Lessons I'm Going
To Teach My Kids
Too Late #25
Everybody thinks they’re normal. Everybody thinks that everyone else had the same childhood that they had, their
parents treated them the same as other parents treated their kids, and their experiences were the same as everybody else.Then you get out in the world, you meet other former kids, and inconsistencies start to appear. You might have suspected earlier, when you were a kid and you didn’t like going over to a friend’s house because his dad was ‘weird’, but it doesn’t really become evident until you’re an adult and you start comparing notes with other adults.
Some kids have great parents, some have terrible parents, some have siblings, some don't. Some kids grow up in big cities, but there are small towns and farming communities too. Some kids even grow up in other countries, believe it or not. Rich or poor, popular or lonely, spoiled or neglected, loved or not-so-loved, there are so many different variables to make up a life, yet we all think that we’re the normal one.
I had an inkling that there was something different about the school I went to from grades 2 through 6, but I could never figure out what. I’d describe parts of it to my high school classmates, but they’d laugh at me in disbelief, so I stopped talking about it. But I’d hear about their experiences and wonder why I never did that, or why they did things so differently, or why I was taught subjects that they weren’t and vice-versa. But then, thinking I was the normal one, I figured that they must have been the ones missing out somehow.
Then, one day, as an adult, while researching something in the main city library, I came across a book that I recognized. It was a book espousing the philosophies of the grade school that I had gone to. The founder had written many books on education, early learning, and child development and here they were on the shelf in front of me in the real world.
“I remember this one. I’ve seen this one at the school. We actually had this one. And this one… What section of the library am I in?”
I looked up at the sign above my head. ‘Occult’.
“Oh, wow,” I thought to myself, “that makes so much more sense.”
Lesson #25 —
It's Weird Not To Be Weird
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