My Mother and Me

Sorry for this late post folks, but I've just gotten finished spending the day with my whole family. And, frankly, I'm tired. Yes, I have one of those families. You spend 7 or 8 hours with them, and it feels as if you've spent 4 to 5 times that amount with them. But that's what you gotta do to "maintain relationships."

Anyway, I want to take some time to actually talk about my mother. Without m mother, I certainly wouldn't be here today. I wouldn't be the person I am today. (Depending on your opinion of me, you might be thinking that's probably not a good thing. Say that within earshot of me though, and I'll punch you.) I want to take the time though to tell you how important my mother is in my life.

To long time readers (all 7 of you), some of this might sound a tad familiar, but I don't care. It's a special occasion, and special occasions call for special exceptions.

To get straight to the point, without my mother, I would not be the writer I am because all writers start off as readers. My mother made me a reader, but it was a long hard struggle. See, when I was a little kid, I had, to use the euphemism of the time, "reading difficulties." I say euphemism because what I really had was a mild form of dyslexia. 

From ages 5 to 8 in fact, I struggled to read almost anything, especially dense paragraphs of prose. Looking at those paragraphs made my head spin, and it served to flair up something that only compounded my problems: a lovely case of childhood anxiety. It got so bad that the very idea of reading made me anxious. However, it was something that elementary education especially deemed was important for me to learn. So, even in those early days, my mother set out to help me learn.

At my first Elementary school, the sadly now defunct Kottmeyer ECC (Early Childhood Center), my mother signed me up for remedial reading. One of the books I remember reading in that course was a book titled The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. This didn't help my confidence or my anxiety (in fact, it made me feel as if I was stupid), but it did help my pass the second grade. 

In all the summers through my childhood, she also got my brother and I to read by signing us up for the Saint Louis Public Library's Summer Reading Club. If we read 12 books by summer's end, we could even win a pair of tickets to see a St. Louis Cardinal's game (which, if I'm being honest, was the real reason she signed us up). I did it, but I struggled to do it. In fact, I only managed to do it by rereading books I'd already read--mostly installments from Mary Pope Osbourne's Magic Tree House series. 

She even roped some of her friends to help me. I can remember one time, a family friend had my brother and I over for a weekend (you know, to give our parents a break), and during that weekend she sat me down to try and help me read. I can even remember the book. It was The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss and Crockett Johnson. I struggled to even read that. (And to this day, I hate that book because this family friend had no patience to help me.)

Where things really got desperate though came when I got into the 3rd Grade. Somehow, I managed to scrape through, from Kindergarten to the 3rd Grade. Barely, but I managed. (We're talking about American Public Schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so the standards were pretty low even then.) In 3rd Grade though, things changed, or seemed to, drastically. I ended up going to a school called Mullanphy ILC, and I went there because, believe it or not, as a little kid, I was quite good a Math and Science and Mullanphy was one of the "STEM Magnet" schools in St. Louis. (There was little reading involved in those subjects, except word problems, but I bluffed my way through those). In 3rd Grade though, I got stuck with a very tough, no nonsense scary teacher named Ms. Burton.

Ms. Burton was the first teacher who ever assigned students homework over the weekend (she was no one's favorite teacher for that). The homework assignment she gave us was, to my chagrin, a book report. So every week on Monday, she would make us go to the massive bookshelf in her classroom and pick out a book. Over the course of that week, we had to read that book, and then turn in that book report in the following Monday. There were only two rules. The book we picked couldn't be a picture book, and it couldn't be a "choose your own adventure" book.

Well, I so unnerved, put off, and anxious that I almost never read the book until the night before the book report was due. My mother would inevitably have to stay up with me, and she'd make me read the whole book aloud to her. I can't recall all the books I read, save for two. One of them was Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach and another was a volume of Encyclopedia Brown detective stories. Sadly, even with this regimented form of reading, my abilities in this area didn't much improve. In spite of having read close to 40 books by the end of that year, my reading scores were still so low, that the school came to my mother with an ultimatum:

I could either attend summer school, or I could repeat the 3rd Grade. 

Well, after all this effort, my mother wasn't going to let her child go through the embarrassment of repeating a grade like a moron. However, she also recognized that since regular school after nearly four years of effort hadn't helped me improve, throwing me into summer school likely wasn't going to help either. As a special education teacher herself, a teacher who's area of expertise was attending to the specific needs of students, she knew I needed focused help. So, like every great negotiator, she managed to convince the school to agree to a compromise. I would be allowed to go onto the 4th grade, if and only if I saw a reading tutor at home once a week. 

It took some searching, but eventually, my mother secured the help and services of teacher. This teacher's name was Sister Rosemary. As the perceptive reader might have guessed, this teacher also happened to be a Nun in the Catholic Church. She, however, wasn't a "hit you with a ruler" nun. She was one of the nice, patient ones (and one of the reasons that, no matter how much bullshit they pull, I can't completely hate the Catholic Church). As I recall, she came every Wednesday and sat and read with me. Unlike my other reading teachers, whenever I struggled with a work, she helped me sound it out or pronounced it for me. More importantly than the sheer help, as I recall, she helped me relax when it came to reading. Without so much anxiety hanging over it, what she was teaching me actually began to click. A book I can remember fondly reading with her was Kartusch. 

By the end of the summer, we'd read at least a dozen books together, plus I'd also read several new books for the summer reading club (again, that my mother signed me up for), but this time, it seemed easier. I headed to the 4th Grade, and found myself reading books like The Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows, as well as many of the other novels by Roald Dahl like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches. And I was doing it on my own. It was in the fourth grade also that I wrote my very first story, a fairy tale called Merlin and the Magic Monster. 

The rest, of course, is history. 

None of that would've happened without ,y mother though. Without her refusing to give up on me, to make sure I got my education, that I could go through school and not hate school, I'll always be grateful for that. Not every kid gets to have a mother that cares that much. I lucked out and got one. It wasn't easy, and I certainly didn't appreciate what she was doing for me then, but I do now.

Thank you mom.