"You know all that because your mom is a scientist!"
This from a friend over for a playdate/sleepover, after my science-obsessed and autistic 9-year-old began quizzing him about the Amazon and its aquatic inhabitants. No, he doesn't know all of that because I'm a scientist. He knows all of that because, like all inerrant and compulsive naturalists famous and non-famous, he's got his ear to Nature's heartbeat and his eyes on every detail. Where I come in is that because of my science background, I can answer many, many of his questions about what he hears and sees. That, you see, is my Sci-Mom superpower.
I've known people like him, met a few going through grad school. They're the ones who can cite the species names for everything from fungi to fossa, who've got ample collections of bones, bugs, and other ephemera of the obsessed scientist. They're the unsung Maturins of the world, the ones who can't resist the closeup of Nature's offerings. There's scarcely a picture we have of our oldest in which he's not bent down on one knee, eyes inches from the ground, examining what's on offer with the keenest visual discrimination of anyone I know.
Yes, I'm a scientist. But my world is of much smaller compass, engaged within my cranium where I visualize to the atom the molecular goings-on that we cannot see. I focus inward, wandering around inside cells and nuclei, parting the tangle of proteins and organelles, peering across the quivering cytoplasm, working my way through a nuclear pore to see the mechanisms at the very core of Nature's being. As a molecular sorta gal, I'm no naturalist. I know a few species names here and there because, well, when you get a PhD in biology and teach it for 11 years, you tend to pick up on that sort of thing.
And I can sit for hours and watch animal behavior. Indeed, outside my office window is a living Disney movie of birds, squirrels, foxes, coyotes, deer, domestic cats, 5-foot rat snakes, 2-foot garter snakes, and the occasional bewildered opossum, and over four years of watching the seasons change, I've gotten to know them all. But I know far more about what's going on inside of them. All of this information, all of what I've acquired in becoming a scientist, even my behavior as a scientist, helps me to nurture the scientist in my children.
We all share our interest in these backyard co-habitants. Our other two sons show a similar affinity for the natural world, although not to the Darwinistic extent of our oldest. We spend so much time outside that they've pretty much had no choice but to absorb nature into their pores. I spend so much time overanswering their typical and not-so-typical childhood questions that they probably regret it every single time they ask me one. If they do, though, they don't show it.
Our version of family entertainment is to load up a nature show, preferably with David Attenborough as the narrator, and watch, as keenly observant of what's happening on the screen as we are of what happens when we're outdoors together. Yesterday, we spent an hour peering at a sleepy, tiny screech owl sitting sleepily and tinily in the bamboo forest edging our yard. That's all the owl did, and we watched it anyway. These are behaviors we've modeled for our children, and now they seem intercalated into their very DNA.
As a biologist and one who sees a molecular world everywhere I look, I know that there's no "heritability" to what my children are doing. No one's born a biologist. In all honesty, I have a liberal arts heart and a scientist's brain, two metaphorical organs that occasionally struggle with one another, especially when I'm trying to choose a book to read at night. The most delicious resolution I can have to that struggle is to find science delineated in graceful prose with a magnetic story arc. Those finds that appeal to my brain and to my heart are the most delightful of reading experiences for me. And with every great science book I imbibe, I pick up more that I can impart to my children. It's as though all the learning I've ever done in my life, all the pursuit of knowledge, all my focus on the life of the mind, has found its outlet in these willing ears and minds of my three inquisitive offspring. With these continued learnings, I feed my superpowers.
And of course, my actual brain and my mother's heart delight in every inquisition about channel catfish or extinct sloths or carnivorous plants. I glow inwardly (I hardly ever glow outwardly) with what seem to me to be their precocious insights into the natural world. As a science mom who homeschools, I'm teaching my oldest child science at a level I've used with college nonmajors, and he soaks it up like a large, prehistoric sponge. There's no more satisfying use of my Sci-Mom powers than that.
I know that they're not genetically scientists, in spite of my degrees and their father's equally holistic pedigree. What they are--and what I, as an educator and scientist and parent, know that I need to nurture--is intellectually curious. They open their minds like little birds awaiting nutrition, never sated, always asking for more. If intellectual curiosity is heritable, if somewhere in those gelatinous intracellular wendings lies a mechanism for a native inclination to a life of the mind, then these children are homozygous dominant for it.
We're a discursive group, wandering down lanes of history and literature and science and geography and getting completely lost in those surprising intellectual rabbit holes where only children guide you. Yes, I'm a science mom. And the best thing about that isn't that my children somehow seem to have inherited a "science" gene. The best thing is that I, with what I've managed to learn in 20-odd post-baccalaureate years, can put that information to the best possible use I can imagine. Not as a wage-earner. Not as a researcher. Not even as a professor. But as a mother who can, in fact, answer the question, "Why is the sky blue?" Yep. I've got the Sci-Mom superpowers to take that one on.
