(471) Friends

I have two friends, one from school days (Mei)  and one I met as a young mother (Swee).

My son once asked me if I keep the knowledge about dyslexia from my friends. The answer is determined by whether the person needs to know it. As soon as I graduated and returned, I tried to tell Mei. She did not believe me until many years later. Looking back, I can see why people from my elementary school would laugh and humour me. I was so very good in Chinese, particularly writing, that cause every teacher who have taught me to shake their heads when they found that I was going to switch to English and the national language stream in High School. My Headmistress actually sourced for a scholarship for me that would last 10 years until I was to graduate from a Taiwan University. I was young enough and dumb enough to turn it down.

It was twenty five years later, when Mei's second child went abroad, she finally had the time to attend an extended seminar to find out why it was terrifically difficult to teach the affected child. At the end of the seminar, she called and asked me what kind of symptoms that I have not been able to correct in Elizabeth. At that moment I could only think of  was that she finds it difficult in associating events to any specific date. She really needs to carry a calendar. Without the date and days (Mon or Wednesday) in front of her, she could not tell even how it is linked to today. Finally Mei had to admit that I haven't been lying all these years. From the age of three, Elizabeth has been an excellent student. However, she is a Chinese who does not speak Mandarin or read Chinese. She will have to overcome that as an adult some day.

I was very sad to be proven correct. I suppose it takes a thief to catch a fellow thief. Not that it is criminal to be dyslexic. As soon as I was convinced that I was a dyslexic, the first person I wanted to tell was Mei. She was a successful career woman at that time. The need to know is for early intervention for her children who may be blessed with similar genes. She did have an early diagnosis that number two was two years late in development at age four. She did the right thing to quit her bright career to teach him, but the assumption that he was normal (going by her judgment) really led her to an emotional melt down. I still have to slow down when I tell her things, my express train mode easily cause her information overload.

Swee was a corporate manager while her children were young. When I was slowing down by part-timing and struggling to prepare my children for pre-schools, she was earning good money. From what she told me about her academic experience, I was almost certain she was a dyslexic. Attempts to explain things to her led to laughter and total unbelief. Her idea of a dyslexic was an illiterate person working as a janitor. Soon after we had a good laugh (over the fact that I was not a cleaner) I moved out of town. When her number two child was in Grade two, she experienced a physical health crisis trying to help the child. In the end she had to quit her job because there was no special tutors to be had in her part of town no matter how much she was willing to pay. Her child was pretty severely dyslexic, it was not possible for the child to read horizontally. The visual line zigzags. Exercise books from that year showed painful struggles in smudged pages showing inability to write on the same line. I could not tell if it was the mother or the child's tears that fell on those pages.

Both Mei's and Swee's children whom they  spent countless hours teaching made it to Universities. Both mothers ought to be given awards for persevering all these years.