When Introverts Get Married

My husband is a hardcore introvert, and so am I. When we were young, one of the things I liked about him was how he liked doing quiet things just like me. I love being married to a guy who runs at the same speed. We have a whole weekend to do what we want? Great. He can play 20 hours of Skyrim while I devour a 500-page novel. Or we can binge-watch the Lord of the Rings movies. Don't have any friends? No problem, we'd rather stay home anyway.

Unfortunately, when two severe introverts reproduce, their offspring can be, well, introvertards.

Out of the five kids we had, only one was born a natural extrovert, and believe me, by the time she was nine months old we were asking each other where she came from. How did someone who wanted to go places and see people come from us? When my other kids were shy and refused to talk to even their grandparents it made a lot more sense. I was terrified of people, too.

Thanks to us, four of our kids are painfully shy. When I dropped my youngest off on his first day of kindergarten, my only warning to his teacher was "He may not talk." My teenage daughters are still too scared to order food at the McDonalds counter, they make their older, extroverted, sister do it for them.

Just this morning, my 16-year-old was telling me she didn't know how to use her graphing calculator in math.

"I just figure out all the problems by hand," said the girl who, by the way, has a 90 average in math.

"You need to go to your teacher and ask him to show you how to use it!" I said, though even as I said it I knew what her answer would be.

She just stared at me for a minute, then said, "Yeah, I'm just gonna write it out by hand."

Do you know what it's like to be so shy you can't even ask a teacher for help? But she's not the only one.

My fourteen-year-old daughter had a cold a few weeks back, so I sent her to school with a pile of Kleenex, in case she got a runny nose in class. When she got home from school, she handed the whole pile of tissues back.

"I didn't use any," she explained, "I was too scared to blow my nose during class."

After my five-year-old had been going to kindergarten for a few days, I realized I hadn't explained to him how the bathroom thing works at school, so I asked him, "When you are at school, do you put up your hand and ask your teacher when you have to go to the bathroom?"

"No," he answered.

My eight-year-old chimed in, "He probably holds it in all day like I do."

"Yeah, I hold it in all day," the five-year-old agreed.

Facepalm.

My husband worries about our introverted kids constantly. He pushes them to attend social events, he coaches them to be friendly and more outgoing. I have been known to give my kids tutorials on basic conversation structures.

We want to give our kids the tools they need to do whatever they want in life, so we push them to be more outgoing and brave. But the truth is, being an introvert is okay. My hubby and I like it, we do just fine.

Hopefully, our kids will one day be comfortable with the basic social interactions required of them in life. Until then, let's pray they don't have a bathroom emergency during class!