Behind Compared to What?
She mentioned it almost in passing — that her seven-year-old was already working through long division.
We were in a library parking lot. Both loading kids into cars. I had just met her inside. And she said it the way you say things that aren't a big deal to you, because to her, it wasn't.
I smiled. Said something like, oh, that's wonderful.
And then I drove home and spent the rest of the afternoon reconstructing everything we had done that week and measuring it against a seven-year-old I had never met doing math I hadn't even introduced yet.
I don't know if this is just me. But I have a feeling it's not.
The word "behind" is interesting when you actually stop and look at it. Because it sounds like a fact. Like someone held a ruler up to your child and the number came back low. It has that kind of authority. And when another mom mentions long division and yours is still working on subtraction, something in your brain just quietly files that under: behind.
But behind whom?
Measured by what?
Headed toward which goal?
I've started asking those three questions every time the comparison spiral starts. Because "behind" never actually comes with an answer to any of them. It just arrives, certain of itself, and sits down like it belongs there.
What I actually need to know isn't whether he's doing what some other seven-year-old is doing. What I need to know is whether he understands what I taught him last week. Whether he's moving, even slowly, in the direction we're going.
That's a completely different question. It has a completely different answer.
My son goes deep instead of wide. He will spend three hours on one thing that interests him and absorb more than he would in three weeks of being pushed through something he isn't ready for. I have graduate level study in developmental psychology — I knew this in theory. But there's a difference between knowing it and watching it happen in front of you. When something clicks for him, it clicks fast. When it doesn't, no amount of pushing makes it click any faster. It just makes both of us miserable.
So I had to stop holding someone else's ruler up to him.
Because it was never their ruler to begin with. And it was never going to tell me anything true about him.
Behind is someone else's word. I'm not sure it belongs in my vocabulary anymore.
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A question I've been sitting with: Behind whom, measured by what, and headed toward which goal — and have I ever actually answered all three?
Love,
Claire