Grrrr. Nothing like an inbox full of missing assignment notifications from school to enjoy with my morning coffee and bowl of cereal.  It’s way too early to pretend that I’m not annoyed with my middle-schooler, and if I’m honest, I’m a little defeated too. These missing assignments are a quarterly event around here. This is not spring fever or end-of-the-year-itis or even I’m-too-cool-i-osis. This is what dyslexia looks like, at least in my house.

My middle son has dyslexia. When he was four, my precocious funny boy was quoting back entire passages from books, picking out the different instruments in “The Nutcracker” and teaching himself how to ride a bike and a skateboard. He was also really struggling to learn the letters of his name. I took him to a group of specialists in Washington, DC who tested him for 5 hours. When they emerged from the testing room with him, the center’s director was laughing and she turned to me, “If you ever tire of him, I’ll take him.” She also said that the testing was inconclusive. There were worrisome issues with some visual processing areas, but he had some real gifts in verbal comprehension and non-verbal processing. And so the story has gone for years even up until just this past week. Dyslexia is a slippery fish and we recognize it more in the shadows than the light.

My son is smart enough and socially gifted enough to swim with the other kids in the classroom who do not share his diagnosis. In fact, if you had to visit his classroom, you would be hard-pressed to pick him out of the crowd of sweaty seventh graders. At first. If you hung around long enough, you would see him start to bob a little. You would notice how hard it is for him to copy notes from the board, you would see that it takes him longer to read a passage, and you would sense his anxiety when presented with a lot of visual information all at once. Dyslexia can look like attention issues and tiredness and even laziness. But how it looks is nothing compared with how it feels.

Tiring, exhausting, confusing, and confounding: dyslexia checks every one of those boxes and then some. On any given day, I can feel any or all of these things when dealing with the fallout of issues dyslexia brings, but that’s nothing compared to what it’s like for my son. For the most part, he just keeps swimming along. Sure, he is working a little harder than everybody else, using up those reserves a little quicker, and pushing himself to the breaking point a little faster, but that’s just how school is for him.

But sometimes he gets overwhelmed. A difficult assignment, a missed class, or just too much work in one week can provide the tipping point that takes him from finishing to flailing. At moments like this, he feels like he is swimming upstream through rough seas with fogged goggles. He quite literally loses his way at the same moment he runs out of steam. These are the moments when the waves crash over him and he starts to sink. It tends to happen around the same point in each semester. Then those emails start filling up my inbox.

So now I sip my coffee and regroup in front of my computer. School is a marathon, not a sprint. This mantra brings peace and some focus. School rewards the long view and the courageous return to the journey every single day.  It forgives momentary failures and allows us to learn from our mistakes. It gives us time to find a way to chart our own course even if we are swimming with a bad fin or dyslexia. Today I will remember that these emails are annoying reminders of the rough seas that mark our marathon journey through school, but that we will do what we have always done—throw him a lifeline, extend our hand, pick him up.

And we will just keep swimming.

Dyslexia can feel a bit like swimming upstream, but we just have to keep swimming.

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-Erin

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