The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (18 page)

I got out of the car, went into the house, and put a pot of water on to boil for pasta. Then Jake and I spent a companionable few minutes in the fading autumn light decorating the porch together—he with his multidimensional math shapes, me with my spiderwebs and gourds (and maybe a fog machine and a shrieking ghost or two). When I heard my neighbor calling her kids in for dinner, I had an idea.

I wanted Jake to have friends, but I knew I couldn’t send him out to play football with the neighbor boys. That wasn’t going to work. Jake’s physical delays made him clumsy and slow, and I’m not even sure he knew the rules of football at that time. (I’m quite sure he didn’t care.) We needed to find some common ground.

What if I made our house—specifically, Jake’s room—the kind of place that a boy couldn’t help but gravitate toward, so that those other boys would come to him?

The next day, I went shopping. As always, we didn’t have much money, but I saw it as an investment in Jake. I bought him a loft bed and got cool fuzzy rugs and beanbag chairs for the area underneath it. I had Mike and a neighbor push our big-screen TV upstairs, even though it left us with just a little one in the den, and I bought Jake a PlayStation, as well as the videogames the teenager behind the counter told me he’d choose for himself. I bought every kind of flavor-blasted Doritos they had in the store, and made a big batch of chewy homemade cookies with extra chocolate chips. In short, I created the ideal kid hangout—a boy cave—and then I opened the doors.

Jake was a little baffled by my redecorating, but as long as he could have pictures of the solar system up on the walls, he didn’t care about the furniture. The new setup also played to Jake’s strengths. Because
of his incredible visual-spatial skills, Jake was (and still is) amazing at videogames. He’s been known to attract crowds at Circuit City by playing the expert level of Guitar Hero with the game controller behind his head.

The kids came, and they stayed. In fact, Jake is still close with a lot of the boys he got to know that year. One of them in particular, Luke, is still a good friend. Luke’s mom and I had an unspoken understanding. She always hoped that Jake’s love of academics would rub off on Luke, and I secretly hoped that some of Luke’s football cool would stick to Jake.

The moms were my secret weapon, especially a couple of days into winter break, when their own boys had gone completely stir-crazy. They loved Jake. “Please, Kristine, rescue me. They’re trashing the joint! Can Jake come over to play?” Whenever another boy’s mom would drop Jake off after a playdate, she was always quick to compliment him: “He is so incredibly polite! I don’t know how you got him to have such lovely manners!” But I don’t think Jake actually had any more decorum than most other seven-year-old boys. He was just quiet. I would have been thrilled to hear Jake yell “Tickle torture!” when Wes provoked him, so I had my fingers crossed that if he spent enough time with his friends, he’d learn to be just as boisterous as they were.

Similarly, while the other mothers we knew were rolling their eyes at the language their kids used, I practically jumped with pride the night Jake told me the movie he’d seen that afternoon was “wack.” I tried not to make a big deal out of it, but as he was clearing the table, I couldn’t help grinning at Mike. It was his very first piece of slang.

Sometimes Jake and his buddies would play chess together, but mostly they watched movies or battled with their light sabers and ate every chip in the house. When the
Star Wars
prequels came out, Jake memorized every line. But for the first time, he wasn’t the only one. Nearly every boy his age could recite those movies by heart. I was so happy to see him hanging out with his friends, I kept the chips and videogames coming, and I didn’t fuss too much when someone took
out one of the living room lamps in their pursuit of Darth Maul. Sometimes I’d have to give Jake a little nudge: “Hey—maybe it’s time to stop talking about math now?” But in general, he adapted incredibly well, and those kids became real friends.

By now, the daycare was completely integrated into our lives. As before, projects often spilled over from the garage into the house. Most of the time, the project was so much fun that everyone got involved. For instance, we spent two weeks creating a wall-sized mural out of thousands of jelly beans in every color you could possibly imagine. It was hard work! But we were all together, singing songs and telling stories, and it was beautiful when it was done. The immense size of it gave the children a real sense of accomplishment. I’m also pretty sure that we ate as many jelly beans as we glued onto the wall.

Around that time, a new mom came to see me. She was going back to work the next week. Her baby was at that age where separation anxiety kicks in, and it seemed that she was even more upset about leaving her baby than the baby was to be left. I completely understood, of course. I’d been there myself. So I went to sleep thinking,
What can we do to make this little girl’s first day as special as possible?

The next day, I put the kids in the daycare to work—all twelve of them, including Ethan, and when they got home from school, Wesley and Jake, too. Together we made huge butterflies out of strips of crepe paper, in every color they had at the party store. Then we glued them together, and I had Mike hang them from a frame attached to the ceiling. “Go big or go home,” he teased me, not for the first time. The effect of all of the butterflies together, covering the entire ceiling and fluttering in the breeze from an open window, was breathtaking.

The kids I took care of were doing activities and projects that others would have considered wildly out-of-bounds for children their age. But I never understood why you would hold a child back. If they could do something, and they wanted to, why wouldn’t you let them? Every
day, I was astounded by their native strengths. I could never be an electronics whiz like Elliott or artistic like Claire.

My grandparents had always given my sister and me little jobs to do, even when we were tiny. We loved organizing the art supplies in the Sunday school, for instance—a real job, and we did it as soon as we could walk. Stephanie and I were put in charge of organizing the tea service at church, too. Each tray needed to be washed and polished, then set with a full creamer, a sugar bowl, and a small glass full of polished spoons. Nobody ever worried about us breaking a glass, and I don’t remember that we ever did.

We learned at my grandmother’s knee to cut ordinary paper into intricate pieces of art before most kids were allowed to handle safety scissors. We learned how to sew our own clothes as soon as we were old enough to hold a needle. My grandmother’s precise stitches were barely bigger than the weft of the strong cotton fabric she sewed, a sign of her experience. One of my earliest memories is of hiding underneath the big quilting frame my grandmother would set up in the front room whenever someone announced an engagement or a baby on the way. I was free to play under the frame after I had proudly contributed my own carefully embroidered square to the quilt. I was three.

I’d learned to bake from my grandmother as well, and not from a recipe, but by feel. Stephanie and I could tell when the bread had risen enough by the strands of gluten that pulled away from the bowl. We knew when to check cookies for doneness by the smell. This wasn’t when we were teenagers, but little girls, still using a stool to reach the countertop.

Perhaps it came naturally to me to give the kids in the daycare, and my own children, a lot more responsibility than other people might have. For example, as a toddler Ethan loved pasta. He’d always been interested in cooking and baking, so I bought him an inexpensive hand-cranked pasta maker. The first few batches he made were not great, but he stuck with it. After a month, four-year-old Ethan’s linguine was delicious.

Noah loved math, so I built him an abacus by stringing giant beads onto wooden dowels, and he taught himself to multiply. Claire loved to sew, so she made little animal-shaped pillows out of felt, and we took them to the children’s hospital as gifts for the patients. In my experience, independence and the opportunity to be creative never went to waste if the children were allowed to do what they loved.

“I
hope next year I’ll be able to learn.”

That was Jake’s response to his second-grade teacher when she asked him what he was most looking forward to in third grade. Jake was starving for knowledge, craving it, longing for it, in a way that was a little frightening at times.

Michael and I were no longer surprised by the depth and breadth of his interests, by his endless memory, or by his ability to see patterns and connect them. But we were finding it hard to keep up. We supported his voracious appetite as best as we could with our trips to Barnes & Noble and lots of time on the Internet, but it was never quite enough.

Mike said it best: Jake was like Pac-Man. If there was something in front of him he could learn, he’d gobble it up and be energized by it. When he hit a wall, he’d just reverse course and find something else to learn. Heather, who helped me with the daycare, was in her sophomore year of college when Jake was in third grade. It was Heather who rediscovered Jake’s facility for languages, hints of which Michael and I had seen when he’d taught himself Japanese from DVDs as a baby. She had to take a Spanish class to satisfy her language requirements. One night she forgot her Spanish-to-English dictionary at our house, and the next day she discovered that Jake had taught himself a bunch of Spanish words.

Soon after, she brought in a beginner’s textbook for him, because she was curious to see what he’d do. Two weeks later, he could conjugate verbs, and he did the same thing with Chinese when she brought
him a starter book she’d found in a secondhand shop down by the college. I have to confess, I didn’t encourage Jake to actively pursue other languages. I was more interested in helping him to become conversational in English. When he was chattering away in Spanish, I couldn’t understand a word he said. English was quite enough for me.

Heather worked for me on and off for a long time, so she knew Jake well. She told him once, “Someday you’re going to win a big award, and your mom is going to make so much noise celebrating that she’s going to get you all kicked out of the restaurant.” Jake found the idea of me whooping it up in a fancy restaurant incredibly funny, so it became a running joke between them. When Heather arrived for work, she’d always ask, “Hey, Jake, has your mom gotten you kicked out of that restaurant yet?”

In some ways, Heather was more his peer than the kids in his third-grade class. When she was studying for her exams, Jake would curl up with her and study, too. When I asked if he was a distraction, she’d say, “No, he’s helping!”

Watching them together, I could see that he was. “Don’t forget this,” he’d remind her, his little finger pointing to a fact on a chart.

“He’d do better on this final than most of the kids who are going to take it,” Heather told me one night as she was putting on her coat to leave.

The fascinating thing was what he did with the information he memorized—the way he assimilated, integrated, and manipulated it, as well as the conclusions he drew. For instance, he had become obsessed with geology and would talk endlessly about plate tectonics, fault lines, geothermal vents, earthquakes, and volcanic islands. The interest itself may have been narrow, but the way he implemented it was not.

One Sunday afternoon when he was in third grade, he took over the dining room table, covering every inch of it with textbooks, tidily lined up edge to edge. When it was time to clear the table for dinner, Mike called me over in a hushed voice. One enormous book was open to a diagram of the Wabash Valley Fault, the seismic zone that runs through Indiana, and next to that was a 3-D image of the fault. Another
open book showed a reconstruction of a hunting camp used by the Clovis culture, the nomadic Paleo-Indians who occupied the area during the prehistoric period. Yet another showed an illustration of a Native American guiding a French explorer through Indiana in the early 1700s. A fourth was open to a geographical and statistical map of the state dating back to 1812. And a topographic map drawn by the U.S. Army in the 1940s sat neatly next to an up-to-date ASTER satellite image of the state.

In a notebook, Jake had calculated the precise longitude and latitude of our house, as well as the corresponding celestial coordinate system. Nearby, there was a book of star maps, open to the constellations that would be most visible from central Indiana that evening.

It was astonishing: a cross section of our place and time, a multi-layered, historical snapshot, spanning from prehistory to the present, and from the earth’s very core to the farthest reaches of the solar system. I didn’t doubt for a second that not only had Jake memorized every fact that I could see in those open books, but that he was also working on a synthesis of what he’d learned, a woven tapestry that would bring together all those random details from multiple disciplines, a theory much more than the sum of its parts. It gave us a peek into the complicated matrix that made up the beautiful universe of Jake’s mind.