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| "Look, Mommy! I can read!" |
My oldest brother James was a baby genius, and he knew it. We all knew it. We taught ourselves to read to entertain ourselves during those long, tense quiet silences that fall over unhappy households, each family member in their own room (if they had one to retreat to, though privacy was always violated as needed, for leverage in yet another battle or war), after our parents fully checked out of their difficult marriage in these half-hearted attempts to solve the problems they have yet to fully resolve, in all the usual ways that adults do. And so it went: need to cook a gourmet meal? Oh, that what those books are for! You can read, can't you?
Taunts, jeers, mocking tones, and much nasty teasing followed, and that was just when we were kids. Same with making a Halloween costume, or throwing a baseball well, or any of the other gazillion things that those pesky creatures called "kids" need to know, or at least want their parents to pass on to them, so they can spend some time with them. And so we did it, each and every one of us. Not one person in my family is a professional writer, reader, designer, artist, photographer, publisher, singer, dancer, martial artist, athlete, yogi, healer, counselor, therapist, master chef, mother, leader, public speaker, archivist, researcher, librarian, linguist, communicator, innovator, technologist, or naturalist except me, and so I became all those things, and so much more, because I had to.
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| "Here, you take him. He's too heavy for me to carry. My back hurts." |
Schools stopped regular, standardized IQ testing in the 70s because it supposedly "hurt" the other children's self-esteem, but that's pure bullshit. They needed the bright kids to pull up the ratings for the rest of the class, and so I was docked in a senior year at high school that went very bad for me very quickly, because it was supposed to do just that out of envy and spite (so I wouldn't beat my mom graduating at 16, thus debunking her as the make-believe family intellectual), even though my oldest brother's last official IQ test in the public school system topped at 146. At 16, I already had college credits and all my high school requirements met. That book-reading served us well throughout our rough childhood years, when we were left to our own devices, so much so, that every decent professional I've related to has told me so, to my face: my parents are lucky we're not dead, because we should be, and several times over, each and every one of us.
And so, when I looked through a pack of old photos that were supposedly sorted by my mom specifically for me to have (more on that some other time), I found nothing organized into neat categories, but then, I never needed her to do that, did I? Instead I found more evidence in this ridiculous farce of an ongoing trial within my family that requires even more truth, and that's in just one photo of the two that I post here: that of a very sweet and very adorable, chubby-cheeked, little baby genius we called "Jimmy", reading to himself as my mom shoved food into her mouth, oblivious or simply spiteful to his needs, because he can.
We all can.
