Blrgleshnurp

My kids are gifted. Okay, well one is confirmed, the other is showing all the signs. Specifically, my older boy is a 2E/HG kid, and the younger is, well, demonstrating unusual-ness (knows his whole alphabet, can escape from anything, insist he should learn to read at 23 months). Now if all the acronyms there are confusing you, you obviously don't spend time in the gifted community and don't know that gifted isn't always as great as it sounds. Yes, P is likely to do great things someday, assuming someone doesn't kill him for mouthing off to them (total strangers of course). He lacks all filters and is literally exhausting. In the past two weeks I've read loads of normal people badmouthing moms like me for calling our kids gifted. Dude, we did not coin the phrase. We're the ones who call our kids temperamental, stubborn, absolutely inflexible, and "doctor, is this really normal for him?" The term gifted not only lacks imagination, it doesn't begin to cover the whole confusing picture. And then, if you say you have a Highly Gifted kid, they (the uninitiated) assume you're bragging. "Oh, so he's not just supposedly more special than my kid, he's "highly" more special than my kid." Yes, that's right. And you want to know what the fact that he's "highly" more special than your kid means? It means he's been kicked out of public school or nearly so. It means he can't seem to get along with peers his own age. It means that I'm seriously worried about the day he knows more than me, and that it might come before he reaches adolescence. It means that every parenting book out there is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. It means I've actually cried with him because he doesn't fit and can't.

Since the term "gifted" does not tell the whole story, I'm officially coining my own. Yep, my kids are blrgleshnurp. Doesn't sound like a nice Latin-based word? That's cause it isn't. That would be normal. It's not Greek or Anglo either, nor any foreign language you can think of.  I like blrgleshnurp because it sounds sort of funny, doesn't give me any clues to what it means, and won't make any parent of a kid who can go to sleepovers huffy. Blrgleshnurp is as unexplainable and difficult as my kid is. It's even hard to spell.