Random

If I was asked for a few words with which to describe my youngest daughter the word random would crop up within the first 10 seconds. As an analyst by profession, I like things to be ordered, structured and logical.  As such I often struggle to comprehend her apparent line of thinking.  To me, her tenuous connections to topics of conversations, people or events often appear random at best, and more often than not, irrational or illogical. I am often left scratching my head with a matching blank look of incomprehension as I struggle to work out how on her earth her response vaguely matches the scenario on hand.

But what I am slowly discovering is that it is the limitations of my own brain and static ways of processing that result in me dismissing her as random.  Her mind processing powers are actually light years ahead of mine in terms of speed, dexterity and essentially general evolution.

For starters, she probably likes logic and sequences more than I do.  As a small child, everything had to be structured and organised to the nth degree. Even then, her abilities to think through a problem and work out a logical solution would amaze me even if she did visit every letter of the alphabet when trying to come up with an answer that in my view simply involved working from a to b. Yet her answer because she could factor in so many additional variables, could actually be interpreted as being far more in-depth and intelligent than my limited view.

I used to joke that my daughter's early development was often a case of one step forwards, two steps backwards with a few random steps to the side just for good measure. Little was I to know that that strange dance would be a consistent feature of our lives.  Every action, event or interaction today has that few extra steps, along with back flips, somersaults and on good days, a bit of hip hop thrown in too.

As the years pass, I am slowly learning to interpret my daughter's actions and reactions.  However when it comes to trying to understand her thought processes, it is me on the left foot, always a few steps behind, and usually with that strange look of incomprehension or bemusement.  I am however hoping that in time her randomness will seem more logical and more understandable within the limitations and confines of my own thought patterns.