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.
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.
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