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, but if I’m honest, I’m a little defeated too. These missing assignments have become a regular event around here. This is not eighth-grader-itis or I’m-too-cool-i-osis. This is not a byproduct of too much screen time or a symptom of an over-scheduled kid. 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 this semester. 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 eighth 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. Just last week, I used the word flummoxed to describe how I felt about my son’s current academic situation, and we really are. My husband and I worry about his future constantly. His potential rarely matches his performance. We have older kids so we know that this is not a recipe for success. We are well aware of all the pitfalls waiting for kids who are not successful academically. Our eyes are wide open and are hearts are willing, but our path forward is uncertain. My emotional state is all over the place as we deal with the fallout of the issues dyslexia brings, but that’s nothing compared to what it’s like for my son.
For the most part, my son 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. Sad to say, but school has always been a difficult place so he is used to the daily struggle.
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 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. Then those emails start filling up my inbox.
So now we are back in the unenviable position of circling the wagons and trying to regroup. We are all stressed out and cranky at having the same conversations, worn out and tapped out confronting the same issues, exhausted and deflated treading the same water. School is a marathon not a sprint so we keep repeating this mantra hoping that it will bring peace and focus. School rewards the long view and the courageous return to the journey every single day, so we tell him to keep moving forward despite how unproductive he might feel. School forgives momentary failures and allows us to learn from our mistakes, so we help him brush off losses and find strength in small victories.
Today these emails are peeving me, but they are also tangible reminders of the rough seas that mark my son’s marathon journey through school. So I will remind myself to channel patience and understanding for something beyond my experience. I will take deep breaths and try not to scream or lecture. Today, I know we will do what we have always done for him: throw him a lifeline, extend our hand, pick him up.
Today, like every day, we will pray that he will just keep swimming.
-Erin
You can follow us on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Check out our books, “I Just Want to Be Alone” and “You Have Lipstick on Your Teeth.”
