Legends, tales, stories, quotes, and high-brow humor from our community to you for those times when life has gotten to be just a little too serious. There's more to come.
I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote
some blues
-- Duke Ellington
"Where do I put the extra screws Mommy?"
-- gifted child, age 2.
The screw driver. Pry open windows. Disassemble furniture. Remove tags from cars. Weed the garden. Take hinges off doors. The screw driver. Babysitter extraordinaire. Never was there a toy that Kept a two-year-old quite So happily engaged For hours on end. The screw driver. Simple, elegant, useful household tool. Mayhem and mischief never had a better friend.
Now, before you start calling the loony bin to make sure my room is ready, let me explain. Some time ago, some behavioral psychologists were studying a tribe of monkeys and how they interacted with one another. For some reason which only a behavioral psychologist could hope to understand, they dyed one of the monkeys pink and placed it back in the tribe. The other monkeys attacked it so viciously that they had to race to its rescue before it was killed.
Lesson: Being different is dangerous.
The trouble is that we all learn to wear our Brown Monkey suits to avoid being attacked, which means that we not only can't really relate to the other Brown Monkeys, we have a hard time identifying the other Pink Monkeys.
You might want to share this analogy with your intellectually gifted children. Other Pink Monkeys do exist; eventually we find each other. This has helped my kids deal with the problem of being different. It seems to me G/T people are fated never to have great, whacking crowds of friends, simply because there are so few of us. It tends to be a lifelong issue that doesn't end just because we grow up. But we almost always develop a few deep friendships that do tend to endure through the years, and these friendships are very satisfying and fulfilling relationships. I rather suspect that most of the parents who participate in TAGFAM are Pink Monkeys, themselves. As you see, we do manage to find ways to contact one another. Hang in there!
-- The End --
Last Updated: 10/29/99
This webpage is maintained by Kit Finn
(director@tagfam.org)