An Extraordinary Child

My extraordinary child has suddenly turned into an ordinary person.

An adult for over a decade now, my extraordinary child was intelligent beyond compare, precocious, sensitive to the world, a voracious (and speedy) reader, funny, beautiful, with all the qualities you could name. She not only had every kind of fact at her fingertip, she was so astute in her judgement she could see through all falsehood and focus in each case on what was most important about the fact. She gave advice in a balanced way and remained cool through crises. She was always wise beyond her years and a terrific companion.

Then a change happened in her life and overnight she got transformed into an ordinary person.

Now, she worries and gets nervous at the slightest deviation of life from the (imagined) norm. She keeps searching for more and more facts on an issue and seems to not be able to sift the wheat from the chaff. Her judgement has become cloudy. She cannot see things in perspective. Obvious answers elude her. She spends time on relatively trivial things in repetitive ways and confuses them for the important. She forgets, she is careless, she gets easily upset and she takes refuge in commonplace novels.

Where did my brilliant, extrardinary child go?

She got transformed by motherhood. Now she looks at her baby, and like every other parent, harbours the illusion that her baby is an extraordinary one.