My mother was a German immigrant. When I was maybe ten or twelve, she told me her mother's maiden name started with von.
It clearly was a big deal to her. I could tell by how she said it.
It meant absolutely nothing whatsoever to me.
I was born and raised in the US. I barely know any German. My mother didn't want to teach me. I lived in Germany briefly as a toddler. I have no memory of it.
Von means from. As part of a German surname, it's a signifier of being a member of a noble family or of noble lineage. [1]
In the US, we don't even HAVE that culturally as part of our social landscape. There's ZERO American equivalent for what that meant to my mother.
Maybe some Brits would get it or kind of get it or think they did. Maybe if I had grown up in England I could have gone "Oh, she was a lady or something very similar to that!" and have some kind of context for what that might mean to my maternal grandmother's children and their social experiences etc.
My inability to understand what my mother was talking about had nothing whatsoever to do with my intelligence or how hard I was trying or how much attention I was paying. It was simply entirely outside my experience of life.
I was a full-time homemaker for about two decades and as such I lived a very private life for the first half of my adulthood. I didn't know that until well after I started trying to get a public life which was shockingly painful because I had blindspots and I didn't know that and I don't think other people knew that.
I would do stuff and it would go places I didn't expect and probably other people were facepalming and eye rolling and wondering how someone so smart could be such an idiot.
I began blogging because I was participating in TAGMAX, a gifted homeschooling list, and people were asking me if they could forward my emails to people they knew. I figured for everyone who had the manners to ask my permission there were probably people forwarding it without asking and if it was a blog, you don't need my permission to share the link. [2]
Blogging turned out to be much tougher than writing emails to a discussion list. I know how to TALK with people conversationally but figuring out what to write about and how to say it on a public blog has proven to be much more involved than I imagined.
One issue I ran into is that posting on the Internet means dealing with an extremely broad based audience and they may not be from the same country as you and may speak English as a second language. Talking usefully about parenting really isn't as simple as telling cute anecdotes about my kids from my perspective as their mom.
That has the potential to go wildly different places than I intended. I have twice exceptional kids and some of the things I did that worked as good communication with my kids sounds like I'm an abusive bitch to total strangers.
Another thing is wherever you go, there you are. Even before I acquired six years of college that includes training in medical terminology, my mother wanted to be a doctor and my sister worked at the CDC for years and I just know a lot about medical stuff, more than I realize.
I have no means to figure out what is "normal, average" knowledge about medical stuff or any number of other topics with which I'm familiar. And if you are talking about parenting, you can do a lot of harm to people if they misunderstand you and there's no clear bright line between good parenting and good health care.
I learned this the hard way on an email list for parents of children with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). I have a diagnosis of atypical CF and so does one of my sons and we're doing well, so I talked about coconut oil being helpful to us.
A lot of people were openly hostile and critical and unwelcoming of my comments about what was working for us. I didn't understand the hatred I was getting.
Someone actually interested in what was helping us tried coconut oil with her kid and ran into issues with side effects and didn't speak up for something like two weeks. I was horrified at how bad it was and realized that I needed to learn a great deal more about communicating clearly on topics that can impact health and welfare.
It took a lot of years to figure out how to talk about medical stuff online. I'm still not sure how to talk about parenting online. That's even harder I think.
One reason my desire to talk about parenting has languished so long is because I have very challenging twice exceptional kids. That phrase means gifted with disabilities of some sort.
Gifted is a loaded word with a lot of baggage. That's a pain in the butt to navigate because people think you are saying "I'm personally smarter than YOU in every way!!!!" God help you if you make a typo. They will drag you over stupid details and ENTHUSIASTICALLY throw the baby out with the bathwater.
When I was on TAGMAX, my advice was seemingly popular. This meant I was also a target of open hostility from people hell-bent on trying to prove I wasn't actually smarter than them and minor garbage like a missed comma was adequate reason to make a mountain out of a mole hill and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt I was clearly a retard and nothing I said had value.
These days online discussion, especially in any way "live," gets thrown under a bus by autocorrupt guaranteeing you sound like an IDIOT on a regular basis. I spend a lot less time trying to "talk" with people conversationally on the Internet. It's mostly not worth the aggravation.
When I got a corporate job, initial training involved an exercise where they didn't warn you ahead of time how things could go wrong. They let you experience getting burned firsthand to help make it memorable.
I had mixed feelings about it. I certainly found it memorable but I have no idea if that really was the best way to prepare me for the job I needed to do.
My understanding is that a good example of how to do it right is the best form of education but I also know people do desperately need to understand parameters of where it goes wrong and how it goes wrong and when to not do x.
My oldest son tells me that his primary memory from his early years is of me -- his mother -- eye rolling and facepalming. I initially felt bad about that but he once told me that was extremely valuable feedback for him to help him figure out "Mom is okay with this and will nicely correct me but probably other people won't be so nice about this."
I ran an email list designed around his needs and interests called Wired for Science. The name grew out of me telling him regularly "You being extremely good at science and terrible at social stuff is two sides of the same thing. You being very literal minded makes you good at science and bad at social stuff. It's not a gift and it's not a disability. It's a neutral trait well suited for some things and poorly suited for others."
Is it a Cheetah? is the "industry standard" so to speak for talking about giftedness, or was back in the day more than twenty years ago when I was part of the online gifted community. It uses speed as a metaphor for giftedness and that is the typical way people think of giftedness: You are quick to understand a thing, quick to answer the question etc.
I used to talk about other metaphors for giftedness, like redwoods and various other kinds of statistical outliers not involving speed. Some people are deep thinkers and aren't verbally or socially quick on the draw. They take their time to draw conclusions and don't stand out in that way.
Giftedness can also mean you have a particular talent, like you are musically inclined. I don't have any musical talent. I can't sing. I can't play an instrument. I tried and never learned how to read musical notation.
I came to think of giftedness as having a hungry mind and told my children they needed to learn to feed their minds in a healthy way and not worry about garbage like IQ tests or good grades or academic credentials.
As noted in the above essay, gifted kids need room to run, to stretch themselves, to exercise if they are going to be healthy and reach their potential. I spoke often with my kids about the problems with running into a wall at a hundred miles an hour as the way they learned their limits.
And if you never hit your point of failure, you probably aren't reaching your potential. But if failure costs too much, you may never recover.
The degree to which planet Earth is failing our gifted youth and either keeping them coddled or letting them crash and burn is a problem not just for those individuals but for the welfare of humanity.
So I persist in trying to find my voice on the topic though the odds are long against anyone ever listening to me at all.
Footnotes
[1] My mother's mother's family sold the title long before I was a twinkle in anyone's eye. I have noble blood about like I have Native blood: No one cares, Ms. Pretendian.
Doc Brown from Back to the Future has a German father whose surname was Von Braun according to Wikipedia. It mentions his family was wealthy but doesn't mention they were nobility. The name suggests they should have been nobility.
My understanding is that von should NOT be capitalized in a German surname, though Wikipedia had it as capitalized. Braun is the German word for Brown and should be pronounced roughly the same, though my recollection is in the movie it sounds like "von bron" when it should sound like "fon brown."
I can't readily find a clip to verify that recollection.
[2] Weirdly, I once had someone email me and ASK if they could post my blog post to Hacker News. I told them "Yeah, it's a blog. You can post it where you want."
I also told them I had already posted it and it wasn't doing well, for what it's worth. They probably never did post it. People mostly don't promote my writing and if you post it yourself it's taken less seriously and I have no idea how you escape that pattern.
I can't win for losing. Email it, they want to forward it. Publish it, they act like it's a private email. Or something.