UP FRONT:Life with a dyslexic child in the family is certainly interesting. Life with three dyslexic children is . . .
BC AND AD no longer hold only a religious meaning for my family. Instead BC now refers to "Before Crisis" and AD means "After Diagnosis". Life in between was pure hell. In the days BC I had a happy-go-lucky, if somewhat reserved young son, who spent much of his time daydreaming and smiling. He interacted well with his peers and with his family. But then small things began to change, at first intermittently. I didn't notice a pattern until much later. My happy-go-lucky son was smiling less, was quick to anger, appeared stressed at times, became withdrawn, and walked to school with what seemed to be a heavy heart. Of course, as a parent your first thought is that your child is being bullied. But after consultation with his teacher we knew this was not the case. He was "just not great at his reading. He was a bit slow." He was in first class.
But my son turned out not to be "a little slow" at reading, he turned out to have severe dyslexia, which was diagnosed a full two years later. As parents, we felt betrayed by a school system that allowed our son suffer in silence for so long.
I also admit that as his parents, we felt devastated and guilty that we missed this, when we should have been the first to realise something was wrong. I knew that my son was not happy. How? Because he told me so, regularly. "I hate my life," became his mantra for nearly a year, and towards the end of the BC period this was extended to include "I wish I was dead." My son was nine years old, and I was at my wits end. For a full year before diagnosis, my son suffered from debilitating migraines which would incapacitate him for two days. To my utter shame, I did not connect the dots at this time.
As a full time working mother, I missed so much of my children's day. And it is time you don't get back. Their school stories are not re-told at bedtime, they are long forgotten before then. "How was your day today" was regularly answered with "fine". And because I was tired and stressed, it would sometimes, if truth be told mostly all the time, be left at that. Their childminder would have their homework done, and I would be free to collapse into the nearest chair.
This is the combination of factors which resulted in me being unaware of my child's problems, and because of a lack of communication with school on the subject, it was pure luck that I uncovered his difficulties. Gnawing away at the back of my mind was the feeling that something was wrong, because on the occasions I did the homework, it was torture. Because of my frustration with him at his slow progress, my son's confidence took a bashing at home, too.
Immediately after diagnosis, things actually got worse for a while for me. For my son, his detection as a dyslexic released him from a devastating, demoralising belief that he was stupid. With this acknowledgment came hope. For me, honestly, I felt my world was falling apart. I felt extremely guilty and ashamed that I had let my son go through all this without catching it. But, the more I learned about dyslexia through the DAI, the Dyslexia Association of Ireland, the more I realised that I was not alone with these feelings; that many parents go through this same grieving process and anguish. My first-born child, Gary, was diagnosed at the age of 10 in 2004. I gave up work shortly after. Lucky I did, because in 2005 his sister Emma was diagnosed at the age of nine, and in 2006 the youngest, Niall, was diagnosed at age eight.
Life with a dyslexic child in the family is certainly interesting. Life with three dyslexic children in the family is fascinating. Everyone knows the pitfalls of dyslexia, the difficulty with reading, with spelling, with concentration, the slow processing of information, and sometimes the difficulty with numbers.
I choose instead to explain their strengths. Because they are dyslexic, they view the world differently. Their phonological processing difficulty creates in my children a better verbal and intellectual processing ability. Dyslexics are often described as outside-the-box thinkers. They are often able to make giant leaps in understanding. They are gifted in so many ways. For the most part, dyslexic children are artistic across a wide variety of activities.
Now, in our home, their abilities are celebrated. Their uniqueness is treasured and their disabilities, while significant in some aspects, are not defining characteristics. They are dyslexic - and we now live with that quite comfortably.