Imagine you're walking down the street and you come across a large
worm. The worm is helpless and ugly, so you feel obligated to take it
home and put tiny little shoes on it. For months you feed it all kinds
of disgusting mush that you would never consider eating. Then one day
without warning it sits up in its terrarium and says, "dirt."

"Holy Christmas the worm is talking!" you call to your wife.

"You're crazy," she says.

"More dirt," says the worm.

"See?!"

"This must be the smartest worm ever born!" says your wife.

"I'm trying to tell you that! It's some kind of prodigy! I'm going to
quit my job and manage this worm!"

"You know, he's not bad looking either," she says.

"I love that face!"

"That's not his face."

"I love it anyway!"

It doesn't matter if every other larva in the neighborhood has done
essentially the same thing at his age. You're all too aware of what you
started with. You brought home this hairless, half-conscious creature,
spent months just trying to stop it from clawing its eyes out, and now
it's handing you a drawing of a bunny. The bunny looks like a dying shrub,
but you don't see that. What you see is a worm that can draw, for crying
out loud! It's impossible. Who taught it that? No one! Clearly it's a
born artist. Soon you've got dozens of paintings, all of which seem to
depict the aftermath of a forest fire, taped to the walls of your kitchen
as if it's a wing of The Louvre.

In our parents' day you had to wait at least until the birth of your baby
before labeling it a savant. Now with the advent of ultrasound and the
scanning electron microscope, you can begin overestimating your child's
potential at the zygote stage.

"I think he's going to have a bigger medulla oblongata than that Jackson
boy," says your wife, looking at a blob of 150 cells displayed on a
computer screen.

"Oh heck yeah," you say. And then you hug.

Dear goggles can also make the most horrific sort of public behavior
seem relatively benign when perpetrated by your own child. In this case
the myopia is caused by your intimate knowledge of his private behavior
and the shockingly low expectations that knowledge engenders. The fact
is you can't spend every waking minute spanking your child. Inevitably
your arm tires, your grip relaxes and he runs off and pulls his sister's
hair. Given this as your daily routine at home, you can calmly watch
your child clothesline a stranger's kid at the playground and feel little
except relief that it wasn't a head-butt.

There's no cure for dear goggles, and they can be incredibly debilitating
with your first child. But thankfully their effect diminishes with each
subsequent birth. When your third daughter gives you a ceramic cup she
made in preschool and your first thought is that it looks like a giant
kidney stone, you know you're on the road to recovery. Steady, incremental
improvements are the key. Then comes the final test. Your adult daughter
and her boyfriend ask you to bless their engagement. You look at her,
you remember the many gifts and talents she displayed as a child, you
think of how well she's lived up to all that potential since, you look
at the homely dimwit she's chosen for a mate, and you say, "Oh heck yeah."

Then you hug.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset. His biweekly column consistently earns
rave reviews from both his mother and his father, who continue to insist
he'll be an astronaut one day.