Some of my fondest memories are of going with my dad to pick something up at the clinic over the weekend or after closing. The halls were empty, and my brother and I would cavort around on oversized crutches, maneuver the wheelchairs gleefully fast around corners, and pretend to dance with the real skeleton my dad has hanging from a metal frame in his office. It didn't occur to me until much later that none of this was really typical. Somehow, the skeleton came up once in adolescent conversation, and I was pelted with a chorus of "Ew, your dad has a dead guy in his office???"
I guess we all think our childhoods are pretty normal while we are still working through them. I was reflecting on this today while sitting in my language development lecture. My professor talks about his daughter frequently, providing lots of examples of the speech she produced at different stages of her life among other anecdotes. Today, he told us about studying Hawaiian pidgin on the islands for a month, and, as a sidenote, mentioned that his daughter had taken a class in pidgin and soaked it up like a sponge. She is, I think somewhere around 9 or 10 years old, and spent her formative linguistic years being tape recorded by not only adoring but also inquisitive parents, who both cooed over and analyzed every babble. A slide presented in today's lecture really drove home how weird it is for a kid to have parents who aren't, well, normal. We were learning about different methods of measuring brain waves, something my neurology class has already covered, so I was sort of drifting when this picture appeared 6 feet high on the screen:
Lily probably thinks this is perfectly normal. I mean, everyone's parents stick sensors all over their heads and make EEG images of their brain activity, right? I'd love to be there the day she has the revelation that no, her childhood was a long way from typical.
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