Hi, I am sorry if this is a little bit off-topic, but I didn’t know where else I could ask. Some recent events made me think about my extended family and my childhood, and I would like to know whether someone else has experienced something similar to what I am about to describe.
So, I come from a huge family on my father’s side. One of my great-grandfathers was a teacher who had a weather station at home, was an amateur photographer, wrote poetry and used to take the school children on field trips to learn about trees, rocks and animals. He had nine children and eight of them went to University, including 4 daughters (this was in the early 20th century, so it was very unusual). One of these children became a Law professor at a very early age, then a diplomat, then a translator, then a writer and historian.
After University, my grandmother married my grandfather, who was a reputed doctor whose real passion was Physics, so he would wake up every morning at 4 a.m. to study Physics before work. They had lots of children, who were all, according to my grandmother, of average intelligence. However, none of them seem average to me. They are all quite quirky, and they all seem to share a pattern of focusing on one theme, learn everything about it, then move on to something else. My father has been an avid reader since he was a child, has been involved in grassroots politics since he was young and is always learning something new, even now that he is retired.
I don’t know a lot about my own childhood. I do know that I was an early talker (I don’t know how early, but apparently one of my uncles, who was doing a PHD in Psychology at the time, was very impressed) and some of the drawings my mother kept show that I was drawing human figures with head, body, hair, arms, legs, hands and feet when I was barely two. School was always too easy, so I used to daydream all the time and still get mostly As and Bs. I was an avid reader too: my parents opened a bookstore account for me in order to nurture my love for books, then closed it because I was spending too much. I was reading adult literature by the time I was 12-13.
Life went on and I had a child. I had the feeling that he was smart, but when I talked to my father about it he never seemed impressed. That is normal, all children do it, they all have very good memories, he would say. Long story short, I ended up having DS tested. Apparently, he has an IQ in the moderately gifted range and a GAI in the DYS range.
So now I wonder: is it possible that they all thought that they were average because they were all the same?
(Please forgive any mistakes, I am not a native English speaker)
