My mother once told me that she made a conscious decision when I was two years old not to teach me how to read. She knew I was ready, but was afraid that she would be “robbing me of my childhood” by leading me to achieve beyond my peers. Unlike many gifted children, I did not teach myself how to read – the process remained a profound mystery to me because when people read to me, I was completely absorbed in the story and had no sense of what they were doing. Instead, I memorized my favorite books word for word, and I recall that a few meltdowns were triggered by someone getting a word wrong in Go Dog Go. When I started kindergarten at age 5, I learned how to read almost effortlessly.
When my husband’s mother put him in school, he underwent the usual testing. An IQ test revealed a result that impressed her in some way. We’ll never know exactly what that result was, because his mother decided that it would be better for Josh not to know his IQ. Later, Josh was diagnosed with ADHD and put on a Ritalin regimen. The effects of the medicine were terrible for him, causing him to become so withdrawn that at certain times of day he was literally incapable of expressing himself or interacting with others. His parents finally took him off the Ritalin, to his great relief and the chagrin of his teachers, and took him home permanently. Thus, their only experience with an exceptional diagnosis was negative. Obviously his diagnosis was either wrong or incomplete, a common experience of gifted kids, and the medication was inappropriate for him. In addition, he received no behavioral therapy.
It’s obvious now that he must be highly intelligent but like me, my husband went through his youth careening between a guilty suspicion that he was far more intelligent than his peers, and a profound conviction that he was stupid, inept, hopeless, and incompetent.
Yes, that is the fate of the undiagnosed twice-exceptional. Both of our mothers were deeply interested in understanding each of their children, both of them invested immense time and effort into homeschooling us and our siblings when they found that school was a torturous experience for us. But both of them were affected by the vaguely democratic ideals floating around. Before she died my mother, who was quite bright herself and probably had undiagnosed ADHD, had become quite comfortable with the idea of discussing my exceptional qualities with me and helping me to evaluate them and understand my past. But my husband’s parents still look away in silence if I mention that my own son is “different” or “gifted.”
My father had a similar, if more verbal, reaction when I suggested that he himself might be “gifted,” given his ability to design and build buildings without training, without blueprints. “Everyone has gifts,” he said dismissively. My dad is the most literal-minded person I know and had great social difficulties until my mother came into his life and helped him to figure out how to behave around people. He spent most of his adult life doing work he hated and has only recently gotten into a new career of welding and steam-fitting. Pipes – plumbing and so forth – has always been an area of fascination for him, to the extent that he even used to get books out of the library to read about them just for fun. He was always the guy who could fix anything mechanical he could physically lay eyes on. Unlike my sisters, I’ve never minded sitting through his “lectures” on his favorite subjects, mainly because I find them interesting too, but also because I myself can lecture with the best of them. The sad thing is that now he is finally doing work he loves and in an area of his giftedness, he is struggling with the physical limitations of his age.
Average or normal people can get along quite comfortably under the assumption that everyone should be at the same level neurologically, mentally, and intellectually. It’s the sub-normal and the above-normal that suffer. The first, because they are pressured to live up to expectations beyond what the fulfillment of their own capacities would lead them to. The second because they are left to perceive, with a profoundly deep capacity for feeling, their own personal failure and the waste of their own gifts.
Those of us who in some way combine both types are better off knowing what we’re dealing with than not.
