Born Reader

The year before I was ready for kindergarten, my mother had the idea to hold a little "play school" at our house. For a modest price, a handful of kids from the neighborhood came over to our house for an afternoon of what amounted to pre-school for us and daycare for the neighborhood moms. Mom was the teacher, and we had story time, crafts, and some quiet games. Since I was otherwise alone with Mom when my brothers went off to school, it was a chance to get some socializing in, and Mom made a little side money. A pretty good deal all around.

So at age somewhere about half-past three, at the close of a "play-school" day, while other kids were getting picked up, my mother turned around and saw this happening:

Me, with another girl, a book open on my lap, reading away to my friend. As Mom listened, she realized I wasn't just babbling words or making up a story. The words coming out of my mouth were indeed the words on the page.

She must have memorized the book, was my mom's first thought. But she came over and asked:

And at my end of this interchange... I wasn't sure why she was asking that. Of course I was reading it. What else do you do with a book? I wasn't in trouble, was I?

And of course at Mom's end of the interchange, she had to check to find out if what she was seeing was really what she was seeing. She found another book and handed it to me.

I promptly opened the book and read from it just as well as the book I'd been reading.

Well, that made the family headlines around the dinner table. "She's reading already!" At three and a half, that's a pretty remarkable feat, giving any parent some genuine bragging rights. Mom did read to us quite a lot, and I suppose I picked it up just following along with the words. Woo hoo, something Mom thought was a good thing to do paid off!

This was at a time when the wisdom handed down from the education experts on high was, "Don't teach your children at home. Just let them play. We educational experts have developed the best methods to teach reading and math, and your children's teachers will use our methods to teach them the proper way when they get to school."

Well, heck with that, my mother thought, as I gobbled my way voraciously through every children's book in the house and everything we brought home from the library.

As for me, finding out that I, the youngest of the family, was doing anything remarkable was intoxicating. Especially when any family or friends of my parents were over, and it was, "Isn't this amazing? She's reading already!"

And while all this was going on...

... in the primary grades in the nearby elementary school, where teachers were using all the approved methods to teach children how to read, my brother K was struggling.

Now, there's no knowing whether or not, if he'd learned a little reading at home, that his dyslexia would have been diagnosed any earlier. After all, kids weren't even expected to know their alphabet before kindergarten at that time. What my parents knew from the reports sent home from his school was that words just didn't behave on the page for him. He flipped letters around. He had trouble distinguishing certain sounds: bull and bowl, for example, sounded alike to him. When he said milk it often came out mulk. As a result, the phonics-based methods that were used to teach reading at the time were knocking the stuffing out of him.

K was the middle brother, already overshadowed by our oldest brother, M, who could do everything better than he could simply by virtue of being three years older. And now here was baby sister, three years younger, doing something that K was struggling to do: read fluently.

I was only vaguely aware that any of this was happening. All I knew was that K "didn't like reading all that well" and we'd go to the library to try to find "books he'll like." And though K and I used to play together, I was aware of a sudden and rapidly growing friction.

Soon, K became my harshest critic. Any time I was drawing, he'd say, "You're copying that!" Or, "That doesn't look anything like the picture." If I read aloud, he'd jump on any mistakes. His toys were his, jealously guarded, and if I got any new toys myself it was, "Why does she get one of those and I don't?" K was never going to let me get the jump on him again. He'd assert his superiority at every opportunity. At one point my artist aunt watched him draw and while scribbled something -- I was being a smart alec at the time -- and said that K was the creative one, and I wasn't. Harsh, that was, and K crowed over it.

At the same time, a new phrase entered my world:

Showing off. "Wow, she's reading already," devolved into, "She's showing showing off again," and my brothers were quick to tattle. Everyone expected M to lead the way with learning and skills, being the eldest of us. But I, the youngest and a girl at that, was expected to dial it back, waaaay back. Not only for K, but for the other kids in the play-school. "You might hurt their feelings," Mom explained.

Other people's feelings. Isn't that so much a traditional girl-child's role? To take responsibility for other people's feelings? To never let herself do anything better than the boys for fear the boys won't like her?

And so that became part of my family role. Yes, read and perform perfectly -- perfection would become the minimum expectation eventually -- but shhh, don't show off about it. Wait for other people to notice.

Imagine how well that works in adult life.

The enmity between us continued on, within a few years reaching ridiculous extremes, where K would say, "I like that candy," and I'd say, "Yeah, I like it too," and he'd say, "Oh, then I hate it." And mean it, spurning that candy from that moment onward. It wasn't until he reached college age and moved out on his own that eventually he let go of the rivalry. Maybe once he was making is way in the real world the old rivalry didn't seem nearly as important. Maybe for once there was no Little Sister to blame things on when things went wrong. Maybe adulthood gave him a better perspective.

Whatever the case, it's fine between us now. I never wanted the rivalry. Even as a kid I'd try to patch things up between us, once I understood what had been happening with him. But it's still something to explore to understand how things went so badly so quickly and how that shaped my world as I grew up.

Pink, Blue, and Infinite Shades of Mauve

Somewhere in one of my mother's family photo albums is a photo of me at age not-quite-three in a cute little cowboy suit, toy pistols and all, that some doting relative got for me. I don't have access to it at the moment, so I'll try to recreate the gist of it from memory. 

I was pretty small when I got it, and I don't know that I wore it all that often. It was a costume for dress up play, so my mother would not have thought it appropriate to wear outside the house. I think I outgrew it fast. And I have vague memories of being a little too yippie-ki-yi-ay when I had it on, so that may have been one reason it was kept in the back of the closet and only brought out on rare occasion when I was "being good."

Even without all the trim and holsters and silver-tone conchos and all in the picture, it's evident why my mother called it a cowGIRL suit. It was pastel pink. It had a short little skirt -- with fringes? Pretty sure it had fringes. 

I knew better, though. It was a cowBOY suit, and I firmly and repeatedly corrected anyone who said otherwise. I didn't grok the cowGIRL thing. It was cowBOY or nothing.

And therein was the opening salvo, a warning shot over the bow of my mother's Good Ship Perfect Daughter, the first strains of the overture in a lifelong tragicomic operetta that might be titled, "I Gotta Be MEEEE." Subtitled, "I'm... I'm a WHAT exactly?"

My mom had some pretty solid ideas of what a girl ought to be. Images like these from a couple of knitting books that she handed down to me are exemplars of what she had in mind when she put in her order for My Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending, Bettie Page bangs and all: 

Perfect little girls, from what I gathered, were:

• Dainty and delicate.
• Always adorable.
• Well-behaved.
• Clean and perfectly groomed.
• Neat and tidy.
• Mommy's little helper.

Her ideas of what little girls should wear were solidified in the 40s and 50s, so that even in the 60s/70s she resisted any notion that I could wear pants to school, and she sewed me some dresses in a tiny flowered print with puffed sleeves and poofy skirts that were the latest in style when she was of an age to start planning her Perfect Little Girl TM Patent pending. So yeah, in '68 and '69 or so, when the other girls were all hip in flared jeans and mod dresses and mini skirts, I was turned out like something out of a Fun With Dick and Jane reader. 

Meanwhile, after I learned to read at a very young age and was gobbling up every Early Reader in the house and the nearest library, I slurped up my brothers' Henry Huggins and other Beverly Cleary books, science books, mysteries, Indian crafts and lore books, and spent time looking longingly at the pictures in brother K's Cub Scout manual like these:

And these:

And these were illustrations for Arrow Point requirements. Requirements! WOW! Not only did boys get to do exciting things like climb trees and build shacks and make electromagnetic cranes, they got awards for it!

Sign me up! I thought.

Now, I was pretty cognizant about the physical differences between boys and girls. I knew that I had all the physical characteristics of a girl. But... I was nevertheless the kid who insisted I was wearing a cowBOY suit. I frequently wished I'd been born a boy because my brothers and their friends got to do cooler things than I did. I knew from the girl bits in my underpants that I wasn't physically a boy. Nor did I identify as a boy. But... "I'm a girl" never quite rang true for me, either. I had dolls and doll clothes, but I didn't do much with the dolls besides put the clothes on them. I preferred being out in the sandbox with my brothers and their Tonka trucks, but no one got Tonka trucks for me. My brothers got chemistry sets. I asked if I could have one. I got craft kits, which were okay, and tea sets, which I had no idea what to do with.

Mom reminded me over and over that I was her "dainty and delicate" little girl. Sometimes when I got to play with my brothers and things got a little wild, Mom would cry out, "Where's my dainty and delicate little girl?" and if I got snarky and said, "I didn't know I had a sister," that put a swift end to play time then and there and I was sent to my room. My brothers scorned "dumb girl stuff," and wanted nothing to do with the few girlish things I was be interested in. My dad... he seldom had much to say about gender roles and what little girls "ought" to be (beyond the time he saw me reading Captains Courageous and said, "Isn't that a boy's book?), but when it came to choosing family outings, it was Dad who chose and we did the things Dad liked -- fishing, going for a hike, going to the beach, camping, going to the zoo, outdoor stuff like that, and we all participated. It was stuff I liked doing, too. By the time I was six I could bait a hook and clean my own fish. Besides learning to cook, which was a little like chemistry (actually it's a lot like chemistry), and needle crafts, I didn't much like housekeeping and other traditionally feminine pursuits.

So... I had a lot of questions. Questions that never got asked because there wasn't anyone willing to have that conversation and there weren't the answers then that I might have gotten these days.

At that time, you were a girl or a boy, period. The only alternate state, for a girl who liked to do boy things, was "tomboy" (there was no socially acceptable alternate state for boys who liked to do girl things). A tomboy was clearly a girl, identified as a girl, but liked rough-and-tumble play, preferring to run around with the boys instead of staying home and playing with dolls. The tomboy story, though, always seemed to culminate in the day when the former freckle-faced little gamin in braids made her debut at the prom, all long gown and smooth hair and chic poise and all the boys who had been her playmates stood there with their mouths hanging open and then stumbled over one another to ask for a dance.

I wasn't confident and extroverted enough to be the classic tomboy, nor did I harbor any illusions as I got older that I'd blossom into a glamorous sylph. I didn't feel like a chic girl who had it all together. I wasn't going to ever be a boy, either, I knew that.

So what was I?

The only things I could say with certainty about myself at that tender age were:

• I was an avid reader.
• I was a maker of things.
• I was creative.
• I liked the outdoors.
• I was messy.
• I hated pink.
• I liked blue.

I was not what my mother had ordered, something I would feel ever more strongly as I grew older and less and less inclined to follow the path she'd so meticulously planned out, which she seemed to take as a personal affront. But that core "me," whatever it was, however non-traditionally-gendered, was a stubborn Old Soul that refused to budge in the face of societal and motherly pressure. 

I knew, even when the youth of the 60s were hitchhiking across Europe or meditating with gurus to "find themselves," exactly who I was. It was that solid sense of self that would be my saving grace, what would literally keep me alive, in the maelstrom of my young adult years.