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.

It all started in a house on a hill.

When I was born we lived in a pale yellow house on Hillview Street, which was actually on a hill and actually had a view (not like how they sometimes name an apartment complex "Pine Mountain" and it's on the flats without a tree in sight), in 1960s suburbia. I was the third of three kids, with two brothers before me. When I was born, Dad reportedly said, "Oh, boy, it's a girl!" My mother was thrilled. She finally had her little dream girl, her little shadow, someone she could do all the mother-daughter things she'd dreamed of with. In a house full of males, there was finally someone to be on her side of the gendered divide.

My brothers were, I think, less than thrilled. My oldest brother M, was six when I was born. My middle brother, K, was three. We lived in a three bedroom house. My parents figured with parental obviousness that one bedroom would be for "the boys," and one for "the girl." And that, of course, began the story my brothers started spinning about how "spoiled" I was and how I always got my way and got all the good things. I was only a baby and I got my own room. The boys got a new set of bunk beds and now had to share a room. Later, when we moved into another 3-bedroom, I remember M complaining, "How come SHE always gets her own room and we don't?" His idea was that he, as the eldest, should be the one to have a room to himself. "Which of you is going to share a room with your sister?" Dad asked. My brothers just glared, and I thought, well, where would I have to sleep?

On the couch?

Move my crib to the garage?

I could picture it all so clearly, and was, for a moment, afraid it might actually happen. I think my brothers would have been fine with any of those so long as they got their own way.

Mom says I was an "easy" baby. I don't know how easy I was as far as babies generally go, or if by the third child she just kind of knew what to expect.

It was all great except the hair.

Of which I had practically none.

I was a bald baby. My mother was extremely embarrassed at having a bald baby girl. I guess I was supposed to be born with a full head of golden ringlets or something. All I had was transparent peach fuzz, so I didn't look girly enough so people felt compelled to ask, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Which was not okay with Mom. No one should be mistaking HER little GIRL for a BOY! Nope. She had a GIRL at last, and there must be no confusion.

Every time we left the house, she tells me, she'd put a baby bonnet on me. To hide my bald head that embarrassed her so much. And to make me demonstrably a frilly little girl so people wouldn't have to ask.

Yep, already. Right out of the box, I was "product not as expected."

Okay, sure. A baby bonnet is not big deal. As a baby I couldn't possibly know any difference. What did I know? Probably all I could make out was manically smiling faces and enthusiastic voices going, "Wah WAH wah WAH WAH waaaahh," like the adults in the Charlie Brown movies. I don't even know if I protested about having a thing tied on my head or if I tried to pull it off as babies so often do.

If Mom thought sticking a bonnet on my little bald head was all it took to make me into her dream baby, she was about to learn it wasn't going to be that simple. I wasn't that simple.

Also, it was the earliest taste of how much of my mother's self-esteem at the time was wrapped up in being a perfect mother to a perfect family, and how much I was to carry the weight of my mother's feelings every time I failed at being her perfect dainty delicate little dream girl.