The Alien Child

It occurs to me that I should probably explain why I call my son the Alien Child. It's a term of affection that he is aware of and doesn't mind at all (I asked).

This is why:

1. At the age of 1 1/2 months, the hubby caught the baby concentrating mightily on a rattle that hung at the side of his crib. The baby extended his closed fist slowly and carefully until he reached the rattle, then gave it a good push. This excited him, and he did this over and over again--for a good half hour. I'd worked with babies before, and I've never seen this level of concentration and focus.

2. At the age of two, the toddler--now in Montessori pre-school--sat in his high chair munching his lunch contemplatively one weekend, then suddenly announced, "Mommy, I chew good with my mandible."

I said, "What?"

He pointed to his jaw. "I chew good with my mandible."

Okay, I thought. This must be a fluke. So I smiled and replied, "and you also have a good grip on your spoon with your fingers."

He looked at me gravely and then looked at his fingers. "Mommy, you are not very smart. Those are my phalanges." He then proceeded to point to where his clavicle, radius, ulna, femur, tibia, and fibia were.

That was how I discovered he had somehow memorized all the medical names for the major bones of the human body. Apparently for Halloween, the teachers had put a skeleton up on the wall, and when he asked what the different bones were, they told him the proper names. He proceeded to form a passion for human anatomy, and when he found I had a Gray's Dissection Guide on my bookshelf, he begged me to read it to him and show him all the pictures for a bed-time story, instead of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I did, since the troll in the Billy Goats story frightened him, but Gray's Dissection Guide did not. Go figure.

He was still in diapers. Not interested in potty training, even though I told him he would be a "big boy" and could wear "big boy underwear" if he was trained. However, when my dad heard that Derek had this interest, he got him one of those Visible Human Body models. Well, the model was much too old for a two-year-old, and I said it was only for big boys. The Alien Child got a speculative look on his face as I put the model out of reach, and said, "Mommy, if I go potty by myself, does that mean I'll be a big boy?"

Swiftly and unapologetically taking advantage of this piece of logic, I said "Yes! Absolutely! "

Within a week, the Alien Child was potty trained, and as promised, I got down the model for him to play with. He is the only child I know of who was bribed into potty training with a human anatomy model. I once asked him why he was so interested in human anatomy, and he told me that he used to be a doctor when he was an old man, a long time ago when the man Cadillac was alive. I was puzzled by this, as I thought Cadillac was a car. I later found out he was a French explorer of the 17th and 18th century. Hmm.

He went on to draw pictures of skeletons, skulls, and internal organs, copied from the dissection guide, then his interest turned to paleoanthropology.

3. By the time he was seven, he had memorized all the different species of early hominids, and had drawn a time line and examples of each hominid species along that line, including skeletal and skull examples. The hubby and I decided he should probably go into the gifted program, and so sent him off to be tested. I was worried, because he'd never been tested before, and he was herded into a huge auditorium and then into separate classrooms. I didn't think he'd do well at it. I was a bit late picking him up, and so found him discussing early human evolution with the counselor, and telling her the difference between the theories of the Leakeys and Johanson, and drawing anatomically accurate pictures of the skulls of Neanderthal, australopithecus, and homo habilis. The counselor looked at me and said, "I don't care what the test scores say, this child needs to be in the program."

4. Concurrent with his interest in paleoanthropology was an interest in art, particularly Renaissance art. As with the other interests, he drew pictures of these, too. The hubby and I enrolled him in art classes when we discovered him drawing a copy of a Leonardo sketch. He continued with the art classes until high school, and his interest expanded beyond the Renaissance. We now have a collection of Michaelangelo, Vermeer, Leonardo, and Toulouse Lautrec forgeries, in addition to some originals he created. He gave a replica of Michaelangelo's Libyan Sybil of the Sistine Chapel ceiling to our pastor at the time. Here's one that he painted in an Impressionist style for me when I was ill with pneumonia once, just to cheer me up.


Here is another picture he painted, for which he won a prize in elementary school. It went on tour nationally, but I still have not got the picture back, and it's literally been about a decade. Pisses me off, because I've called and called the PTA for years, and nobody knows what happened to it, and I really liked it. It would have looked good on our wall. It's sort of a post-apocalyptic picture, where nature takes over the ruins of our civilization. If anyone has seen this picture anywhere, let me know, because I want it back.


5. He went through a number of other obsessions, including skateboarding. That last occupation gave him a broken ankle at the age of 16, and while recuperating, he took up an old Yamaha acoustic guitar and a book of blues chords that my brother Dave gave him. Within a year and a half, he was playing in the church band, after having bought himself an electric guitar. Now that he's in college, he's in a band.

6. He also has a talent for finding expensive clothes that fit him perfectly at thrift stores. Example: he once found an almost-new Armani jacket at the American Cancer Society's thrift store. Cost only $20. Fit perfectly, and needed no alteration. He paired it with a bizarrely printed silk shirt and a tie, but it all worked. That's another thing. He'll take items of clothes that separately look like they don't belong, but when when worn, look like a million bucks. I could not get away with this kind of thing, ever. I try to pick out nice clothes for myself, but I am ever in danger of looking like a bag lady if I tried to be artistic about it.

You see how it is. Neither my husband or I have this level of artistic or intellectual skill or focus. I don't know where it came from. Although I know his taste for fine clothes at bargain-basement prices came from my mother and myself. My mother positively beamed with pride when she saw that Armani. I was also impressed, and we both gave the purchase the Ritual Moment of Respectful Silence before exclaiming over the amazing bargain. I mean, Armani. Twenty bucks. Perfect fit. Like new. What's not to like?

So this is why I call him the Alien Child. I sometimes wondered if he'd been dropped into my womb by an alien entity, but there are too many other things about him that he definitely took after my husband or me, and so I have to conclude he's definitely ours. Besides, we're too attached to him now to return him.

And now you have been exposed to a blatant form of cornering you with family pictures when you are sitting on the window seat of an airplane, but this is my blog and I'm posting it. :-D

--Karen H.