I Was Today Years Old When I Realized I'm Related to My Children
A personal tale about dyslexia
Oh my God. It happened. I have two children. And those two children are, and this is true, related to me.
That's obviously, I hope, intended with a little bit of humor. But something happened recently. Which isn't some thing that happened recently. My daughter, Quinn, who is awesome, had difficulty in school. The difficulty? She has dyslexia. I also have dyslexia. That's right. Your author, a person who writes, and gets paid by you, my readers, for writing? As the typos that are frequently present in this newsletter demonstrate? I have dyslexia. This term has been updated recently.
I have a learning difficulties. I have a learning disability. I have two children. At least one of them, and I suspect both, have a highly heritable learning disability.
When all you're doing is going to school, as the primary way in which you are measured, learning disabilities are a pretty big disability.
My daughter is having to cope with that right now.
I had to get help with that throughout my entire childhood. I thought I was less then. I was less than. I was not good at learning to read. I was not good at reading.
It turns out in addition to dyslexia, I also have wicked ADHD. And I suspect this is something true of my children as well.
These are highly heritable conditions. How tall you are is less heritable that the likelihood that you'll have ADHD. I'm not very tall. I also have a lot of dyslexia. This is just what's happening.
There are those moments, as a parent, where you encounter something you're really familiar with from your own life. Most of the time, and this really kicks you in the chest, it's struggles. Struggles are common. A lot of people struggle. Most people will struggle sometime. Some people struggle a lot. It's really hard to watch your kids struggle. It's really hard to watch them make the same inevitable conclusions about themselves that you made when you were a kid.
I thought I wasn't very smart. I thought I was bad at things. I didn't really understand why I was bad at things. It was very confusing. I was held back in kindergarten. I had five years of tutoring. I was slated for special education. I got extensive testing, neuropsychology, etc. It revealed that I have a severe learning disability.
The quote, from the person who did my neuropsychological testing as a child, as reported by my mother, is as follows "I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is he’s a genius. The bad news is your child is woefully dyslexic.”
My IQ has been measured on a number of different occasions. That initial neuropsych testing when I was six or seven years old clock me in at 186. This is a nonsense number. IQ testing isn't validated, I later learned, past 160. There just aren't enough people out in the tails to make any number past 160 reliable or valid.
I was tested again, in my 20s, as part of a large research study I participated in. I've been a subject in a number of large research studies, and this is one of the reasons I do research now. Because it was actually really helpful to me to have those assessments by experts, that pointed me in the right direction.
That study revealed an IQ of 168. But I was depressed of the time, and so they cautioned me, the results were not accurate.
All of which is to say, one of the things it would be hard to argue with the above data is that I'm not very smart, whatever that means. But I was still held back in kindergarten. I literally repeated kindergarten. In first grade, they want to put me in special ed. In second grade, I was in a talented and gifted program.
It wasn't until many many many many many years later that I recognize these are often the same program. Some kids are different than others. All of us are different in one way or another. The way we are taught, and the way teachers learn to teach, is to teach most kids how to learn. And they're very good at it on average. When it comes to average kids. Sometimes there are outliers. I was one of those outliers. It seems like my daughter is also an outlier. This isn't to suggest that all children who struggle with learning are extra special or brilliant or whatever, but it doesn't rule it out either.
The point I'm getting too, is that it's heartbreaking to watch your child struggle. It's heartbreaking to watch my child struggle. It's also worth remembering, the reason I do any of the things I do, and I do a lot of them, as readers of this newsletter can attest, is because I had that history of struggle.
It's not easy for me to write. That's why I do it every day. If I stopped, I wouldn't be good at it anymore. I would avoid it. So I made it a habit.
I'm not good at reading. I make mistakes. I miss words. Sometimes it takes me five or six tries to dial an analog telephone. I just get the numbers wrong. In the wrong sequence. And somehow, none of these things prevented me from writing something you want to read.
Our struggles, they can be a source of empathy, power, ethics, justice, failure, resilience, and trying again. I don't want my kids to grow up without struggle. It's hard to watch my daughter struggle in the way I struggled. But it didn't hurt me, it made me.
Loved this article. Both my children have learning disabilities and are brilliant. One is transgender. And watching them struggle is SO HARD. But I also try to remember that our struggles are what defines us and helps us define our own path. Thanks for sharing!