What Happens When You Are a Dumb Daughter of a Mathematician
Alright, a bit of my dad before starting the essay.
He always struck me as a math wizard who, under the right circumstances, was sure to invent zero or something close, but unfortunately, Aryabhata failed him centuries before. So, he fathered us as a math wizard.
Painfully, he can calculate Kazillion numbers when I can count the birds sitting on the tree branch next to my bedroom. And sometimes I get that wrong, too. The birds fly away, and I doubt my mathematically challenged brain for the wrong calculation.
My negative biases for Mathematics and Murphy’s Law since childhood
Honestly, I do not get the numbers. They dance before my eyes like headless djinn. I’ve had this feud with them since I was a child. During the same childhood, my dad also taught me Murphy’s law. The epigram still haunts me in grim situations, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
Dang! I knew this so well.
My equation with mathematics was going to get wrong. Disastrously wrong.
Thank you, Mr. Murphy. Couldn’t have been more cynical.
Though Mr. Murphy have you ever heard some good people also say that minds create realities? I don’t distrust your motives, but the epigram is a pseudo-reality. Which pitted me into a lifetime battle with numbers.
A strong enemy is better than a genius dad.
However, I found Dad in teaching mode more intimidating than Math herself. But the combination was an apocalypse. Because Dad found solace in the warm bosom of math, he sat for hours cuddling with number patterns, spaces, and distances from the Sun to Earth.
Once, he told me that the distance between the Sun and the Earth was 15 crore kilometers, and if a human had a superhuman ability to travel at the speed of light, they might reach the Sun in just 8 minutes and 20 seconds.
Jeez!!! Noooooo!
8 minutes and 20 seconds only.
This is sheer delirium! Whoa!
But then my babyish brain reasoned.
Who in their senses would want to travel to the SUN? And get fricasseed like chicken Tangari, or perhaps dissolve in space after being charred, and never return back.
Bad idea, Dad!
Painfully, I couldn’t even utter a word of disgrace against the Sun, the numbers. Don’t you know how these weird wizards are? Highly sensitive.
So, pretending to befriend the subject was easier for me. I bobbed my head like a bobblehead.
All geniuses cannot be teachers, and the inverse, too, is correct.
I recently realized the greatest mystery of math: it can make a chess player, an atheist, and an engineer out of a family man. But it fails to make a good teacher out of a genius. My dad wasn’t a teacher at all, let alone good. But this realization was late because realizations, by default, dawn on you when the moment of concern is done and dusted. And Sir Ralph only added to agonies.
The great teacher is not the man who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Well, by this definition, my dad was a great teacher.
Did he supply me with tons of traumatic facts? Yes, he sure did.
Did I become a different person in his presence? Duh!
Different, as in I became a lizard, stupefied and numb when sprayed with insecticide. Half dead, half consuming.
I took the debilitating mental shutdown so personally that I labeled myself as the dumb daughter of the math wizard.
The tools of torture.
On any random day, I was caught and sat on the other side of the table to do Numbers. The forms of torture were various depending on his qualms. It could be trigonometry, Algorithms, Pythagoras, theory of relativity. It fried my brain like a forgotten chicken in a preheated blazing oven. My ears slept, my eyes bled, my heart wept, but everything was in vain. Because I took myself as a proper dumb. I thought it was expected to be intelligent, and every kid should be; if not, they aren’t fit for society. I also thought that being below average, especially in mathematics, was an unspeakable skin disorder. Better hide it.
So, I sat with a studious face because that seemed the mature thing to do for 13-something.
Now that I have recognized that I am a survivor of Math trauma, I’ve started the healing process.
Did you just say how?
By being more English to a Mathematical dad.
Did I tell you my dad’s English is unpardonable?
