My Gifted Child

People told me that my child was smart. I knew that, he was always very curious. I beamed like any other proud mother when he said something no one else had even thought of or noticed, or when he answered his older sister’s math problem.  I still could not match that with his frequent immature outbursts and his pure defiance and oppositional behavior.

He could never have been described as having an easy going personality but he had an ability to focus intently on a subject that interested him for a long period of time, such as lining up toy cars or building with his lego bricks. That was the only time I could take a breath in his very early years.  He even appeared to enjoy pre - school when he started at the age of 2 ½ years. But he never glowed like the other kids; he held a certain emptiness in his face.

There were at best two other things to be grateful for. He loved to eat healthily, always tried new foods and he slept to an invisible alarm clock. He went to bed at the same appropriate time, fell asleep almost instantly and woke at precisely the same time every day. It was uncanny. For a while, at least, I convinced myself he was like any other 3 year old boy. I talked myself into believing he was happy and he was, providing he was at home and doing what he wanted to do and with whom it wanted to do it.

At the age of 4 years, a close friend of mine told me one day he was too intense. I thought he was “too” everything:  too intense, too sensitive, too emotional, too competitive, too moral, too perfectionist, too driven, too much to cope with!

At the age of 5, he began to have an extreme need for constant mental stimulation, he followed his own path, he was less teachable than my older child and he still had this unusual depth of feeling. He had a recognition for inconsistencies, he was always telling me off for saying one thing one day and something else another, I think this is where he learnt his bargaining skills and he never liked to lose. He had to be the first child out of the bath tub, had to start his breakfast before everyone else, had to be the first one walking through the door.

Then, the two things that had up until now been consistent with him, changed too. He went almost completely off his food (not a phase) and began taking increasingly longer to settle to sleep. At the same time I began getting reports from his pre-school that his behavior was becoming more disruptive and until then I had chosen to dismiss his progressively depressive, anxious and aggressive self that rode in the car on his return journey home from pre-school. That’s when it began. My obsession, that is, with the need to pin it all down. He is a gifted child.