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Dan Kennedy (1:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. This is where you'll hear true stories told live on stage. We're excited to announce that the Moth is coming to Clayton, New York on Wednesday, July 27th. The theme is Home in a Way and tickets can be purchased by visiting themoth.org and for you listeners in Chicago, Peter Sagal hosts the second Chicago Grand Slam on Tuesday, August 2nd at the Park West. For more information, visit themoth.org okay, are you ready for this week's story? This week's story by Kip Malone was recorded live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December 2010. The theme of the night was American Stories.

Kip Malone (2:02)

My Flies are not down Right Good. So about a month into my daughter's kindergarten career, beginning of her being in school, I was informed by her mother that her teacher was concerned about how she was doing in a month in the kindergarten. You would think that there's not a whole lot that you need to know how to do, but apparently my daughter was giving her teacher calls for concern. And so at the earliest opportunity, which was the parental observation day around Halloween, I went in to observe the class and it was all very familiar and it was clear to me what her teacher meant. Even though it had been delivered to me in a really ambiguous and hard to understand way, I watched my daughter just be herself in this classroom, kind of blissfully unaware of what was expected of her. It seems all very innocent. Kindergarten and everything. But that's where they start training you how to be a part of society, which, if you're into that kind of thing, that's awesome. But you don't have much choice in this world. But. So I'm watching her and watching her do her thing and watching her teacher get frustrated with her to the point of near anger just because she's not jumping to the next thing that's being assigned to her. Because they have, like, little sections in the day or in the afternoon they have to work on. And it was very familiar. A nice thing that can happen with having children is that you can see yourself and you can be reminded of the progression of your own life through viewing them. And I was brought back to my experience beginning in kindergarten. And I can see myself very clearly in my dada. We share a lot of similarities. And I remember being handed, like, rudimentary mathematics that you're supposed to start in kindergarten and not being interested at all. So not even bothering. It wasn't clear to me that you were. That was, like, required. It was clear to me that she was kind of in the same place. And her teacher, besides rubbing me the wrong way in a lot of ways, clearly didn't understand my daughter. I didn't want my daughter to stay in that school. I wanted her out. And that could be just. It's hard to say when you're dealing with your children because, you know, everyone thinks that their children are God's gift to the planet, you know, or sane people do. Sane people do. So I wanted her out. I didn't think it was a good place for her, but I didn't think anything was wrong with her. But of course I didn't, because I'm her father. And it's very difficult to see your children clearly because I would like to say because of the incredible amount of love that you have for them. But that's not totally honest. Because there's something besides the love. There's ego involved because they're such a reflection of you. You want them to do good. You want them to be smart, you want them to be beautiful because you're smart and you're beautiful and you do good. Or that's how you want to perceive yourself in this world. And you want your children, your offspring to have that. That's maybe a little ugly, but it's true. And I think it's true for most parents. So I do love my daughter a great deal, and I love myself, and I wanted her out of that school. And her mother, a very fine Woman, brilliant and beautiful. We're partnered and raising her. We are not partnered romantically. Didn't want to hear me that maybe the teacher had the problem because she was beginning her career as a teacher, and she always heard parents talk about how it was a teacher's problem and that they wouldn't be able to actually see their children. And I had no idea how hard it was to be a teacher with all these kids and blah, blah, blah. Not blah, blah, blah. I'm sure she had points, but we really. We're very, very good at disagreeing. We can disagree very strongly. But I can see myself and my kid and I can see myself sitting at the kindergarten desk that she was sitting at. I can see the similarities. And a lot of the similarities come down to an attribute that is slowness, Like a real slowness that we share that has been frustrating to teachers and parents and friends and lovers and roommates and a number of people. For instance, like, it really can and often does take me an hour to put on my shoes. And I can't tell you where the time goes. It's not like I got distracted and started playing records or something. Like, I can sit in the same place putting on my socks and shoes for an hour. So can my daughter. We can lose weekends just sitting on the toilet. And if there's an apartment where I spend time with my daughter, there's only one toilet. So that I'm starting. That's easy for me to see the similarities. You know, thinking about how we see our children and how we see ourselves and our children and how we want to see ourselves in a positive light. We don't want something to be wrong with our children. It makes me think about a moment in time when I was 17 years old and I was watching television with my father. Episode of Nova. It's like a science program that was on. I think it was on pbs. I don't know if it still exists. This one was on neuroscience and neuroscience technology, and they had a guy getting prepared for a CAT scan and receiving a CAT scan. And it filled me with this crazy wave of deja vu. But not just regular deja vu, like deja vu mixed with dread and sickness to my stomach. And it was overwhelming. And I couldn't stop thinking about it and wondering, did I have a CAT scan? So I turned to my father and asked him if I had a CAT scan. He said no and fell back asleep. And then I couldn't get out of my head. And I started remembering more and more this experience of being a little Kid and getting a CAT scan. And I finally went to my mother, asked her, and she didn't want to talk about it. And I persisted. And she admitted that I had had a CAT scan when I was six years old, something like that. And I asked her why it had a CAT scan, and she didn't want to talk about it. But she started laughing a little bit, which is weird from where I was standing, you know, kind of filled with dread and having like this like, repressed memory come up. And finally she admitted I'd had a CAT scan and she told me why. She said that I was so slow that they thought that I was retarded and I'd be given a battery of tests to test my cognitive ability. And the tests were inconclusive. And they couldn't figure out. The jury's still out, trust me. But the tests were inconclusive, so they thought that maybe I just had a brain tumor. And so that's why I got the CAT scan. I don't know if you've ever had one, but I don't even like giving blood for a blood test. This is actually thinking about it right now. Probably exactly why I hate Western medicine entirely and will do anything to stay away from a doctor. Well, a CAT scan, they have to, like, take your clothes off if you're little and you don't want to take your clothes off in a room full of strangers. And then they. This is my memory, so I don't know, they inject something into your ankle, like an iodine solution. And then they lay you on a table and you get slid into a tube that sends whatever rays through your body to look into your brain to see what's going on. Totally fucking terrifying. Like, I remembered trying to escape. I remembered screaming until I was hoarse. I remembered my father coming into the room and talking me down. And I remember having my clothes put back on and taken to the gift shop. And my father bought me a book of animal limericks and rhymes and photographs of the animals. All these animals from North America. Black hardcovered book. I remembered that book. And I had it through childhood. But I didn't remember anything about the CAT scan after I left the hospital. It sucked that bad. My parents loved love, loved me, loved their children. And that couldn't have been anything but painful and frightening for my father too, you know, the whole situation. And so I'm just thinking about what motivated them to go to that extreme to see what was wrong with me. Okay, so it turns out that no brain tumor as a child, just slow. I'M just slow. I figured out ways to live my life that it doesn't really matter as far as survival is concerned. And actually I've been able to thrive, you know, by degrees. And I had to think about that. It's so tempted to sing, so tempted to push it so past the time that she starts playing and I have to improvise a song on top of it to finish the story. I won't do that. Just thinking about not doing that to my child, you know, having the good fortune to have a child that's so much like me, that I can take my experiences and help her, at least in this moment. I don't know what the future holds and I don't know who she's going to become, you know, but I can use my experience in a way to lessen her potential problems in this world, which is what you ultimately, ultimately, ultimately wish for as a parent. Her mother went to talk to the teacher a couple weeks later and came back horrified and wanted to but she's not a violent person. But she wanted our daughter out too. So we took our daughter out of that school. She's now at a Steiner school, which really suits her much better. And we're both slow.