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As an extremely shy introvert, I just had to comment!

I really feel for you Lori. We live in a very small community where everyone's nose is in everyone's business. If anything in town happens, then everyone else knows it is a matter of minutes. Gossip is the main recreational sport, closely followed by football. Actually, I'm convinced that football is just a socially acceptable reason for gathering to gossip! And anything that makes you different (whether you are different from the public school kids or from the other homeschoolers) makes you an immediate target. There are certain pockets of intellectual or social inbreeding that encourages uniformity. Anything outside of the norm is then suspicious and undesirable.

So it is hard to ignore these people, or to walk up to them and strike up a conversation. Being different here is similar to having the plague. People do avoid you rather than be seen speaking to you.

I remember when DS was beginning first grade. You will have to picture a six year old boy who very energetic, talks with great enthusiasm and energy about unusual topics, spends a great deal of time in an imaginary world of his own design, and who should really be in third grade. (not too unusual for this group!) We got a "friendly" letter in the mail from an anonymous neighbor suggesting that "he may be as smart as we think he is" but that he would have to learn how to adapt to the real world, and that we should seek intervention before it was too late.

Now you would think that when DS was accelerated a grade, people would have been a little more accepting of DS or of us. Maybe he really is that smart? Maybe kids with really high IQs are just a little bit different than your average kid? Maybe he is completely normal for who he is and doesn't need intervention in order to "fix" him (or save him before it is too late!). No. Even the other parents whose kids were in the gifted program stopped talking to us because now we were different from them.

So I hear you Lori. It is indeed a very lonely road to travel.

So maybe it is background noise that should be ignored. But when you are walking down the sidewalk on Halloween night and your next-door neighbor has stopped ten feet behind you, holding her kids back so that they will not walk with your son (and explaining loudly to her kids why she is holding them back)... and your son is stopped on the sidewalk, staring at the mom and her three kids because he really wants to go door to door with his friends, and not understanding why they don't walk the ten feet up to join him... then it is really difficult to not feel like you have the plague.

Sorry for venting on you guys. I guess this it struck a nerve. Must repeat original healing mantra...


Okay... I feel better now.