Thing One did a report on Diwali, the Hindu festival of light for her third grade class. Her class does a project of the month, and this time around, the prompt was "do a report on something having to do with the fall." Thing One, being Thing One, first wanted to compare and contrast Halloween with other holidays around the world, like Dia de Los Muertos and All Saints' Day. I suggested that she pick one holiday to focus on, and she ended up liking Diwali the best because of the decorations, the lights, and the story (good versus evil, which is an archetypal narrative everyone can get down with).
She will give a short presentation today and show off a poster she made. I'm nervous because of my experience at that school with other projects of this ilk. Last year, when Thing Two was in kindergarten, the class was given an assignment to make a lost poster for the gingerbread men they made. Some of those kids showed up with perfectly typed posters complete with computer rendered pictures of gingerbread men and descriptive lines no five-year old could think of ("When last seen, Mr. Bread was singing 'run, run, run as fast as you can...'"). A few of them were laminated.
No, I am not kidding.
But I really believe, seriously, that a kid should be guided, helped, but for god's sakes, you have to let her do the project herself. So Thing One's poster has too much information on one side, and is visually lopsided. And she hasn't gotten her presentation down yet, didn't memorize or make notes, but she's great at the art of verbal discourse and can riff with the best of them. And it's smart in a lot of ways, her project that is, and includes her funny sense of humor ("Henna is really cool, but it looks like weeds growing on your arms").
And, more importantly, it's her project. It's vital for her to figure out how to go through the process, think it out, figure out what she thinks she should do next time. And she's eight. She doesn't have to make it perfect.
Part of my little rant here has to do with the fact I was a child prodigy in some ways. Read at three, then went on to read C.S. Lewis at six and seven, Dickens and Vonnegut at nine and ten. I was the youngest person (at the time) to go to Cal State Sacramento. I started there when I was ten, taking a 200-level lit class through a program designed to give gifted high schoolers the opportunity to take college courses. My fifth-grade teacher argued for me to take the test, and when I aced it, they decided to make an exception for me, even though I was technically too young. I earned an A in that class. In all of them.
And I remember, distinctly, how I loved it, loved the fact I could use my brain, how I could compete at that level. I loved, too, the rush that comes from simply being good at something and finding joy in it. But all of it was an escape from a home that wasn't stable. By the time I hit middle school, I thought that if I were just smart enough, did a perfect project or presentation on my own, wrote a brilliant paper, things at home would stabilize. It was magical thinking of the kind only a child gifted enough to be in a college course, while still young enough to believe in the ability to create reality out of fantasy, could produce.
I burned out of course, and did so magnificently, once skipping two weeks of sophomore year straight until I was sent to Saturday school. I drank to excess, snuck out at all hours, found myself in corn fields throwing up in the middle of the night. I graduated from high school, barely, with a 1.9 GPA.
I don't want Thing One, or any of the Things for that matter, to grow up with the kind of problems that an early attention to perfection, or the setting of unrealistic standards, produces. As I read this over, though, I realize how this is also about me, my unrelenting drive to perfection, and how I don't meet the standards those other parents, mothers really, set. I don't do my kids' homework as a means of self-conscious self-promotion. I'm not, as Tragically Hip Single Mother puts it, like those moms who are "rail thin as though they have sacrificed some joy on the altar of self-control." I am not beautiful in that suburban way. Next to them, I don't feel beautiful at all, and it's a struggle, that feeling. I am single. I am young in comparison, barely into my 30s. It isn't that I don't want to meet these standards; it's that I don't want to want to. I want to be free of them, want to have the kid with the normal, eight-year old created poster and not feel some needling guilt, some silent, whispering demand to be better, and to exhibit that betterness through my children. Somewhere, there is still the ten year old prodigy, smart enough to dissect The Great Gatsby, reading the story over and over, but never able to see herself in it, see that Nick's tragedy is in not wanting what he already has.
*tm
Dude, I can so spell, you just totally maligned me with your "sacraficed." Dammit, tm.
Actually, I loved this entry, because I AM you--I too read before I could run. No CSUS for me, though, till I was in high school--took concurrent credit while taking stupid AP. Dude, did we live the same life? How did I miss you at the java joints? I had a 2.7 GPA (not sure how) and didn't go to college till I was 28 after dropping out spectacularly. I named my feral child after the fuckin' Great Gatsby's own love. Get out of my head; it's too spongy in here, I can't offer you a drink, and the light is atrocious.
Posted by: Inherently Cool Single Mother | October 26, 2006 at 06:09 PM
Oops, I forgot, it's not all about me. Let me add a little more, since the flame wars have not yet erupted (I'm waiting, Friend Omega; I can wait all day. Don't disappoint me. After the "David Bradley is the R. Lee Ermey of the UO", I'm your beyotch).
You are SO beautiful, you big compliment-sponge--the very idea of you thinking/saying/writing that you don't feel beautiful next to the coterie of First Name School moms--pshaw! You are brie; they are Velveeta. You are linen; they are rayon. You are a crisp organic Fuji apple; they are dinosaur-shaped fruit snacks. You are sixty shades of blue; they are dull roadwork-vest orange. (Simply because they can afford all of the former(s), and we can barely afford the latter(s, doesn't kill my analogy/ies.) Simply put, you're GORGEOUS; they are pinched and spare and tremulous.
Posted by: Self-centered Single Mother | October 26, 2006 at 07:42 PM
if it makes you feel better, ihsm, she wrote "I thought that if were just smart enough." so don't let her come at you with misspellings and grammatical issues.
i, too, was this person. overachieving with the hope of finding some stability. becoming disillusioned and disenfranchised when i learned that it did no good. it didn't make my father love me any more. it didn't make my parents stop fighting. no one cared... and what's more, my dad would use the threat of pulling me out of the gifted program whenever he wanted me to perform some banal chore, or whenever he got the urge to dislike something i'd done.
i flamed out around my junior year of high school. went through the motions. simply put, i no longer cared. i was numb. this is a terrific entry.
Posted by: Friend Omega | October 27, 2006 at 11:20 AM
Someday Omega, just once, I want to be the one to catch you on a grammar thing.
I fear that this will be an unfulfilled hope.
Posted by: Terrible Mother | October 27, 2006 at 02:52 PM
And there is something especially cruel about pointing out one's grammar and spelling errors, Omega, while that someone is saying that they are tired of being a perfectionist!
Do you know how long I was able to resist editing that typo? ABOUT 45 SECONDS!
Posted by: Terrible Mother | October 27, 2006 at 03:04 PM
look, i feel bad about it. does that help?
and i create typos and grammatical trainwrecks constantly. which is why i count on my friends to catch them, and to help me out.
if you'd rather avoid the unpleasantness altogether, that can be arranged.
Posted by: Friend Omega | October 27, 2006 at 05:03 PM