I'm only one week in and this already feels like cheating - complicated math feelings are hardly a subject new to this week. That being said, I have been doing a lot of really fun math lately. I'm grateful to my friend that's been answering all my analysis-related questions in a way that makes me forget I could ever be insecure about learning something new.
There's no winning with you. Our games are shrouded in anxiety. When I make a wrong move you marvel at my newly-uncovered stupidity. When you make a wrong move you direct the anger at yourself, but it's reflective, and bounces back at all of us. You've mellowed in the past decade. You dislike Monopoly because it's a zero sum game. Your opinions on Monopoly wouldn't be so important if you didn't treat interactions like the decision-point in an ongoing debate about our IQ. You live life like it's a battle to prove to someone - who? - that you are clever, actually.
You were mad at me when I underpreformed on the math contest, underperforming as in 'only one standard deviation higher than average'. But you're much less bothered by our medicority than your own. That evening, you looked at my test copy - "how did you miss that question?" you asked incredulously - then tried one of the harder questions and were wrong. You were mad at yourself for hours. We were miserable.
We're your children and a threat to you, the same way everyone is a threat to you. When you play chess with Alex and call him stupid we're supposed to read it as an investment in his abilities, but I think that when he goes to bed he forgets everything else except stupid, and I think that power over us is part of the point. When Nate applied to the same university you went to, in a more difficult program, you tried to talk him out of honours, and then out of the advanced classes he chose. You say you're worried that he'll do poorly, but I wonder if you're worried he'll succeed. I sometimes wonder if you had kids so that you could beat them at chess, and none of us are playing chess anymore.
I chose my Statistics major for you, and I'm glad I did. There are moments when the math stops reminding me of childhood, where it's new and exciting and beautiful. But these moments are bounded by a structure of grades and assignments, and I remember that when you look at our report cards you look only at our deviation from the median, and when you compliment us it's only in relation to others doing poorly, and it becomes tedious and tiring again, like another game of chess.