Brain child

I could be wrong - Anonybabe is my first kid and I'm not around children that much - but for some reason I get the impression that my daughter isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. I stopped paying attention to milestone charts after the first couple of months, but in general Anonybabe strikes me as charmingly, delightfully average.

This doesn't bother me much - I daresay it bothers me not at all since I've known several highly intelligent, socially-misfit assholes and several kind, generous and happy not-so-intelligent souls. I'm not saying brains and happiness are mutually exclusive, I'm just saying smarts aren't a magic ingredient to happiness. Smarts just are. They are a part of personality just like blue eyes, artistic tendencies, or a hairy back. You do with them what you will. Just drop in on your nearest Mensa convention. You'll see what I'm saying.

Besides, it would be nice if Anonybabe and I were playing in the same brain bracket. We'll have enough bridges to try to cross as we age without throwing an IQ gap into the mix. It's isolating to have the people you love function on a different plane, and although part of me would love it if Anonybabe had a mind like a steel trap, part of me is content to see her struggle through life like Anonyhub and I. I mean, intelligent people struggle lots; it's the "like Anonyhub and I" that just might give Anonybabe some camaraderie and comfort. Maybe not, but them's my thoughts.

Anonybabe and I went to visit my college friend last week. It's a friend I've only seen or talked to very sporadically over the past 10 years. Since I last saw him, he and his wife had had two kids. One is now a six-month baby girl, and the other is about the most darling three-year old boy I've ever had the pleasure of meeting.

This boy was hella intelligent, but he was three, so it felt like we were on roughly the same wavelength. He told a few well-paced knock-knock jokes; he politely asked me questions to lead into what he wanted to talk about (i.e. what I'd had for dinner so he could let me know his favorite foods); when I pulled out a toy hippo Anonybabe and I were packing, he informed me that he had a poem about hippos in his room and would I like to hear it? He was awesome. And smart. I liked him muy mucho.

And I felt the very first pangs of kiddie comparisons ever. The moms I know - we don't really compare the kids - not really. I mean, I don't get this sense of competition. But I felt it with this college friend. It was coming from me, but I think it was due to my college buddy's lack of reaction when we discussed what Anonybabe was up to. Her words, her new tricks; they were obviously unimpressive to the father of this little genius. I think he had no concept of what an average one-year old acts like. I wasn't quite sure how to react.

Plus I was disappointed when he spent a lot of time during our visit listing his family's academic achievements (both are smarty-pants professors): how prestigious his wife's job is, how hard he is on his students and how he wishes his job were more prestigious, where his wife had been published, how many job offers his wife's best friend had gotten at top schools(?!) Keep in mind that I'm a college drop-out (although I don't think my friend knows as much since I quietly slipped out right before graduation and never much saw the use of going back.) I gathered that we just inhabited two very different worlds. Him: - academia. Me: so-very-not academia.

Don't get me wrong, I like this guy. He was one of the few gifted & unpretentious minds I knew at my school. Others may well remember it differently, but there was an air of such solemn insecurity in my classes. Lots of privileged high IQ kids with little sense of play or joy or what could be important in life other than being validated as "smart". Not even a few grandiose egos to help keep things interesting. The only kids who piped up seemed to be desperate to impress the teacher. At the time, this friend struck me as different. He told stories about how his dad stocked drug store aisles with temporary hair dye. He cracked self-deprecating jokes.

Anonyhub guesses that he just didn't know what else to talk about. He was the shy sort in college. He once quipped then that his level of comfort in any given social situation was inversely proportional to the number of people in the room. So he could have been struggling for material. Lord knows I've come across as an asshole around other parents when I'm at an absolute loss as to what to talk about. In my mind, I'm bonding with the person over how silly and over-the-top the baby-wearing moms of a trendy boutique are, but out of my mouth comes a monologue about how we bought only the state-of-the-art expensive diapers there. Only later do I realize how what I meant to say was edited down to make me sound like the opposite of who I wanted to appear to be....Socializing is hard, ya'll.

So I should throw my friend a bone. But the long short is that I liked hanging out with his kid more than him. And even a little more than Anonybabe. (Argh! The guilt! The shame!)

Perchance in a few years karma will come around, and someone else will get to enjoy all of the efforts I've put into making Anonybabe a pleasant child, while I sit in the corner and talk uncomfortably about how my local organic produce box is the biggest and best in the neighborhood. And my old friend will blog about how parenting has sucked all of the life out of me, but that daughter of mine - what an amazing little genius!