I am a mother of two, both truly outliers in their own right. Oh no, not those kind of outliers. The other kind.
My older one will soon turn 9 but has the emotional maturity of a 5 year old. He hates talking about ‘feelings’ and bottles them up until he can’t anymore and ultimately rages them out. He tears up every time he is corrected or denied something. My only solace lies in the fact that he is a voracious reader and is extremely curious about the world. He is always asking questions of Alexa and whenever possible, Google and occasionally, me. As a result of which, he already knows more about all Sciences, than I do. He spends his time trying to help his poor undereducated mother by rattling off scientific facts, making up quizzes or riddles for me and filling his Invention Diary with ideas on how to colonize another planet, in anticipation of the day you and I run ours to the ground.
My younger one is 7 and is her own brand of unique. She spends her time reading or working on her picture books. She might work on one, for hours at a time, over a whole week and then decide it’s not good enough and shred it to pieces with a dramatic flair. The shredding, the crumpling and the tossing is something she has truly mastered. Reduce, reuse, recycle? What’s that? When she is working, I marvel at her laser sharp focus and her attention span. But then there are times like during online school, when she can’t sit still for one minute and struggles to switch gears. But most of all, I’m amazed at her predilection for being bottoms-up and I don’t mean figuratively. I mean, quite literally, upside-down. She can read, write, talk, sing, dance and even eat upended (yes I know, criminal negligence blah blah). On the sofa, on the bunk bed, on the floor, inside cupboards, obviously on the jungle-gym and other garden equipment, basically pretty much everywhere. If I hadn’t drawn the line there (so far away from normal), she may have tried doing school that way too. Imagine seeing an upside-down person on your zoom window! And once, when she was upside down on the bed, she asked me to bring her the hula hoop. I’m not entirely sure why.
Apart from this, they are very similar. They love to bamboozle their mother with false promises and throw insults at each other. They are yet to learn how to get along with people or to be polite, or basic table manners or to put things that back in their places, to do their homework on their own (or at all), or even to bathe or brush without being reminded (or at all), to not hit/push/pull/kick/fight with each other. And if I were living in a different country, I might have been given prescription drugs, either for them or for myself. In short, they’re quite a nightmare.
My redemption lies in their cuddles and their giggles and those cards that I get everyday that say, “you’re the best mama in the world”, even though, I’m sure you can tell, I am not.
