My father should have known better. He was a college graduate, a Army veteran of strategic bombing missions over Japan in 1945, and by the time I was old enough to understand what other people were saying to me about him, a respected figure in our community. I have distinct memories, corroborated by my elders when I was old enough to ask about them, of having been taken at the age of five for special intelligence testing at Boston University, that he knew there was something out of the ordinary about his son. None of that helped. Nothing was ever done in response to the results of that testing except, perhaps, the crafting of various unacknowledged barriers by my elders that helped them ignore the whole thing.
He should have known better. Within a few years of coming home from the War, my father completed the first of what would become a long series of college night classes to qualify himself as a public school teacher, while working days as a life insurance agent to support his family. By the time I had grown old enough to go off to college on my own he had progressed from being an elementary classroom teacher to a school principal to the Superintendent of Schools in an exclusive New Jersey community. The way he did that had sufficient effect on me that my first real job, fresh out of college myself, was as a Middle School math teacher. At first glance you might have accepted our experiences as yet another chapter in the Great American Success Story, but you would have been wrong. Along with the rest of my family, my father did a fine job of keeping me from realizing what was going on. In looking back over many long and not particularly happy years, the man I grew to be learned that I presented a classic example of an unacknowledged gifted child. The path I followed to that classroom had indeed led through a wilderness of near total lack of confidence, a dismal self image, and a crisis of identity severe enough to have brought me right into the depths of a debilitating emotional collapse, and the weight of the difficulties all that left behind led me into was such that after a few years of what I thought was success in my chosen profession, it bore me straight off another precipice and out of teaching forever.
My father should have known better, but he did not. Being an intelligent man with a good education did not help him at all in dealing with a gifted son. It happens all the time. In my case, a combination of stern, old-time New England Puritan tradition, a grandmother who had raised my father to fear indulging any interest beyond the hard work necessary to support his family, and a mother who was just a bit afraid of anything intellectual, made it easy to agree that any signs from young Bobby of the kinds of behavior we now associate with being gifted had better be nipped in the bud. My father should have known how to find some time to spend helping me learn more about making model airplanes that would fly, encouraging me to identify and classify the multitude of snakes I kept bringing in from the pasture behind our house, to let me know that being able to read Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer during the summer after I finished First Grade was something wonderful, to do anything to prevent me from having to learn that asking "Can we go do this, Dad?" would guarantee a stern lecture on how hard your father has to work. It was not until I was in High School that I gave up questioning my mother about why I felt so different from the other kids, but I could not remember a time when I didn’t already understand that asking Dad just wasn’t done.
He should have known that never having time for a little boy who was always ready to read another book, ask about something new, make things, do stuff, with his father was not a wise choice. Maybe he did know that, but just like my test at Boston University he did nothing about it. All the kids I grew up with had fathers who worked hard to make a living and we all understood, every one of us, that time with Dad was something special to be treasured, but I knew better than to ask.
Years later, when my wife, a veteran teacher herself, took my parents aside one at time and asked "How could you not have known…how could you have done nothing?", my mother admitted she had been afraid that acknowledging my giftedness would have spoiled me, turned me into a little Smart- Alec. At least she had a reason. My father, I’m told, had nothing to say.
The reasons don’t matter. I suspect that the parents of any gifted child, if they chose to do so, could find reasons to deny acknowledging what is happening. In this context, that my parents found themselves overburdened with residual guilt from their Puritan heritage is beside the point. That they denied acknowledgment is what matters…any one of a thousand different circumstances could have led to the same consequences. Sixty-some years later, my father has passed on to a better place. I do not blame him for what happened. He believed he was doing the right thing and there was nobody to suggest that a fresh look around might be a good idea. In his place would you…could you…have done better? If you can honestly answer yes, then my challenge to you is to do whatever you can to keep the gifted children of today from going unrecognized and unacknowledged.
My father was no help. We can do better.
Robert A. Benjamin is a writer who has devoted years to a personal account of his experiences as an unacknowledged gifted child. To learn more about A Gift of Dreams, I Promised You Daisies, and Side Door To Heaven, the three books of the Imperfectly Ordinary trilogy, go to http://www.imperfectlyordinary.com
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