To me, any time there is a deviation from the image I had in my mind of something--especially something big like how having kids would be--there is a kind of mourning for it.
Case #1: I left a VERY expensive German beer stein in a park and walked away from it when I was in high school. It was a purchase I made as a favor for someone who had given me $50 (a lot of money then!) up front, so I had to replace it out of my own spending money. And thus my trip to Europe was not AT ALL what I had planned. 20+ years later, and I still grieve over that mistake.
Case #2: in college, I met a guy I (thought I) wanted to marry. It crashed and burned. I mourned not so much for the relationship as it had actually existed--that was brief and, frankly, not good! But I mourned the relationship that lived in my imagination, the one I had seen the potential for. Oh, did I mourn. For a long time. YEARS!
Am I sorry I'm not with the guy now? Oh, in SOOOOOOO many ways, NO!!! A thousand times, NO! But there is a small part of me that is still disappointed that the ideal never became reality.
Case #3: I gave birth to a smart kid. So I envisioned a great school career for him. He's a handsome, social, mature, fun kid, too, so I thought he was going to take the school by a storm.
When he turned miserable and started becoming a problem kid in 1st grade, and we had to pull him out for emergency homeschooling, I found myself mourning the education ideal that was not to be. Does that mean I don't think my kid is amazing and wonderful? Of course not! I think he's more wonderful now that I'm with him more, actually. But...
>I will never get to hear the glowing teacher comments--like the ones I heard from his K teacher!--that I had imagined.
>I don't get to have all that glorious time to myself during the day that I had so eagerly anticipated so that I could write. Put 'im on the bus in the morning and get 'im off in the afternoon, happy and full of stories about his day. Not happening. And as my introvert husband and I (also introvert) joke when one of us needs alone time: "How can I miss you if you won't go away?"
>I kept many of the same friends all through grade school, jr. high and high school. My best friend and I were in K together, and we're still good friends. But my son doesn't get to have that experience of riding the bus with the same people for years, sharing growing up on that daily basis, knowing people relly well. He has friends, but he doesn't have the same experience with them since he sees them once a week at most.
>I don't get to attend his school shows, carnivals, PTA meetings, etc. Are those annoying a lot of the time? Of course! But never getting to go to one makes me feel like I'm missing the school experience.
>I have to work hard to be sure that my son has his needs met. If I do nothing, nothing gets done. That's certainly not to say that school is meeting every need of every child! Of course not! But they are meeting some of the kids' needs. In my ideal, they met most of my child's needs. Without me, my son would starve, be in physical danger, and would learn nothing. I mourn the ability to coast sometimes if coasting is needed without feeling guilty. (In my ideal, I would have been doing a lot of coasting...)
>I have to face the fact that I may never see him walk down the aisle to "Pomp and Circumstance" for his high school graduation, since he may wind up graduating differently (early, online, from homeschool, etc.). I'll probably never see him in high school sports/theater/band/whatever in front of cheering crowds. I will miss that.
And so on...
Do you see? It's not the GTness itself that I grieve over. It's the changes that it brings with it. And some of the changes are pretty big!
As for denial, I think there are a couple of brands:
One comes when you try not to think about how different your child is because it is hard to imagine that your child is really that different. He just seems like himself...How can I even think about his being +5 years in math or graduating from high school before he's old enough to date...or whatever it is that seems so foreign to your experience. This form of denial stems from not wanting to see reality or just simply not being able to recognize it. A skewed idea of normal can do this, as well as fear of being so far away from the middle of the Bell Curve.
The second, "She's not that smart, really" type of denial creeps in as a way to keep your child and yourself from being ostracized by other kids and their parents, even parents of other GT kids, sometimes. To avoid being seen as braggarts or pushy stage parents, we internalize a wish that maybe they really
aren't that smart. Maybe they're normal! Maybe they can do what the other kids do! This one is a brand of wishful thinking.
For the record, I am NOT sad or upset that my son is GT. He is what he is, and I love my kids no matter who or what they are. But having a child who is HG+ is a big challenge. It has turned our lives upside-down in an awful lot of ways! It is hard sometimes, and would have been a lot harder if we hadn't resigned ourselves to giving up our ideal and accepting that this is our reality. Mostly, I mourn that shiny, pretty, easy, happy ideal that will never exist.
Well, wait! Maybe I don't have to give it up yet! There's still hope for DS4! He might be "normal" still!
