Another thing on our list of things

The air is vaguely warm and damp as I walk home from the bus stop, holding the hand of my eldest daughter. We’re discussing her reading; more honestly, the struggles she is having with learning to read.

“Sometimes the words dance around, and go blurry and I can’t remember which word I’m meant to be looking at.”

A short story she brought home the previous day encourages me to probe for details, the transposed letters, mirrored words and sight words with the middle all muddled ringing alarm bells in my head.

I research Dyslexia and mark a checklist that tells me if you check more than ten of these, consult with a specialist. I check thirty four.

I make an appointment with our doctor for (another) eye test, just in case, before sending her off to her room to play. A highly intelligent child, this might explain her frustration with words not making sense inside her head.

My husband confesses that if he doesn’t read methodically, the lines move and blur together for him as well.

Huh. These things run in families, oftentimes.

She plays and I am grateful to be making this connection now, which she is small and malleable, before the disillusionment sinks in and the bright shine of learning gets knocked off her.

It will be okay – it will always be okay. It’s just another thing on our list of things, another reason to keep pushing, to keep reading, to keep paying attention.

Maybe something inside her brain will click tomorrow and she will stop shouting, frustrated, when the books don’t speak to her. Or maybe something won’t, and we’ll get help, falling to the bottom of the issue and working out way out again with success in our eyes.