at. She made no attempt to go get it.

I found myself thinking, will she always give up if she has to expend the tiniest effort? Will she ever want to work for anything? Will she spend her life totally complaisant?

I'd heard that I should expect broken sleep up until, or even through, the elementary school years. So, of course, all four of my children slept through the night when they were tiny. Two started sleeping through the night at about six weeks old. Terry no longer wanted fed at night after about six weeks, but she interfered with my sleep the most anyway.

She was only happy lying on her tummy. She was less than a day old when we discovered that any other position produced loud wails. Terry never whimpered or fussed. She went straight from content to red faced shrieking and back. If I laid her on her tummy, she'd almost instantly fall asleep. Lay her on her sides or back, and she'd wail like a Banshee. So OK; on the tummy it was. This was long before this sleeping position was considered a risk factor for SIDS and health care professionals started the "Back to Sleep" campaign. Even if it had been later, I still would have lain her on her tummy. When a kid has feelings that strongly held from the moment of birth, trying to change it will just make you both crazy.

She learned to roll from her tummy to her back at six weeks old. The trouble with this is obvious – she hated being on her back. During the day, when she was on a blanket on the floor, we could fix that rather easily. At night, it was a royal pain. Terry couldn't resist rolling over, but it took her a split second to go from, "Hey, look what I can do!" to, "I hate this! Fix it NOW!" We'd be awakened by a loud, angry shriek degenerating into a howl, go roll her over, and soon be awakened by another loud, angry shriek and howling. We took to measures that virtually amounted to bedding bondage. We'd try to tuck her covers in so tightly that she was virtually flattened on her tummy. It didn't work. She'd wiggle and squirm until she could flip over, then remember how much she hated being on her back. It was misery for all of us until she learned to roll herself from her back to her tummy again.

I soon realized that it is a universal truth, one of the certainties of the universe, that your children will do things that baffle you, things you never prepared for, things you never even contemplated the existence of.

When I was a kid, I was always baffled by adult response to my schoolwork. They would virtually swoon, and I never understood it. We'd be handed a paragraph to read about Johnny picking apples on his uncle's farm, and then we'd have to answer questions about the paragraph. I could not figure out what the point of the questions was. Why in the world would you be asked, "Where did Johnny go?" when the reading assignment started with the sentence, "Johnny went to his uncle's farm last weekend"? I finally decided it was a simple check to see if you read the assignment. Otherwise, you could say you did, and skip the whole thing. So, I obligingly answered the questions, amazed that the teachers would make them so obvious. It was even more obvious when you had a multiple choice option, as was usually the case. Even if you didn't read the assignment, if your choices were: "a. his uncle's farm, b. his father's office, and c. the grocery store," all you had to do was skim the assignment and see which words appeared. I decided there was just no accounting for adults and the odd things they did. I found it even odder when they would be so effusive in their praise for my work. We'd been handed a paper with the answers right there on it! It's not as if I had psychically divined the answers from a closed book across the room. So, I accepted the praise with the same attitude that I did the work – there's no accounting for adults.

Terry and Alex, my two middle children, had very similar reactions. They just did the work, without bothering to have existential angst about it. Lana and Hallie, my oldest and my youngest, were not content with the obvious answers, but their discontent took very different forms.

Lana, with a tendency to be anxiety ridden anyway, was sure that any seemingly obvious question was a trick. Ask what color the sky was, and the answer couldn't possibly be, "blue." It MUST be, she reasoned, some deeply complex, obscure answer that she, in her ignorance, would NEVER be able to figure out. The simpler the question, the more she would agonize and tie herself in knots. If she finally gave up and chose the simple answer, she was not reassured to find out that she'd gotten it right. She felt that getting it right was an unrepeatable fluke, or maybe carelessness on the teacher's part.

A large part of this attitude stemmed from the attitude of the children around her. Many of them would be complaining about how hard the work was. Instead of being happy that it wasn't hard for her, she was sure that it only seemed easy because she was doing it all wrong. Lana always wanted to fit in, and to her fitting in meant being just like the other kids. She hated anything that made her even a little different. So, if someone else said it was hard, well then, it was really hard, and if Lana didn't think so, she reasoned that she had to be the one that was wrong.

We told her, and her teachers told her, over and over and over again, that she was smarter than most of the other kids. She could not figure out how in the world anyone could think so. Being smart would make her stand out, something she really did not want. Besides, the smart kids always seemed so sure of themselves, and Lana was never sure of herself. Therefore, she thought, there's no way she could be smart. She had also decided, maddeningly, that all the pretty, popular girls were stupid, and if she wanted to be pretty and popular – and she did – she had to be stupid as well.

I cannot tell you how many times we would have virtually identical conversations with her. If she had the assignment about Johnny and the farm, and she was asked, "Who went to visit the farm?" she would hem and haw to the point of tears. We would tell her that the answer was in the reading assignment. We would ask her to read it out loud. Still, she would insist that there was no possible way to know who went. Finally, she would shout in frustration, "All I know is Johnny!" And we would tell her, "That's all you know because that's all there is TO know. That's THE ANSWER." She would look stunned, every time. Math, reading, science, even art would have her going round and round and then insisting, "All I know is…" And we'd say, ad infinitum, "All you know is THE ANSWER." And she'd be stunned, again. It was so exhausting.

It took until she was a junior in high school before Lana started to accept that really, she was bright and capable. She'd been in honors and accelerated programs for years by that time, and was still sure she was dumb as a fencepost. When it finally dawned on her that, "Hey, I can easily do things other people can't do," her reaction was, "Well, why can't they?" It still made no sense to her that she was different. But at least, praise God, she understood that she was bright. There are few things more infuriating than a child with a genius IQ who's convinced that she's dim.

Dealing with Hallie is exhausting in an entirely different way. She doesn't think she's stupid or that the work's too hard - on the contrary, she knows that most of it is easy. That's what throws her.

If she was given the assignment about Johnny visiting his grandparents and then asked, "Where did Johnny go?" she was likely to answer, "Swimming." At first glance, that kind of answer makes it seem that she was hopelessly lost. Ask her to explain it, however, and you were likely to get an extensive answer. "Well, it says that Johnny went to his uncle's farm and he helped feed all the animals and pick the corn, and after he did that I think he'd be hot and tired, and it said that there was a pond for the ducks, so I think Johnny went swimming in the duck pond because he was hot and tired." Obviously, this is a child who not only understood the material, but has taken her understanding farther than necessary. Still, the answer "swimming" will be marked wrong on any standardized test – indeed, on virtually any assignment.

Give her the multiple choice questions for the same reading assignment, and she's likely to choose, "the grocery store." Again, this will be marked wrong every time, but she'll have a logical reason for her choice. "Well, they picked all that corn, so they're probably going to have it for dinner, but you can't have just corn for dinner, so I think they went to the store to buy the rest of their dinner." She's internalized the story and fleshed out the details. Yet, her answer will still be marked wrong.

We have explained until we are blue in the face that the answers to the questions will always be in the reading assignment itself. She is sure that we are wrong about this. She cannot imagine a universe in which she is supposed to parrot back what she's just been told. She is positive that she's supposed to imagine what happens next – or happened before, or happened behind the scenes. Anything else seems ridiculous to her. Why ask the obvious?

So, now I'm faced with extreme frustration on two fronts: 1. No matter how many times I explain the expectations, my daughter ignores me, and 2. I am being forced to squash my daughter's bright and creative mind so that she'll fit into the mold society has deemed appropriate. It's absolutely maddening.

Math is even more of a headache for a creative child. Just because 2+4=6 last week, today maybe 2+4=11. Tables across the top of the page may or may not apply to the questions underneath, in her mind. My head starts to hurt after I explain for the 10,000th time that the answer will be found in the information you've already been given. Hallie's head starts to hurt as she tries to imagine a world in which she's not supposed to go above and beyond what's in front of her. Explain that the questions are to gauge what she's learning, and she questions how simply giving back the information you already have shows "learning." She can't imagine that repeating back is "learning" of any kind. And she's only eight, so we'll be having these conversations for years, I'm sure.

When she was in first grade, her teacher told us, "I've never seen a child more suited to the gifted and talented program. You really need to get her tested next year, when she'll be eligible. It's so wonderful for the other children to hear how her mind works." That's lovely to hear, really, but it won't stop her answers from being marked wrong on virtually any assignment.