June 7th, 2010
So I think something is finally becoming clear to me: It's taken years and it's taken lots of soul-searching, but I've finally unlocked a secret about myself. And it's come from a fantastic source: my daughter.
Here's what tipped me off to it: She has taken to a type of acrobatic humour lately: She'll start to fall over face first, then catch herself with a little comical noise, "whoo!" Then she'll take a look at me or her mother to see if we've noticed her little joke. She'll do it in the living room, on the stairs (which causes some concernation as you could well imagine) or even in her high chair, which may very well end with her doing a face plant from on high some day, since no matter how fast one moves, one can't always catch a miscalculating 19-month-old prankster before disaster strikes (though you should've seen the brilliant catch my wife made last night).
And what she's doing here is just exactly the same thing I used to do when I was a child—though not nearly as young as my daughter's 19 months (I'm not sure why she's so physically ahead of the curve, though I'm thrilled by it). I used to have these little normalcy-challenging physical moments too; a way of showing the world that I got the point of normal movement and gravity and what not ... but that I also appreciated the value of poking a little fun at "normal". "Whoo! I almost fell there ... whoo! I almost fell again! Whoo!" When I was a child I looked to other children and adults for confirmation that they got the joke. Of course, they didn't. I'm smarter than 99% of the rest of the population (really: testing has shown this). And most of my "little" jokes (that is, the jokes just for me) were not particularly funny to others. I'm not saying they were especially intelligent jokes, just that they appealed only to the very intelligent. It's something I've noticed in Mensa: We don't sit around making high-brow intellectuall jokes, usually, we find low-brow—but it has to be a certain brand of low-brow—funny.
Back to my daughter. I'm noticing her jokes. And I'm letting her see that I notice her jokes. I don't want her to grow up all warped and twisted into a form that made me a little bit more understandable to the rest of the world ... I want her to have an open and un-filtered forum for her to express her quirky, and obviously equally intelligent self. I want her to grow up as unfolded and uncensored as possible. (Now, if she's smarter than I am, then heaven help her—but at least I'm giving her full face and will be able to see that.)
But none of that is the discovery. Here's what is:
Raising children is not as much about the children as I thought it would be: It's just as much about learning about myself ... and in a way that gives me a second chance at the things I missed the first time around.
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