From the Deep

*THUNK*

*SNAP!!!*

*silence*

The fact that silence, not screaming wails, followed the “snap” comforted me as I turned off the kitchen faucet. I’d been washing breakfast dishes when the thunk-snap-silence sequence happened. I looked into the family room where I saw two young faces, garnering stunned and guilty expressions. Both children were intact; the immense snap sound hadn’t accompanied a broken bone, thank God. The kids were gazing in the direction of the back door, so I looked at it too. From the glass door’s wood blind hung two slats, broken completely in half.

The kids had been engaging in some before-school athletics apparently, a game they’d created involving a humongous liquid-filled koosh ball and air time. Performing the post-breakfast cleaning, I hadn’t entirely tuned into what they were doing. I only put two and two together as I viewed the evidence.

A few weeks ago, the broken wood blind would have set me off in a tirade. Our house is tremendously kid-friendly, and I allow creative, messy–and admittedly sometimes rough–play in our house, more than perhaps many moms do. But I’ve repeatedly instructed my children that hurling toys in the house is strictly off-limits. Still, they’ve continued to do it, and today they learned the reasoning behind the rule. So in my mind, I had a sturdy foundation for a full-on lecture complete with voice rising in volume and pitch until it became a frenzy of unintelligible words and paraverbal utterances.

But instead, at least at first, this is what my kids heard: *silence*

I looked at the broken blind, and in some gift of divine brilliance (definitely not from me) called two mantras to mind: 1. No talking; and 2. No emotion.

I clicked “Send,” and the party began. I’d just submitted a piece of editing work that had dogged me for months. I had no deadline, so the project hung over my head as I dealt with more urgent tasks such as taking care of my kids, blogging, and watching “Whose Line” reruns. Finally, in an effort to rid myself of the burden, I’d committed myself to work on this project a couple of hours each week, and today, the deed was done. I attached the manuscript to an e-mail, and happily sent it on its way.

Then the party started. I felt jubilant inside and needed to do a victory dance. However, dancing alone in my office just didn’t cut it. I needed an audience. No, I needed companions, witnesses. So I sent out a tweet on Twitter: “Just sent off the Powerful Conversations Course to its next destination! And now for a little victory dance!” Even that seemed a little anemic. So I started inviting dance song requests. As responses came in, I played the songs on iTunes and danced to them, sending out a tweet to the person who requested it dedicating that dance to her. I felt so happy and grateful that I had my friends joining in my joy, laughing along with me, and participating in the craziness.

As a life coach, I notice that many of my clients struggle with celebration. I understand them, because I struggle with it too! I’m not sure why. I think most of my clients tend to be highly intelligent people, people who achieve a lot, and for whom celebration comes hard because it feels like celebration should be saved for big occasions. I’m all for celebrating big occasions! A wedding, a birthday party, the beginning of a new year, and completing a projects all deserve celebration.

But big celebrations are few and far between. Where’s the joy in the everyday? What about the small victories in life? What about making lunches for the kids? Making it through a boring meeting? Getting the grocery shopping done? So much drudgery. Where is the light?

I used to make fun of athletes who’d do a victory dance after achieving what boiled down to doing their job. They’d make a tackle, then dance their carefully choreographed moves. I used to equate that to making a photocopy on the Xerox machine. I’d place the paper on the glass, press the copy button, then do my own dance. But I was making fun, not joining in.

I know that football players now receive penalties for any kind of organized celebrating, and I understand why. It takes time. The game drags because of it. But you know what, I’m no longer certain that celebrating the more mundane plays is a bad thing. Perhaps we need to add more time into our days for just such acknowledgement.

After all, life is hard. It’s hard for everyone. As parents of gifted children, we face many struggles. Sometimes just getting our kids out the door to run errands or go to school is a victory. Have you ever felt like that? I sure have. And we face those trials constantly. We expend massive amounts of energy trying to strategize our days so they run as smoothly as they possibly can, and even still events converge to thwart us (such as trying to finish this blog post while my daughter blithely–and loudly–sings “B-I-N-G-0″ instead of doing her homework.) So when we achieve something simple or an activity goes exceptionally easy for us, whether big or small, wouldn’t it be worth a momentary celebration, a little victory dance?

Hey, I just finished this post! I’m taking requests…

“Should the air pressure in the cabin depressurize, an oxygen mask will fall from the compartment above you. Place the mask over your nose and mouth, pulling the straps on either side to tighten the mask against your face. If you’re traveling with a child, place your mask on your face first, then assist your child.”

I love airplane travel, and have heard the above speech hundreds of times. Usually, I give it only cursory attention; having heard it so many times, I could probably deliver the spiel. But sometimes I wonder whether, in case of emergency, I really will know what to do should oxygen masks pop in front of my face and those of my children. I imagine my first impulse would be to help my children. Forget what the flight attendant says, my babies are in danger!

But why do the airlines give this advice? Do they hate children? Are children the disposable people on the plane? We all know the answer to this one: parents need to take care of themselves first so they can then help their children.

Applied to the rest of life where we face so many emergencies–spilled milk, sibling squabbles, skinned knees–we can easily forget this wisdom. Instead, we run between one disaster to another with little regard for our own needs. As parents of gifted kids, we may feel this even more. We’ve had to deal with more intense tantrums, discussions with teachers who don’t understand giftedness, appointments with professionals to help us deal with 2e issues, among others. At the end of the day, we fall into bed utterly exhausted emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Then we wake the next morning with low energy and dread for what the day might bring.

What might happen if we applied oxygen mask wisdom to all of our parenting? What if we took care of ourselves in the interest of caring for our kids’ needs? What might change then? How would we think differently? What would we do differently?

I believe some of us fear we’ll become selfish, narcissistic machines, doing nothing but going for massages and manicures. Our kids will go hungry and sit in squalor, crying, while we read our gossip magazines and sip our tea. But really, with the amount of sacrifice we’ve shown we can give, are we really even capable of this?

What if it were imperative that you took care of yourself so that you could take care of your children? What would you do? And what might the real results be? Could it be that your kids would have a mom who has more energy and groundedness from which to operate, more love to give away? Tell me what you think!

My heart has felt heavy today. I’ve been asking others the question “If you’re a woman who happens to be the mom of 1 or more gifted kids, what would you say your greatest need is?” I’ve received a list of answers that has broken my heart because I know the pain behind them. I feel it for the women who have responded.

And I feel it personally. I have one 2e child, and yesterday we began occupational therapy. This particular child has experienced almost every form of therapy you can imagine: vision, speech, physical, etc. My beautiful, delightful, gifted child struggles sometimes. And I find it hard to watch. I’m thankful and hopeful for the strategies we’re engaging to help this child resolve the issues at hand, and the journey is rough. What parent can watch that and not feel empathy?

It’s also hard because on top of everything else, therapy requires work at home. Our schedule has become packed with appointments and homework. Invariably, I have to keep a chart. I must confess, I am chart-challenged. In fact, I hold structure of any kind at arm’s length. It’s just not part of my natural rhythm in most cases. So to work toward my child’s healing and strength, I have to engage my weakness and areas of challenge. In some ways, I have to deny myself.

But isn’t that what love is? Isn’t that what we moms and dads do for our kids? So on I go, facing my own struggle to help my child face hers. To help myself, I’ve gotten creative. I’ve developed a new perspective around the challenge. The records I have to keep are a part of my child’s story, and as I keep them, I’m writing her history, acknowledging her growth, identifying her inevitable success. This reframing gives me more energy and even a little excitement to a task I’d normally do with feet dragging.

As parents of gifted children, we all face struggles of some kind. To help us get through them, we can engage our own creativity to develop a new approach, a new vision of what we’re tackling, and in doing so, bring more fulfillment to the role of parenting.

Yesterday I posted this question on Twitter: If you are a woman who happens to be a mom to 1 or more gifted kids, what would you say is your greatest need? I didn’t get too many bites on the question, but the ones I did get were incredible. One woman told me she couldn’t cover it in 140 characters (the Twitter limit), so she blogged about it instead. (You can read her post here.) In this beautiful, poignant rant, she listed many things she needs, from true school support to people understanding how hard it is to raise a gifted child to the ability to maintain her mind so she could develop that of her children. These are only three of many things she said she needed, and in the end, she couldn’t nail her answer down to one greatest need.

As I read her post multiple times, I felt such empathy. I’ve walked many miles in her shoes, and I know the joys and challenges of the journey. I had asked the question because I know my own experience. I’ve also researched giftedness and parenting gifted children. I have my own personal list of needs, and head knowledge gained from books and websites. But I didn’t feel confident that I really understood what moms of gifted kids need. If you’d asked me before reading her blog post, I would have thought most moms of gifted kids needed time for themselves, room of their own, a life and purpose to express.

Perhaps that’s true. But as I re-read the blog post and the comments that followed, one theme clearly emerged: moms of gifted kids need to feel seen and understood. It’s as simple as that. Most people don’t comprehend how challenging it can be to raise a gifted child, especially when that child has a learning disability, AD/HD, or another challenge added to it. They wonder why we harp on school placement; surely these smart children can figure out how to survive the system, can’t they? People look askance at us when our kids melt down in public. And often, frankly, they don’t want to hear about our struggles. We’re blessed with gifted children, after all, and we should be grateful, not complaining.

I believe we are a grateful bunch. We do appreciate how wonderful our kids are (especially when other people don’t understand them). But we also experience a set of challenges that those “outside” would never believe, perhaps wouldn’t be able to survive! Gifted children are high needs children, and as we strive to fulfill those needs, we can so easily deplete ourselves.

I say all this so that you parents of gifted kids out there know that someone sees and understands you. I do. And I know others who do too. I asked the question about needs for a reason. I want to know deep down what you need so I can create opportunities for you to be seen and understood. So stay posted. Help is on the way.

I hung up the phone from my conference call, an hour’s worth of feeling like Charlie Brown’s teacher was talking in my ear. Wah wah wah waaaaahhhh…

I walked out of my office, bleary-eyed, aggravated, and only vaguely aware that the family room was completely dark. Didn’t matter. Within seconds, the lights flashed on, and I heard my kids say “Lisa Lauffer, you’re our next contestant on Deal or No Deal!”

Only then did it register that while I’d been on the phone, the kids had been awfully quiet, which usually means mischief is afoot. However, this time their stealthiness served a purpose: from their own resources they’d recreated the entire Deal or No Deal set. On a large piece of cardboard they’d listed the amounts of money I could win (from a penny to $6517.01). They’d placed numbered labels on the drawers from my son’s portable shelving system, and each upside-down drawer covered a paper with a dollar amount written on it. 

I sat in the chair they’d set out for me, and boldly chose my “suitcase”: number 11. I stated loudly and confidently that the $6517.01 was in my suitcase. Then, just like the TV game, I had to prove it by having the one lovely lady (my daughter, who also served as Howie) open other cases: first four, then three, then two, then one until we were done. Halfway through, they invited my husband down from the second floor to give me input on my decisions: which suitcase to choose next, whether to accept or decline the banker’s offer.

And the banker, my son, sat behind another large piece of cardboard, cold and calculating (literally–he had a calculator with him!). After each set of cases I opened, he used his self-developed algebraic equation to determine his offer: $4578.51, $3026.34, $2000.25 (yes, the amounts kept going down since I’d knocked the $6517.01 out in the first round–oops). He wrote the offer on a piece of paper and displayed the number through a hole cut in the cardboard.

I couldn’t stop myself. After every offer, I just knew I had a higher amount in my suitcase. In the end, I walked away with $1500 in clean, cold Monopoly money. And a smile on my face.

Here’s the deal. Creativity comes with a price: mess. My kids turned the family room topsy-turvy, and in that state it stays, since the kids continue to play the game. That night, having just finished a phone call that had left me depleted, I could easily have unleashed my frustration onto my kids for encouraging entropy to continue its reign over our home. And the game would be over. No winners.

Or I could engage in this surprise they had created just for me. I had a moment to decide: Deal or No Deal? Fortunately, this time it took me only a nanosecond to choose. Deal. I’m in. And delight was the result.

Today it begins.

For some, it began January 1, 2009. But for those of us with children, the New Year starts today. The husbands (if we have them) go back to work. School-age children return to academia; younger kids return to preschool or their scheduled tot activities. Perhaps we, too, return to our jobs. Whatever our scenarios, moms around the world are facing the first Monday of 2009 and going back to the grind.

So how will it be different? When the New Year approaches, some of us create resolutions to make the current year better than the one before. Some of us eschew resolutions yet want to invite change of some sort. It’s natural. A New Year denotes a new beginning, an opportunity to take stock, to see what we like about our lives, to jettison what we don’t, and to invite something new to manifest itself. But those high hopes born in the holiday euphoria won’t ever become realities if we don’t take steps toward them in the harsh light of the Monday morning after.

Today, January 5, 2009 is where the rubber meets the road. If you want to create true life change this year, begin by answering these questions today:

• What do you want to leave behind in 2008?
• How will you practically accomplish that today?
• What do you want to invite into your life in 2009?
• What step will you make toward that beginning or change today?
• Who will you invite into the process to help you along the way?
• Will you contact that person today?

I wish you all the joy and richness of creating the life you want beginning today where the rubber meets the road. And if you’d like guidance from a life coach along the way, please contact me. I’d love to take this journey toward change with you!

Today was my children’s last day of school for 2008. Yay! We’re on Winter Break!

Ack! We’re on Winter Break! Seventeen days with two children in tow hyped up on sugar, engaging in Christmas festivities, lacking their usual structure, with abundant free time on their hands. Seventeen days in which I don’t have my usual structure and space to pursue what energizes me, to accomplish goals, and to converse uninterrupted with other grown-ups.

On the one hand, I’m looking forward to time with my kids. I really enjoy their energy, creativity, laughter, and play. On the other hand, I know that so much time together can often result in emotional stress that creates havoc at holiday time.

How am I going to handle it? I’m going to practice.

Actually, I’m going to engage in two specific practices that help me stay grounded and connected to my joy. The first is movement. I’m a fidgeter. If I don’t get enough movement, I feel as if I have extra energy zinging inside my body desperately seeking an outlet, and it eventually leads to frustration. Mitigating that frustration requires extra energy, creating a hazardous cycle until I blow up. I’d rather expend energy through movement I love–dancing, walking, and playing outside or at the gym with the kids–and avoid the emotional outbreak that comes when I don’t.

The second practice I’m committing to is soaking. This discipline involves laying or sitting still in God’s presence, focusing on Him, and allowing Him to show up however He wants. I’m finding that this practice grounds me, centers me in God and in who He created me to be so that I can hear His voice more clearly and act more in line with His will. It feeds my soul.

Amid all the holiday hubbub, I will do each of these two practices everyday. All my other customary pursuits may shift around my children, but these two activities will happen as preventative measures–preventing me from losing myself then from losing it with the kids.

Are your kids on Winter Break? What practices might you commit to so you’ll stay connected to yourself and your joy at this holiday time? 

As I type, my daughter sits at the other computer working on a book report that’s due tomorrow. My daughter was home ill when the teacher assigned this project (a month ago), and since the teacher didn’t give the assignment to my daughter when she returned to school, we didn’t know about it until this afternoon. And this isn’t your run-of-the-mill book report. No, this is a “cereal box” book report. Each side of the box covers a different part of the book (summary, setting, characters–you get the idea), which means wrapping the box completely in text-covered paper, including the inside (she had to cut the front of the box so it opens like a book). As if I didn’t have enough wrapping to do at this time of year! (Thank God I had an empty cereal box in my recycling bin!)

This last-minute assignment produced a strong emotional reaction in me, and somewhat feverish activity for me and my daughter. She’s in second grade and needs support to complete this assignment. I’m wondering why I’m experiencing such a strong response. What’s going on within me? We could totally blow off this assignment if we wanted. She’s in second grade; her score on this project won’t make or break her chances for acceptance into Harvard. We could even turn it in late–she’d have a lower score, but perhaps we wouldn’t feel as harried doing it. So what’s the deal?

On one hand, I feel this situation is unfair. The teacher didn’t communicate, so we’re thrown into chaos. When a child is sick, s/he already has so much catching up to do that the teacher should make it as easy as possible by actually giving the child the work s/he missed (this wasn’t the only assignment we struggled to get either).

But even deeper, what’s really going on with me? Am I so into my child’s work as a reflection of myself? I thought I was over that. I really tried to never feel that way in the first place. But here I am. If I don’t get my daughter to do this project and do it well, I will feel like I failed somehow. I already feel badly that I didn’t see the assignment was posted on the school website, even though I’d looked. I didn’t cull through the scads of website postings to find this one big assignment written in small print (which, as we bloggers know, if you want people to pay attention to it on the web, you really ought to put it in bold, bullets, caps, or something else to make it scream at the reader). I feel like I’ve failed. I haven’t done my homework, and now my daughter is having to cram on hers.

I realize now that instead of doing homework, I need to do some heartwork. I want to let go. I want to teach my children the deeper lessons of learning from mistakes and not beating ourselves up for missing something. Of giving ourselves grace. Of doing our best among difficult odds, and accepting the results with joy. And of knowing that in the big scheme of things even big assignments don’t matter all that much. What’s really important is that we learn the important life lessons along the way.

You have a child who concocts stories with broadband speed, asks a never-ending stream of questions, knows information after her first exposure to it, and can engage adults’ attention like few children you’ve ever seen. Is she gifted? And if she is, how do you parent her?

To find answers to these questions, I recommend reading Raising a Gifted Child: A Parenting Success Handbook by Carol Fertig (2009; Waco, TX: Prufrock Press Inc.). This highly readable book gives parents information about giftedness that helps them determine whether to pursue testing and educational changes. It also outlines parental responsibilities in raising gifted children, expresses the importance of creativity–which is huge in gifted children–covers specific subjects in which kids might possess exceptional abilities, and describes some uniques groups of gifted kids and their specific needs. Along the way, Fertig offers many resources, both print and online, for parents to access in determining their children’s giftedness and in meeting their needs.

What I most appreciated about Fertig’s book, however, was her tone. When wondering whether a child is gifted and how to help our children make the most of their innate abilities, we moms and dads of gifted kids often switch into hyper-parenting mode. We do what we can to create the best educational experience for our children, often amid an educational context that doesn’t understand a gifted child’s needs. We strive to set the stage for our children to meet their full potential. While affirming these desires and efforts, Fertig communicates the necessity of relaxing a bit, of allowing our children to unfold in their way and time, and of accepting their challenges as growth opportunities.

I highly recommend Raising a Gifted Child. If you suspect your child is gifted, you will gain much information and encouragement for the discovery journey ahead of you. And if you already know you have a gifted child, this book is, at the least, required for your resource shelf and, at the most, required reading. My copy is already underlined and dog-eared, and I know I will refer to it often in the coming years as my children continue to grow and develop into the amazing people they are destined to become.