At Home With Homeschool Parents
"Thoughts on Being Gifted for a Year" by Sarah, homeschool parent
(excerpted from Creative Home Schooling:
A Resource Guide for Smart Families
by Lisa Rivero, Great Potential Press, 2002)

It has been about a year and a half since I happened across the web site for the Gifted and Talented in my search for answers to questions about my oldest son. I have two sons (whom I homeschool), both of whom are, of course, unique and special. But it is my older son who has challenged me the most. Quick to learn, but unwilling or unable to go through the usual educational hoops, he has been at times an old man in a child's body, and different from other kids his age. He has also had, and continues to have, difficulties with his health and has many of the symptoms of ADD.

My entry into the world of the gifted through an e-mail list resulted in culture shock, to put it mildly. I stumbled through the first few months, finding that my old assumptions about what it meant to be "smart" were challenged. I'd never heard the expression "gifted" used in the context of intelligence when I was a teenager. At first I have to confess that I was a bit put off by some parents' descriptions of their kids — you know, the types that read quantum mechanics as leisure reading. While I felt sure that my son was highly intelligent, he showed no signs of the single-minded focus that drives some of these gifted kids to university at age thirteen (except for computer games, which he loves!).

I read as much as I could find on the Internet on giftedness. I hadn't realized that giftedness came with particular character traits affecting the emotional and even spiritual life of the gifted, traits like heightened emotional sensitivity, intensity, empathy, imagination and even sensitivity to seams in socks! Some of the Linda Silverman articles hit too close to home. I also found, to my surprise, many pieces of the puzzle that described me as a child; often characteristics that other people had tried to encourage me to change. It was as if I had been an alien, and then I found that there were other life forms that were similar enough to be related to me, and who could provide me with a mythical history and identity.

I've spent a lot of time in this last year (the year that I have been gifted) going through the process of grieving, not for opportunities missed or great things I "could" have done, but for having lost my vision: for not trusting and speaking my own truths. For having lost myself...

This time continues to be a process of growth and personal challenge to integrate my "lost" self with my present understanding. My relationship with my older son has undergone many changes, mostly for the better. His new understanding of himself is helping to heal some of the pain of his "differentness."

At this rate, what great changes will be wrought by the time I have been gifted for two years — or three or four!!

— Sarah, homeschool parent