Is This Normal?

A while back, a friend sent me an email that included a video from the Today Show. It featured a seventeen-month old girl who could read. "Oh yeah, right! SURE, she can read. This outta be good!" I scoffed. But no joke, the kid was actually reading. READING! Real Words! Words that I still struggle to pronounce! I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was beyond amazing. It was freaky.

Of course, I didn't have much time to marvel over this because in the next moment I was made aware of my own boy of eighteen-months who was in the room next to me performing his own kind of wonder. Ignoring the perfectly good educational toys that surrounded him, he was repeatedly slamming the door up against the wall and laughing his head off with each thundering crash.

It was hard not to play the "Let's Compare Our Kids!" game for at least a few moments. Was my boy normal? The boy who still only refers to me as "Do-pa-ba" and whose only interest in literacy is throwing my magazines into the toilet? Meanwhile, genius girl was probably smokin' her parents at Scrabble and reading bedtime stories to herself at night. I imagined her as the designated car navigator, reading mapquest directions from her carseat. "No, Mom. It clearly says to make a left first, at the stop sign. THEN a right at the intersection." What I imagined for my own son was quite different. I pictured him as a preschool escapee wandering down long hallways, slamming doors, and giggling. Should I be worried?

My mind raced to explain away the glaring disparity between the two. I convinced myself that the girl's parents, both speech pathologists, were probably using her in some type of research experiment, testing the limits of the human brain. They subjected her to countless hours of flashcard drills, withholding snacks and naps until she got all the words right. They played subliminal messages in her room while she slept, a steady stream of sight words wafting into her ears all night long. I thought about what my cousin Sarah would say about all this, "Eh, don't sweat it. That kid'll be the next Unibomber by age fifteen." Pathetically, I consoled myself that the girl was not a happy child, probably miserable, whereas happiness seeped out of every pore of my boy's body. And wasn't that more important anyways?

But the truth is that girl's mom was just as worried as I was, only she worried about different, maybe even scarier things than me. It's funny. I've spent most of my life trying to be different, trying to set myself apart from the rest of the world. And now, as a mother? I want nothing more than for my kids to be just like everyone else, disappear into that overwhelming majority we call "normal". For some reason, it just feels like the safest place for them to be right now. Maybe, once I know for sure that they're ok, I'll feel differently. But for now, I'll spend my days worrying, praying and documenting the occasional glimpse of genius.

Link to unhappy Unibomber baby who also happens to read:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23557147#23557147