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Monday, September 30, 2013

Learning Differences

Every child is different, no matter how much DNA they have in common. Not only do they have different strengths and weaknesses, interests and opinions, but they think differently. I mean, the functional processing of their brains is drastically different. Consider how, as toddlers, they determined which is the girls bathroom:

Child one is very visual. She told me one had a picture of a girl and the other a boy.

Child two is an early reader and gifted with language. She told me one said "Men" and the other "Women" or some variation thereof.

Child three is mathematical. She told me that one had a triangle on the door and the other a circle.

Child four is a social ringleader and creative problem solver. She told me which was the door her sister went through.

What we can see so clearly at the age of three, we shouldn't lose track of when it becomes less transparent in later years. These four children will always see the world differently. They will always learn differently. And each of them found their way into the right bathroom.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

#Homecoming2013


The sun sets in a rosy glow that, 
Almost, rivals your smile. 
Night wraps warm around us like the 
Velvet skimming your shoulders. 
The sparkles on your dress, 
And in your eyes, 
And on all the accoutrements of a 
Girl's first high school dance
Are blinding me. 
That's what's causing these tears. 
They call it Homecoming, 
But you're leaving me 
A little more 
Each day. 

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Why TheMensaMom?

When I started blogging, I didn't know what my subject would be. There were too many ideas bouncing around in my head to focus into a narrow theme. Titles can change, but address is fixed, so I messed around with different titles in the beginning, but made the address more about my identity than my subject matter. Hence, themensamom.blogspot.com (The Mensa Mom).

It may sound a little self aggrandizing, but that's not my intention. For those who don't know, Mensa is a social organization for geniuses. Specifically, those of us who score in the top 2% (approx. 131+) on any of over 200 accepted IQ tests. We're often accused of being elitists, and every organization has a few immature people who can be pointed out as examples of the worst accusations levied against the group, but they don't represent the majority. Two percent of the population qualifies. That's millions of people worldwide. And they're not the people you think.

When people think of geniuses they usually imagine people with doctorates, and a lot of geniuses have them. But intelligence and education are not the same thing. About half of the Mensans I personally know, are high school drop outs. People can be educated beyond their intelligence. There's only so much an education can do for you. There's also only so much intelligence can do for you without education.

The difference is that intelligent people learn all the time whether we're in a formal educational setting or not. We can't help it. We're constantly absorbing and processing information is complex ways. That's why we drop out of school. We're miserable in a typical school setting where the introduction of new topics slogs along at the pace of the slowest learner.

Sometimes we think we're stupid because we get poor grades and always give answers that are different from the ones our teachers are looking for. We often have asymmetrical development in other areas, like social or emotional behavior, and others can't see our intellectual strengths through these weaknesses. We get diagnosed as hyperactive, hypersensitive, or just plain hyper, because of our constant quest for new information and stimulation. We have trouble fitting in because we constantly question "normal" and can't bring ourselves to do things a certain way just because that's the way they've always been done.

All this means that we often feel isolated and weird. Mensa is more of a support group than a brain trust. It's not really any different from football fans gathering in a sports bar, or book lovers joining a book club. We're just people who occasionally want to be around other people who are weird like us.

I qualified for Mensa in second grade, and thank God my school principal and mom agreed to tell me. My mom admitted that my playmates used to ask her why I was so weird. I was completely aware that I was not normal. It made all the difference in the world to know that my weirdness was a good thing. Especially since the following year I had a teacher that hated "gifted" kids, allowed me to be bullied, and convinced the new principal that I didn't qualify for the GATE program. GATE or Gifted and Talented Education programs consider the top 10% on IQ tests to be qualified. (I have all the paperwork from this incident.)

My mom, like so many other parents of gifted kids, didn't really know what that meant for me or what to do with me. When a kid is gifted in sports, as soon as they're identified, they receive all kinds of extra training and support from coaches to develop that gift. When a kid is gifted in music or art, they still have pretty good chance of receiving extra training or support from school to develop those gifts. At the very least, their talents draw praise and encouragement. When a kid is gifted intellectually, the extra training and support they may receive is often entirely dependent on the resources of their parents, since a large number of educators still carry a prejudice against these kids. And since intellectual giftedness is sprinkled across all racial and socioeconomic divides, what happens to our most intellectually gifted children is a crap shoot. Some become physicists. Some become drug lords. Intelligence alone is not enough. It needs cultivating and developing, because it will learn. The question is, what will it learn?

I was one of those who dropped out of high school. I used a crappy homeschool by mail program to get a diploma while working full time as office manager for two start-up business that shared a space. I had no idea how to go to college because no one in my family had done so, and I left public high school before anyone told me that they have guidance counselors to help you make that transition. I didn't have any career direction at the time either and didn't want to commit myself financially to an education without a purpose. Most significantly, I couldn't fathom suffering through any more formal education. I've since been assured that college is nothing like high school, but the aversion is still so strong I can only imagine myself going back to school as some distant future possibility.

Working was wonderful for me. I discovered how much I could learn out in the world. My boss challenged me again and again, and taught me everything about his business. I caught the entrepreneurial bug.

Being a highly logical person, I deduced that who I spent my life with was more important that what I spent it doing. Having found my perfect match, I married at 19 years of age, allowing us to finish growing up together and into each other. Having further determined that the thing I would regret most would be not having children, and that it was the most time sensitive of my goals, I set about building a family. I wanted to be done having children by the time I was thirty, and have an idea of what else I wanted to do with my life after that.

I accomplished that goal and learned a lot about myself in the process. Kids do that to you. I learned how much my intellectual giftedness affected my parenting decisions. How different and weird it could make me in this situation too. And I questioned whether I could lose it. Sleep deprivation and hormones both worked a number on me.

About a year after my last child was born I really felt this new phase of life approaching where I  would no longer be constrained by the fuzzy haze I'd been in through the previous decade of childbearing. But I lacked confidence. I had never pursued joining Mensa even though I knew that I qualified. I could have dug up those old test scores and mailed them in. But I wanted to know if I could still qualify, to find out if I had really lost some part of my intellectual gift in the brain fog. I signed up online to take the Mensa administered qualifying exam. I took the test and felt good about it. A month or so later I received the invitation to join.

That moment, having been through so much, and questioned my identity so thoroughly, was like stepping into the light again. I already knew beyond a doubt that I could survive anything. Natural childbirth gives you that. Now, I knew that I still had that ability within myself to learn anything I want to learn, in order to do anything I want to do. That I'm not crazy.  Gifted people often worry about that. I'm fine with being weird, but I feel crazy creeping up on me sometimes and it's disturbing.

After that, I slowly began to pick up where I left off as a writer. I've given myself a decade to accomplish certain goals in this area and am on track to do so. Blogging is part of my process toward that goal.

The theme has become "Crafting a Family," because family is the most important thing to me. It bothers me that half the marriages in this country end in divorce, and half the kids are growing up in broken homes. If I can encourage people, if I can show them a different way to look at a situation, or offer an idea they haven't thought of, that's my purpose here. There are thousands of parenting blogs and hundreds of popular experts. I don't want to retread the familiar ground. I'm too impatient for that. But I do know that being a Mensa Mom means I think differently. That I challenge normal. That I pick up things in research articles that have implications for families that others may not see. That I have successfully done things that people consider crazy.

I've never used a crib or baby food. I'll never go to a hospital to give birth again. My older two daughters watched their younger sisters be born and cut their cords. I use marketing tactics to get my kids to try new foods, counter bad advice attacks with statistics, and am enjoying my teenagers so much more than I did my babies. I've figured out this isn't normal.

My very normal sister just rolls her eyes and loves me anyway. Normal works for most people, that's why it's normal. But when it's not working we need alternatives. For some of us, normal never works. That's why the way themensamom crafts a family has a place in the blogosphere. Its different, because some of us will always be different. And we can learn more from each others differences than we can from repeating the same things that have always been said.

*** This post was featured in the Redwood Empire Mensa Bulletin, Nov. 2013 edition. 

Saturday, September 14, 2013

eBook Fundraising

I'm excited to announce the release of my first book, "eBook Fundraising." It's a comprehensive guide to planning a fundraiser using an eBook created by and for your school or organization. BookBaby.com picked it up and is offering it as a FREE guide on their website. That's right! I said it's FREE for you to download to your computer or eReader!

As parents we always seem to be fundraising for something, and always looking for new fundraising ideas. I know, with four kids, I'm involved in 10-20 fundraisers per year. Many of us have also wanted to produce student anthologies, just for the sake of encouraging our kids to write. With this guide you can do both at the same time. Raise funds for present needs, and foster creative expression for posterity. How great is that?!?

Download your FREE guide to "eBook Fundraising" now, and be sure to share the link with your community.

When you use it, come back here to share your eBook in the comments, and let me know how it worked for you. I'm waiting anxiously to see what you produce!

***This book was recently pulled for a revision. I'll keep you posted when it comes out again.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Confessions of an Over-Sharer

This post will inevitably contain TMI. That's just how it is with me. I try to be brief and not bore people with my enthusiastic recounting of the details of my life, and all the interesting things I've learned, but I know I fail. After a great deal of personal reflection, I've decided I don't care. There are reasons I over-share, and they're good reasons. Perhaps an explanation will help the rest of you have a little sympathy, and maybe a little grace, for the over-sharers of the world. 

1) My parents don't speak the same language. It sounds like English is coming out of both of their mouths, but I assure you that interpretation is always required. The simplest way to describe it is to say that my dad is a PC and my mom is a Mac. This digital difference is really just an extension of a deeper communication difference. As I grew up in their house, I'm "bilingual." I listened to them argue endlessly about things they agreed on, because they each expressed it differently.

Because I understand that two people can hear the same thing differently, I always feel obliged to offer lengthy detailed explanations that I'm hoping will cover every possible interpretation. This is especially the case with instructions. People who get things easily often make fun of lengthy detailed instructions, but people that write them have to explain it for the most confused and frustrated possible reader. Thorough instructions at the outset alleviate mistakes and calls for help in the end.

2) My family is also Pentecostal, and two ideas from the Bible made a strong impression on me as a child. They undoubtedly contribute to my problem with over-sharing. First, God is omnipresent, and omniscient. He sees and knows everything I do and think. Second, there is a verse in the Bible that says everything that is secret will be revealed and everything that is done in private will be shouted from the rooftops.

I'm neither surprised nor bothered by government surveillance. I've never lived with the idea of privacy. In my way of thinking, everything I do is already known and may someday be broadcast. In a way, these ideas have better prepared me for the inevitable and quickly coming end of all privacy. But, because I've already thought of whether I'd be okay with the world knowing what I'm doing and thinking, before I choose to do or think a certain thing, I probably censor myself less when later sharing my life experiences with others.

3) My hometown is on an isolated island in Alaska, and even among my small group of peers I was an oddity. So, my early childhood was spent in a very internal disconnected way. As I reached my teens and became more aware of the world, I made a conscious choice to push myself out into it.

I didn't understand all the social subtleties, and I thoroughly pissed off my older brother by recounting his life to his friends...and possibly a few random strangers. But I was so desperate to connect to real people (as opposed to fictional people) that I didn't think of his discomfort at the time. His life was so much more interesting to talk about than mine. He was cool.

Now that I'm a lot older, I see many people who feel depressed and disconnected. They're afraid, and hide their real selves in silence. They wish they had someone to talk to, but are embarrassed to speak. We can't connect if we don't communicate. That doesn't always mean talking, but talking is a good place to start. Not everyone will want to reciprocate my efforts at connecting, but I'll never find the ones that do if I don't open up my mouth. I like people. I think they're mostly interesting. And there are people in this world who like what I have to say and want to enter into a conversation with me. Finding them is worth annoying a few who don't.

4) When I was in my early 20s I did presentations in schools for an abstinence based sex education program. I was motivated by the complete uselessness of all the many hours of sex ed I received in school. It starts in fourth grade and in high school they spend an entire year on it, but when I got married I discovered how irrelevant most of it was, and how much important information had been overlooked. I got comfortable talking about this subject with teenagers. I also went on to become a certified doula and now feel completely comfortable talking about all aspects of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.

There are a lot of things wrong with what Americans believe about all of these subjects, but these wrong ideas persist because we don't talk about them. What women have shared for thousands of years, what made them strong, has become a taboo subject in the modern age. I believe we will only experience true liberation and strength as women when we become willing to talk to each other about these important subjects again. We will experience more equality in our relationships with men when we don't feel ashamed about, or inferior in, our own bodies. We have the freedom to speak. This is a super power.

5) Parents are often the worst over-sharers and parenthood has given me so much more to tell you about than you could possibly want to hear. But among parents, sharing is often the only vent we have for our frustrations with a life that we could never have fully anticipated. We share the good and the bad because both are so overwhelming they push the boundaries of our comprehension. We want to know that others have shared our experiences and survived. And we can always use sympathy, and fresh ideas for dealing with old problems. I love to hear what others are doing.

We also want to celebrate our kids' achievements, not because we view them as our achievements, but because we've shared their struggles. It's the same reason everyone talks about an Olympic athlete who wins gold after sustaining an injury. We witnessed the pain, felt deep empathy with it, therefore, we can't help our excitement over the triumph. Only, the rest of you weren't watching our kids struggle, so it's hard to share our enthusiasm.

6) That we celebrate the achievements of others is one of the most beautiful things about my family. No one is diminished by the success of someone else. We live in a competitive and critical world. We judge everything from movies to clothes, to melons in the grocery store. I think we feel all that criticism lingering in the air. We're all hungry for words of affirmation. Our mothers' admonishments, "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all," aren't enough. We should admonish our children, "if you think something good about someone, say it!" In this area, I'm trying to share more. I want to tell people when I've been thinking of them, how I admire them, what I appreciate about them. This can make some people uncomfortable, because they've gotten used to a lesser view of themselves. They try to deflect praise. "Thank you," and, "I know," are both perfectly acceptable responses IMO.

7) The more of the world I've seen, the more I've come to realize that, there are more ways to live a happy life than anyone can count. I'm interested in hearing about how others live, the choices they've made in life, why they've made them, and how that has affected their view of the world. Because I'm interested in hearing about all the details of others lives, I suspect there are others who must be interested in hearing about my life. I don't want to gossip. I'm just fascinated by how different we all are, and how, in spite of vast differences, some things about us can be the same. I'm perpetually examining my own motivations and results, and assume others are too. Though I've discovered that assumption isn't true in general, there are exceptions to be found and I'm on the hunt for them.

That's why I'll probably continue to over-share, even though I'll keep trying to be brief. In the end, it won't matter much whether I've succeeded or failed. I'm living my own personal version of a happy life and don't have time to worry about what other people are thinking of me. Especially since they probably aren't.