School

Dear Kate,

HOLY CRAP! I have just enrolled you at school, because you asked me to.

Next I'm off to the bottle shop.  I guess I should meditate, but I'm up for a more passive form of relaxation that doesn't require mental discipline.  Avoid your inherent psychological tendencies and don't be influenced by my coping strategies, if you would.

How do you think you'll go? 



Can I just let you go,
or
will I need to pick you up,
or
will I need to scrape you up?



Or will it be another case of liquification?  I hate mopping.



Watch this space and you'll find out! I'll give you my perspective at least.

I've always said that if you feel ready to tackle it, you will have the mental duress to succeed. (Are there too many 'mentals' in this passage?) Now I'm less certain.  Actually, I was never certain at all.

Good luck! Huh! What an outrageously inadequate thing to say!!

Love Mum
xxx

P.S. Are you sure I have equipped you well enough with what you need?  You seem so definate these days!

P.P.S You were the age champion of the home school swimming carnival today, remember?

P.P.P.S  I got your visual processing test reults yesterday.  Remember someone said you are essentially blind and have no visual memory?  91st percentile for visual memory and 99th percentile for visual spatial skills -you hit the ceiling of the test and the examiner commented that he assumed you would be an exeptional reader.  What an enigma you are!

A Loss of Perspective

Dear Kate,

Last week you finished a 2 week intensive visual processing course with an expert on Dyslexia.  The upshot was they "hoped like hell that it had done some good" but considered your impairment to be "very severe" to the point that you would always need a reader and a scribe as you are functionally "deaf and blind" where literacy is concerned.

It has really knocked the wind out of me...again.

You enjoyed the course (and all the bribery I used to get you to do it) and skipped out happily and chatted away, while I staggered and grunted non-committally and the migrane started to brew.

The next day I set off on a 100km walk to fundraise for the Fred Hollows Foundation. For each $25 my team and I raised, the charity can restore vision to one person whose blindness is caused by poverty. A cheap easy solution. Appealing huh?

You and your sister wrote me little notes to give me encouragement along the way, but the only one I can really remember said "Go mummy go.  If you get dorb (bored), try torking in pig lengig (Pig Language)."

What I should have done, is enjoy the running joke between us, but instead I counted the errors and wondered if anyone else could have gleaned a meaning from this.

I recognise my complete lack of perspective in responding this way.  I guess that is good.
It is a new week and time to start afresh.

Love Mum
xxx

A big glimmering, glistening ray of hope! Perhaps you need one?

A big glimmering, glistening ray of hope!  If you are reading this blog perhaps you need one.

Here's where I found mine:

DyslexicAdvantage.com is one of the world's largest dyslexia communities.

It's HERE!


"Probably the most helpful material ever published on dyslexia..."

So true!!

Here is my letter to the authors:


"I wanted to thank you for giving some colour and texture to my hope.  I knew that dyslexic minds were amazing ones and my daughter’s amongst them, but couldn’t quite articulate how.  After she was labelled as gifted, teachers and therapists kept asking “But how is she gifted?” and I could only answer “Well, cognitively”. 


 It certainly wasn’t functionally because she was performing in the low-average arena for most things at school.  Everyone looked at her performance from ”the flip side of the coin” and only addressed her areas of weakness, me included.

Now that you have highlighted her processing style for me, I can see for the first time how it is that she will progress from the caterpillar to the butterfly and I could howl, snort and slobber (not merely weep) from relief.

Those 16 typed-pages of fairy story that she dictated to my mother at age four, are the masterpiece that I thought them to be, a window into Kate's world and maybe the first grading in what will eventually become a vertical trajectory to fulfilment and success.   Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!"

Superkate's Mum