June 29, 2004

• Intelligence and My Earliest Memory

  Some of my readers have been discussing intelligence with me through
  comments since I posted my confession yesterday about my social faux
  pas at the NA barbecue.   quiltnmomi
  brought up a new generation of tests designed to measure not just the
  left-brained intellectual form of intelligence, but such things as
  creative thinking and “emotional IQ” or people skills.  This
  brought up a number of memories for me, of discussions I’ve had with
  family members, co-workers in the psych and social service professions,
  my clients, and some Mensans.

  It was a hot issue for a while, and I’ve been away from those
  professions and from the certified intelligentsia long enough now that
  I don’t really know where the matter stands currently.  In the
  discussions that I remember from a few decades ago, we were in general
  agreement that a single score that combined or averaged such diverse
  types of “intelligence” would be essentially meaningless, since it is
  quite common for someone to have great creative ability or people
  skills without much of what is measured by traditional IQ tests, and
  vice versa.  Thus someone scoring very high in one area and very
  low in the other would come out in the middle, precisely where he does
  not belong both because of the high ability and the low one.

  I think the move toward such testing was part of the same movement that
  has brought us the proliferation of such politically correct terms as
  “developmentally challenged.”  It sought to reduce the cultural
  bias toward
  left-brain learning and to “include” those who have been stigmatized or
  left out of educational opportunities because they lack such
  intelligence.  I respect the motives of those who would make
  education more inclusive, and I wish we had less of that cultural
  bias.  It can be hard on everyone  when one group is left
  behind because of low expectations and another is subjected to stress
  because of expectations that are too high. 

  Phencyclidene‘s 
  experience in school sounds very similar to my son Doug’s.  He
  scores extremely high on intelligence and achievement tests, but it
  took him fourteen years to complete a 12-year high school education
  because he was bored and uninterested in school.  We have a screwy
  system, and I don’t see it getting better right now.

  When I was seven and being tested by the psych faculty and grad
  students at San Jose State, one of them told me that “intelligence” is
  the ability to learn.  In Mensa, we used to talk about
  intelligence and what it might be.  The consensus was that
  intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.  Some aptitudes
  seem to have become common to every modern IQ test.  These include
  visual/spatial ability, pattern recognition, and memory… and I’m
  going to let that be the lead-in to my blog:

  My Earliest Memory

  What I recall:

  It was nighttime, and my mother and I were in the kitchen of the house
  where we lived until I was six years old.  The kitchen light was
  turned off, and the only light was from a source outside that room,
  possibly the bathroom or maybe the back porch.  I was on her lap
  in an overstuffed armchair that was placed in an unlikely
  location.  It was backed against the west window close beside a
  built-in cupboard, partially blocking the normal traffic flow in that
  room.  Except for this one memory, I recall that chair as always
  being in the living room.  Normally, nothing impeded either the
  line of sight or traffic, straight through that “shotgun” house from
  front door to back door.

  The radio was playing softly, and my mother had on a silky-feeling pink
  nightgown.  I was feverish, hot and headachey, and my mother’s
  hands and body felt cool.  It  would make me shiver with
  chills when she patted my bare back.  I was hungry, whimpering and
  reaching for her breast.  I kept repeating “bubbie”, her word for
  breast.  She would push my face away, or grasp my hand and pull it
  away from her breast, or slap my hand and say, “no”, or “no
  bubbie.”  I felt desperate, frantic, ill and frightened.  She
  sounded angry and impatient.

  She kept trying to put a dry cloth thing in my mouth, and I kept
  turning my head away, pushing it away, and trying to nuzzle into her
  bosom.  After a while, the cloth became moistened with my saliva
  and I tasted a cloying, sharp sweetness.  I took it into my mouth
  and sucked on it, got dizzy and sleepy and faded out.

  What my mother told me when I related this memory to her:

  The chair had been placed in the kitchen (the room where our family did
  most of its living) for her when she came home from a stay in the
  hospital.  She had breast-fed me until that hospital stay, and her
  milk had then dried up.  I had been switched to bottle feeding
  while she was away.  That night I was feverish and restless and
  she took me into the kitchen so I would not wake my father.  The
  radio was on because it usually soothed me, and it wouldn’t disturb my
  father..  (I remember the radio being on constantly as I was
  growing up.)

  The cloth was a “sugar tit”, just granulated white sugar tied in a
  piece of cloth.  Mama and her brothers and sisters and nieces and
  nephews had been weaned on a sugar tit, and so was I.  I was six
  months old then.

  What I can infer from this:

  It seems likely this was the start of my lifelong sugar
  addiction.  My mother’s typical impatience and the many little
  slaps and shoves of her brand of “discipline” also seem to have shaped
  and shaded our relationship right from the start.

  Since this isolated memory is all I can recall of the time before I was
  two or three years old, I suppose it was the trauma of the illness and
  of my frustration at not being allowed to nurse that imprinted it.

  And, further comments:

  The early memory is clearer in my mind than my mother’s
  explanation.  I think we talked about it several times on the
  phone during the late 1960s when that memory first surfaced while I was
  doing psychedelic drugs, and again in 1979, when I visited her for the
  last time before her death.

  When I was small, I always wanted sugar, in any form.  I refused
  to drink water and demanded juice or Kool-aid.  Mama would stir a
  spoonful of sugar or chocolate syrup into my milk to get me to drink
  it.  After my doctor told her to stop because that wasn’t good for
  me, she would tape money to the bottom of the glass, or colorful
  pictures, in an attempt to seduce me into drinking straight milk. 
  After my father died she gave up trying to get me to drink milk and
  went to trying to limit my intake of sugar.  In response to that,
  I began to sneak it any way I could–typical addictive behavior.
  

  • 12:38 am
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