I can hear your laughter, it stays with me after all this time.

Tuesday blog -

Day two of the completely unplanned meeting on planning for the future.
Yesterday ended up being a good deal of stress for almost no output at all. This client has been notoriously difficult to deal with and it took almost all day (the day of the actual meeting) to get answers from them, which meant they skipped using us in the morning because they hadn't yet looked at what we were doing and once they did decide and put us back in the show they forgot and then skipped our section completely. So it's been a lot of sitting in a storage room that serves as a backstage area from very early until later in the evening than was agreed doing almost nothing but fighting to stay awake.

I figured I should at least post a blog today since I'm better prepared this morning and they're probably still going to skip over us. So I have lots of time and you get one hell of a read.

things have been busy but not in that 'there's a lot going on and a lot getting done' good kind of way, more like the 'I'm everywhere at once and not actually getting anything finished' sort of way that just sucks all the energy out of a day. Trying to unwind with the family at the end of the day starts to feel busy, like "spend time with kids" is something else I need to check off for the day.

Last night during the little space of time I get between work and bedtime Aidan had a heart-breaking emotional collapse that really affected me.

His mother got a root canal yesterday and while the boys and I were playing some basketball (thanks, Auntie Jill!) Aidan asked where his mom was, probably to invite her to join in the fun. When I told him she didn't feel good and was laying down he proceeded to shoot a couple more free-throws and then turned and scurried upstairs, leaving his brother and I downstairs.
When we came up he was at the dining room table with construction paper and markers in hand and had already scrawled, in his big funny script

"Mommy - hope you feel better. Don't worry we will make sure we take good care of you and ask if you feel better. Love, Aidan." All of this unprompted. He just heard his mother wasn't feeling well and ran to make a card. Has there ever been a more sensitive five year old??

toward the very bottom of the page he got distracted by me watching and smiling at what a sweet kid he is and misspelled a word. This was something on the level of a natural disaster.
The kids were up about an hour too late but he's such a perfectionist anyway but to hear his breakdown you'd think we regularly told him that if he screws up we won't love him or feed him anymore. Total sobs, huge tears and screaming that it was ruined and he needed to start over or mommy wouldn't love his card. Seriously, the kid is SO hard on himself.

after we got everythig calmed down and Aidan back to work he sat with marker in hand again and a totally different anxiety took over. He froze over the page and started muttering "the teacher will keep asking and I won't know and the teacher will keep asking and I won't KNOW and then they'll make me leave!" which broke down into horrible sobs of despair.

I pulled him away from the table to try and calm him down and get to the bottom of where this was coming from. You see, Aidan is smart. Really, really, really painfully, dangerously smart. And he's burdened with being five and too young to process all the things he understands and he worries like lots of smart kids do. Ironically, what he worries about is not being 'good' enough because he has no gauge of exactly how smart he is so instead of allowing him to relax and feel like he's ahead of the game he constantly feels like he's going to be tested somehow and won't be ready so he drives himself to learn more and drives himself crazy with stress.
A five year old with stress.
It's so sad.

When I asked him about his anxiety about school he said that was going to happen in kindergarden. I assured him that he was ready for kindergarden (he's been a bit obsessed with the idea ever since he saw the book "Everything your child needs to know for kindergarden" on our bookshelf - it's easily a 300 page text for parents - and I found him reading it on the living room floor because he was scared he didn't know something he 'needed' to know before he started school, I had to pry him away from the book, kicking and worried about what he might not know) and in fact he already knew a lot of the things they were going to learn there. I was nice about it since, in fact, he probably knows everything they're going to teach through 1st or 2nd grade besides handwriting.
That was when the real painful stuff came out.

He exploded into "I KNOW I'm smart!! I KNOW I'm ready for 1st grade and I'm trying to be patient. I'm smart as a fifth grader and I don't know how much smarter I can get! I'M SO SMART AND IT'S JUST NOT FAIR!"

There was more but it just tore his dad's heart out. the poor little guy just cried about both being too smart and waiting for school to catch up, which he's probably been harboring for a long time, and it driving him to worry about what he 'should' be learning. He cried that he 'learned more and more and I just don't know what else to learn" because he thought HE needed to figure out what he should be teaching himself. When I told him the teachers would tell him what was next and he didn't have to he relaxed visibly and slumped in my lap, exhausted.

I brought Owen up to hang out with Mom and spent some time with Aidan.
He's growing up with so much of the same things that I did and hated - I was a 'smart kid' too and drove myself crazy worrying about school when I was young, to the point of making myself sick on a very regular basis and I've always found it hard or weird to relate to people all the way through adulthood was very isolated by it. I hate to think that my boy is going to be that kind of lonely but it's probably the truth.

I've always had trouble with people and it's actually what I'm spending time with a therapist on (I know seeing a therapist is supposed to be some weird, secretive thing but whatever) ever since a good friend of mine pointed out that I don't have close ties with any of the people I grew up with (probably including family) because I have so little in common with them, if I ever had anything at all.
Relating to people used to trip me up in a huge way, back when I used to speak way faster, interrupt and finish sentences way worse than I do now. I've spent a lot of time trying remind myself to slow down, which makes a lot of social interaction feel like a lot of work and it's hard to enjoy spending time with people when you're trying to force yourself to slow down to the speed of conversation so you don't freak them out or come off as totally rude or not listening. This was before the rise of ADD and your only option was to just the freaky kid that was super uncomfortable to talk to. I'm probably still that adult that's really uncomfortable to talk to sometimes.

total side note: I resisted the idea of ADD for a long time as well - there's a fine line between being able to take on a myriad of thoughts and concepts and put them together at once and in different ways and not being able to hold onto one thought at all and not making sense, it's easy to confuse the fact that your thoughts are racing with the fact that you think quickly. I recently got officially diagnosed, official treatment has yet to happen.

Anyway, This is why Aidan will always choose to converse with adults when he has the option and why I get frustrated and defensive when adults act like they're talking over his head to keep things amusing for themselves or because they're being funny. It's his only relief, I think, and I even wonder if his mother and I are going to be able to keep up for long before he finds explaining things to us trying.

Which usually leads to the other half that causes anxiety - having to tone it down because of the way people react when they figure out you're a 'smart kid'. It usually falls somewhere near freakish curiousity and it certainly will get in the way of connecting with other kids (and adults, let's face it). Having to act like you're less smart than you are to fit in can feel horrible, like you're hiding some weird sort of secret that you shouldn't have to hide but people don't know how to deal with someone that is on a different level intellectually as just another person socially, which is exactly what smart kids need. A super smart five year old needs to challenged on a different level but he also needs to be a five year old.

( I keep saying living with Aidan is like living with Tom Wolfe. He's our resident old man and he makes amazing observations that seem so profound. He seems to have his mother's love for writing so I hope he keeps using it and learns to get over the occasional typo without all the hysterics and seeing himself as a failure. )

Aidan is doomed to find this one out for himself, thankfully he hasn't learned to put it away around groups of people yet (as a parent I can't bring myself to tell him that he shouldn't be anything but proud of what he can do with his big brain, that's just not something I can teach him in good conscience) but it's sadly just a matter of time before he discovers that people will think it's 'neat' that he's advanced (or a nerd in need of an good punching) but after that they won't look at him like a peer.

Let's face it - he's going to get beat up.
On top of being smarter than his peers he's totally a sensitive kid (nevermind that it's a by-product of his big brain or if it's right or wrong - he still feels a little "too much" and cries a little too easily "for a boy") which means he's practically asking for an ass-kicking in a school setting.

And even stuff like this won't help - try complaining to someone (or everyone...in a blog.) that 'it's hard to be smart'. You'll find out pretty quick that you should keep your mouth shut or that you sound 'cocky' (I'm sure some of my readers have already thought that just reading this. that's ok). So it's isolating, lonely, frustrating, emotionally hard and there's no good way to let that all out. I think that's what MENSA was supposed to be, I was invited to a meeting once when I was young and found the whole thing gross (and I brought a runaway with me - one of my favorite stories ever) and was another thing I had to hide as a kid in order to fit in. All this makes me fear for my kiddo and understand why you see so many biographies on profoundly intelligent serial killers. it's enough to make you see yourself as 100% different than "people" and make you crazy. Man, I wish that was a joke.

His dad was a 'smart kid' but thankfully not freakishly so like I suspect he might be. Of course it always seems more astounding at this age and it'll blend in better as he gets older, once he's already gone through the hard part of being a kid that doesn't fit in with kids at all.

His dad acted out, got frustrated, angry, did some damage to his brain - finally found improvisation as a fun place where a big brain can both come in handy and can also switch off.
Socially, I still feel isolated more than I would like (working both in my improvisation and with a therapist about not processing emotion like logic - for all those that I've seen use improvisation AS therapy, I'm using therapy to get better at improvisation......and as a person) and I connect much easier on stage than I do in real life but it's also easier to learn to adapt when you're an adult relating to adults but he's still a kid.

Thankfully the boy is still a silly boy, which makes me proud that he still just enjoys being weird, giggling and playing but his big, genuine laughs make his shaking, sobbing tears all the more sad and seeing him do all the things kids should do remind me that no 5 year old kid should feel anxiety like he does.

Tonight when I get home the boy and I are going to enjoy some playtime and not worry about anything beyond that. First, I have to get through a day sitting in a storage closet waiting to push a button. He has no idea how silly the adult world he's so stresed about really is.