There has been a distinct blessings to staying at home with them. I don’t know if I would have had the time or the energy to devote to helping my middle daughter, who ended up having selective mutism and is turning out to be highly gifted as well (she started spontaneously reading at 4 and now reads second grade level and she’s not even in kindergarten yet).

Another other blessing I have is the time to devote to supplementing my children’s public school education. With many budgets being slashed to do the economic belt-tightening school districts have to do, the schools are going to be restricting the budgets for gifted programs and extra-curricular activities (it’s already starting in some places).

We do science experiments at home, we play games and I have a chance to help them understand a lot more than the teachers have time for. I don’t know if I’d have the time or energy for that either.

So, yeah, it’s a bit tricky to find the level of intellectual stimulation I used to have, I have learned a lot about human development, selective mutism, behavior and learning styles, giftedness, and many other topics of interest. Even my former scientific abilities has been useful in teaching my kids or understanding brain functioning.

One of these days I would like to cobble a career back together, possibly incorporating things I have learned along the way of mothering my young children.

I’ve already done a lot of peer-to-peer counseling due to my knowledge of gifted issues and selective mutism. In a way, that’s my current “career” (albeit an unpaid one). Hmmm…interesting thought…must keep that in mind.

Again, thanks for the thoughts.

Casey

That sentence absolutely jumped out at me. The limits on my intellectual space, as you so eloquently put it, have been some of the more challenging aspects of motherhood for me. My son is four, and I have really struggled with interruptions when I need to think. And it really is a need.

I have been at home with my son since he was born, but, in the last year, I have had the opportunity to re-engage in the professional world in a flexible way, and that has made a world of difference for me because it does allow me an outlet for my need to think and create and pursue ideas. I’ve only very recently come to recognize giftedness in myself (and in my son), and the self-understanding I am gleaning from that perspective is so helpful in explaining why motherhood has been so challenging for me and why it has affected me in ways that it does not seem to affect so many other women. I firmly agree that gifted mothers experience motherhood differently, and it is crucial to our very Selves that we honor our differences and respect the needs they entail. Thanks for an insightful article.