Dumbfounded

What do you do when your kid's smarter than you are? I guess life goes on - I'm still the mom, right? What I say goes and all of that...but it is a little unnerving.

My sophomore son just took the ACT for his first time and scored much higher than I even dreamed of scoring, eclipsing his father and me by several points, and his older brother, the valedictorian, by one point. To celebrate he sat down at the piano to play "Defying Gravity" (I can't play a note) then went outside in the heat of the day to mow the front lawn. What a good kid!

And I am left contemplating my next move. How do I channel him? Do I lead or follow? He's still a 16-year-old kid with all of the usual immaturities and not much actual life experience, but he's smart, really smart, and in ways that I am not. That's the unsettling part.

When I was pregnant with Tom, I saw a nurse midwife who recommended that I eat a lot of red meat in the 4th through 6ths months of my pregnancy for brain development. At the time I thought it sounded a little far fetched, but on the slim chance that she knew what she was talking about, I did eat a lot of red meat - is that how this happened? He's had several excellent teachers - should I hold them responsible? I'm not complaining - just (literally) dumbfounded.

Several years ago, miffed by how rarely I was given an opportunity to punish my children, I coined a new word: spankable, which functions as both a noun and an adjective. Whenever one of my children comes up with a brilliant idea, making me feel inferior in any way, I declare their idea to be 'spankable' and start chasing them until I have them in a bear hug. (This first happened when Abby, then three years old, corrected my assembly of her Fischer Price kitchen. She couldn't read yet, but she could tell by the schematic that I was putting it together incorrectly.) As they get older, they come up with 'spankable' ideas more and more frequently. I am regularly amazed by their original thinking. 'How did you come up with that?' I thought I was the one with all the answers.

I probably should have known that my children would surpass me - that's what everyone should reasonably expect. It just never occurred to me before.