Most gifted adults have gifted families. Not all of us but most of us. The impact of growing up surrounded by other people with complementary or clashing interests and intensities is something often experienced by the gifted. Singer-songwriter Dan Hill’s autobiography, I Am My Father’s Son provides an unflinching description of growing up with a powerful, mercurial, intellectual father (as well as a less powerful but also intellectual and mercurial mother and his gifted sister and brother). On the surface, I have little in common with Hill other than that we both grew up in Toronto – I do not share a bi-racial background, a father who was a local public figure, a rise and fall as a singer, or the mental illness experienced by various family members nor does my family experience include the unrelentingly critical nature of Hill’s relationship with his father but his description of the intense emotional nature of a family of gifted people, THAT I could relate to.
My apology to Hill for applying the term ‘gifted adult’ to him – it is one I’m imposing. But reading his book, he describes and castigates himself for his intensity and ‘too-muchness’ countless times. An extremely bright man who struggled within the school system, barely finishing high school though he was published in the local press as a teenager and signed with a record label at age eighteen, Hill describes himself as driven to create music. Hill’s description of what music means to him and how laser focused he was to learn and create music as both a singer and a songwriter will resonate with any gifted adult who has ever had the ‘rage to master’ anything. He is also a lifelong distance runner and his description of his appetites: for food, sex and physical activity provide further insight into the experience of being gifted beyond his obvious creative and intellectual gifts. Also, Hill describes a lifetime of talking too loud and having difficulty navigating typical social conventions. His intensity alone emanates from the pages of the book so strongly that I couldn’t help but I feel I was peering into the mind of a gifted adult.
For me, the particularly interesting part of the book was his description of growing up in a family of a other gifted people with unconventional ideas moving through his home at supersonic speed layered with powerful emotions and strong personalities. Hill’s parents approach to life was unconventional, starting with their mixed marriage, the way they questioned everything (his father’s career was grounded in questioning the status quo on race), rejection of Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, organized religion and social norms. Hill grew up enveloped in his parent’s powerful love for each other and their children but their expression of this love contrasted with the world Hill saw around him. In Hill’s words of advice to his son:
”You’re quirky. Big deal. I’m quirky, my brother’s quirky, so we’re all f—ing crazy in a way. Embrace it and do something with it. That skewed vision of the world, seeing things kind of lopsided, that’s what really connects with people.”
I think it would be fair to say that this quote reflects his vantage point as a man in his fifties rather than the boy in high school struggling to find his place in the world. As he tells it, Hill’s family was eccentric and iconoclastic and always charged and often combative, as he was always being challenged by his parents, whatever the situation, even as an adult. However, he also describes visiting with his friend’s families as a teenager and finding them colourless and quiet in contrast. Hill paints a vivid description of what it’s liked to grow up in an intellectually and emotionally charged household.
If you read about gifted children, it is often noted that the intensity of a gifted child can be wearing on a parent. But I’ve yet to see it acknowledged that as a gifted adult your intellectual and emotional intensity also has the potential to wear on your children. Ultimately, Hill reaches the conclusion that his family and his father in particular did him a favour by providing an unusual and unconventional upbringing, particularly since he acknowledges that he and his father are quite similar, that he is ‘his father’s son’. However, arriving at this ultimate conclusion was the culmination of many years of struggling with himself, his father and the rest of his family. Only when Hill became a father was he compelled to examine how was raised himself and the death of his father which affected Hill so significantly that for the first time in his life he was unable to create music led him to write this book. Hill’s quest to understand what made his father larger than life, where his values and passions and sensitivities came from and untwist the contradictions and complexities of his father’s life. Hill looks at his father’s relentlessness – in his profession, in his criticism of his children, in his love for his family, defines Hill’s life story. Hill’s father’s intensity is described as the biggest influence on his life – to my mind, that is a story of a gifted family – a intense gifted father profoundly affecting his intense gifted son.
I wonder how many gifted adults have their own version of growing up in a gifted family. Being gifted means often having a perspective that differs from those around us. Coming from a family that may also sit outside convention adds to feeling out of step particularly if you struggle with your place within your gifted family. Hill provides a very candid portrait of his experience of being the son of sensitive, intense and driven father as he in turn is a sensitive, intense and driven father to his own son. Interesting to see the pattern. Interesting to reflect on the impact of growing up in a family of other gifted people and consider influence and interaction of each of our gifted qualities.
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