I love my son – it’s a 10 from me!
I love my son. Very much. It’s more difficult to write about that than it is to write sarcastically about the joys of waking up at 4am or trying to reason with a mauling, screaming toddler who just wants to embed their fingernails into your chin. But I do love him very much, every day. Today, he reduced me to tears by drawing a number. The number 10, to be specific. I don’t think I even have any justifications for blaming such an unnecessarily emotional response on hormones or lack of sleep; It was just genuine delight and pride.
To give it some context, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him mark a piece of paper with anything recognisable. And even then, if you could see the ’10’ without context you probably wouldn’t know what it was. But he definitely drew a line next to a circle having followed the shape with his finger in a book. I should also say that he attempted each of the natural numbers in the sequence up to 10, but it was very much a case of 10th time lucky after 9 random squiggles.
I’m not really trying to teach him to write, per say. I doubt it will make any difference to his quality of life whether he can draw Arabic numbers before he turns three. In fact, I’d go as far to say that when it comes to quality of life, there’s probably an anti-correlation! I think it is my enthusiasm to teach him maths though that made it so exciting. Maths was always my favourite subject. I was good at it at school, took a masters in it at University and have pretty much kept myself employed ever since with my ability to use it commercially. My dad was very enthusiastic to teach me as a kid and I have to remind myself not to push to hard to get ahead of myself with Piglet.
I also have to remind myself that his brain may not work in the same way that mine does. To some extent, I hope it doesn’t! I can be a pedantic, logical pain in the arse some of the time. For example, I recently found my school annual and in it each pupil was given a quote – designed to reflect their character condensed into a series of words. Mine was: Louis “surely that can’t be right” Stansfield. I’d like to say it was misleading, but it wasn’t.
Piglet’s mummy definitely has a different brain to me and Piglet alternates on a second by second basis from being a mini-Louis to a mini-mummy. In terms of maths, my wife’s brain just doesn’t look at it in the same way at all. She’s dyslexic and while this mostly affects words, there are times when we talk about numbers as if they’re completely different things. She has an intuition about maths and logical problems that I can’t fathom but then also struggles with what, to me, seem like simple issues.
If Piglet’s brain works in the same way as his mummy’s then it will be a powerful, intuitive, connection-making engine that will do things I could never imagine or comprehend. But I will probably struggle to explain mathematics to him in a way that works for him, without significantly changing my approach.
There are moments though when he’s so like me it is terrifying. Earlier today, we were listening to a playlist of songs that he likes. Some Christmas, some modern pop, some classic 80’s… Weezer’s cover of Toto’s Africa came on (naturally!) and within the first 2 seconds of the first bar he turned to me, looked pleasantly surprised and blurted ‘Africa!’. He seems to be able to hear things in songs and contextualise music in ways that I find hard to believe. Continuing the 80’s theme, we were listening to Deacon Blue’s ‘When will you make my telephone ring?’ later in the same playlist and he turned to me and said, “daddy, this is the song we were listening to in the car”. He was right, of course.
Album coming in the fall…
It’s hard to know what I want for him, really. I get very excited when he demonstrates strengths in certain areas. Touching numbers in ascending order is Einstein-level genius, right? Casually throwing the word ‘passenger’ into regular conversation is passive-aggressive verbose verbal dexterity, yes? He’s also a natural performer: we went to the nursery’s Christmas concert the other day and he stood their beaming and raking in the applause. Singing confidently and loudly (just like his mum!). But in truth, I just want him to be content, have purpose and know joy. And it turns out that having a son who can draw the number ’10’ is the answer to that!