Asynchronous

My son is four. Four and three quarters, as he likes to tell people. He is also bright. Gifted, I suppose you could say, although we never use the word in front of him. Mostly because it suggests there's somehow something better about him, better than others his age. And also because to be quite honest I'm just not sure how much of a gift his abilities really are.

When he started reading before he was two, we talked a lot about his being gifted. It's impossible to tell the absolute intelligence of a two year old, to be fair. They grow in leaps and bounds, children, you never know where they will speed up or slow down, so we tossed the word around a lot without ever really assigning it to him. But what was clear and what still is clear almost three years later, after reading became math and the ability to add, subtract, and multiply in his head all before age five, is that gifted or not, his brain works in a very, very different way than everyone else's.

I suppose that's the best possible definition of gifted in its purest sense, how it was meant to describe chldren when it was first used. Who knows? All I know is that my preschooler can do math in his head as fast as I can, can read with the fluency of many teenagers, and is starting to grasp himself that he's not entirely like everyone else.

But yet he is. He's four and three-quarters and he likes dinosaurs and superheroes and thinks farting is funny. Being silly is his greatest joy in life, he loves to laugh. He hasn't yet learned when to stop talking, how to adequately read body language, or how to listen. There are days his impulse control is maddening.

He still has the emotions of four and three-quarters. The innate sense of fairness of a preschooler.

And the cognitive ability of someone twice his age. Or more.

What this means for us is that conversations speed from the inhospitable atmosphere of Venus (because he reads, you know. Mstly non-fiction, lots of science. Some math.) or perhaps from the adding of positive and negative numbers into a weeping meltdown over the fact that he just angrily shoved his now-crawling sister away from his book. Or sat on her like a pony. Or he starts shouting that he's NOT HUNGRY OR TIRED when the fact that he's shouting and ragingly angry means that in fact the exact opposite is true.

None of this is a problem, of course. He's allowed to act like a four year old.

The problem is me. Because I get so caught up in all that he *does* know that I find myself thinking whenever he is naughty, "Goddamn he should know better!"

But the fact is he doesn't. Because he's FOUR. He doesn't always know how to control his emotions or act with his sister or control his impulses because he's a preschooler and sometimes preschoolers just ... Don't. But it's surprising, the strange lapse, the huge chasm between his abilities and his age-appropriate behaviour.

One day, I know, it will all even out. His emotional competency will catch up with his cognition. Maybe he'll be seven, maybe he'll be 25. Or maybe it won't. After all, none of us is perfect in this area. But it will get *better*.

All the information you read on giftedness writes about this. The asynchronicity of development, the leaps and the holes. So it's fine, of course. Of course it's fine.

Because what I've come to realize is that it *is* fine. That's who he is. *He* has no problem with it. The problem is only with others like me. Who don't expect what we get from him. We're the ones with the problem. He's perfect the way he is.

For those of us watching, its maddening, heartbreaking, fascinating, and amazing. It's hard to understand, hard to remember his age and what that means.

For him it's just the way it is.

Sent from my iPad