#3: Making men: Too sensitive; too smart

The Pikachu our son once loved

When my firstborn was four (and loved the Pikachu pictured), as his gifted-ed ('Small Poppies) teacher turned the number '99' over on her wooden abacus he leapt to his feet and in perfect ecstasy exclaimed: 'Oh my goodness! What an enormous number!' Only he lisped at that age, so 'enormous' became 'enormouth', adding to the wonder-boy vibe. 

It was an open day at the gifted-ed for preschoolers he attended and a dozen or so prospective parents, mostly mothers, and their possibly-gifted toddlers were watching. And when they heard this from my son who was small for his age their jaws, as one, dropped open. I, meanwhile, swam in an ecstasy all of its own maternal pride a child of your blood and body doing well. 

Then, in his second week at school, after he had just turned five, he appeared on daytime TV in a documentary on the gifted-ed centre. On that show hosted by a famous young mum he multiplied two double-digit numbers together on paper, carrying the ten, and then read the four digit answer out. Again jaws dropped, perhaps across the country. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder (and dog) as portrayed in 'The
Little House on the Prairie' TV series.

At eleven he came second in the country in maths in his year and also provided one of the winning answers in the national lit quiz as the only 11-12-year-old who knew Laura Ingalls Wilder was the answer. He hesitated long enough for others to give the answer if they had known. They had not.

Again my maternal pride soared when I learnt about this (I wasn't there), especially as I had read him and his sister and younger brother all of Laura's extraordinary US frontier memoirs, loving them myself and even learning my craft (of memoir) from her. The TV series 'Little House on the Prairie' I absolutely loved as a child is based on her memoirs. All children should read, or be read, these books.

At 12... he (my first) appeared on New Zealand's Brainiest Kid and made it through to a tie-breaker in the semi-finals. His question was which two countries built the Concord, and his opponent, a Chinese girl, had to give the word for memory loss. My son knew immediately he heard her question, after he had answered his incorrectly, that he had lost, and he was right. 

But he was so gracious about losing when interviewed on camera after the show that everybody loved him for it and he was invited onto Breakfast TV to talk about being on the show, just him and onne of the female finalists - a female won the title, NZ's Brainiest Kid - not the girl who beat him. He was funny and entertaining on that show too.

But after twelve, the usual story, in his early teenage-hood he began to change, not wanting to read so much, so getting bored and missing that substantial brain stimulus that only good books can provide, wanting to do more computer, not sleeping as much, and so on. We, he and I, the two kind of 'big picture', maybe you could say 'big brained' people in the house, argued increasingly, especially around the family dinner table, which was not good for his sister and brother. I knew that but I had to try to reign in his young male arrogance. It felt like my job. I did not, ultimately, succeed. I paid for that trying with estrangement. 

I also had to get him off the computer for two afternoons a week at least. I succeeded for a while, but he was so surly on those afternoons that eventually I had to stop policing them. Then he grew out of my ability to discipline altogether, though I still tried. 

He lived with us till he was 24 but at twenty-ish he imported a couple of MAGA hats from China and wore one to the Sunday dinner table. When I reacted predictably he laughed. It was very childish.

We fought constantly, though there was a breakthrough of sorts when I got him a job at a computer start-up and he loved it. The first computer job I got him he didn't like. But then the good job fell through after about a year and he drove over a stray tyre on the day he was told they were letting him go and his spirits never recovered from those two blows on one day.

That was in 2017. Then in early 2018 he moved to Perth to live with his girlfriend who he had met online - of course. He returned for Xmas that year, but when his brother returned from Dunedin where he, at 19, had spent his first year away living with a group of male friends, the brothers did not get on, the younger being cockier and probably more charismatic than the elder, though the elder was probably smarter. The younger's intelligence was much more creative, which is harder to both hone and measure. He might be even smarter than his older brother. He certainly knows more about classic cinema than his older brother does and than most other people his age do.

But both, I think it is fair to say, are too sensitive, even the cooler younger one, and too smart. Smart people are supposed to struggle to be happy. I think that is what our sons are doing, and so are we, being too sensitive and too smart too.

Ultimately the estrangement at Xmas 2018 of both of them was all but inevitable, especially when you add his brother's story, as they estranged us together. I will get to 'son 2' and finish 'son 1' another time, I am busy checking the proofreader's work on my latest book that I hope to have published in November. But proofing the proofs for 187 single-spaced pages is proving slow work. And it's getting late (8.58). I'd better get back to it. 

Till next time, 

S. Jones