We don’t talk about your dyslexia. We don’t talk about the fact that no one helped you. We don’t talk about the fact that you were a part of the generations of children that were never identified. We don’t talk about the fact that no one understood you. We don’t talk about the fact that you were relentlessly teased as being “stupid” by everyone around you. We don’t talk about the fact that you responded to being teased with your fists. We don’t talk about the fact that your rage was self destructive but makes complete sense. We don’t talk about the drinking. We don’t talk about the drugs. We d ..read more

Life in general isn’t easy. We each have our challenges, our triumphs, our wins and losses, our adversities. Good days, bad days, and everything in between is what makes up the journey that is life. What we in the dyslexia world know is it starts out easy, as it usually does for most children, then gets overwhelmingly hard, for a list of reasons that sum up to adult feelings and special interests that in no way care about the trajectory that is a child’s life. As the normative parent of a neurodiverse dyslexic child, I willingly chose to stand in harm’s way to try to protect my son, but at the ..read more

It’s a sobering thing to have your child reach an age where in their maturity they begin to open up. It can be even harder when that child is dyslexic, and what they begin to open up about is their dyslexia and the way they’ve been treated inside education. It started within the last year with small questions. The first was, “Mom, are there any teachers I’ve had that you did not like?” I asked why he would ask me that question. His response was, “I know which ones hated me, and I suspect you did too, and if you knew, I bet you didn’t like them.” Like I always hope people behave in a divorce, I ..read more

(I wrote the below in February of 2020 right before COVId began, during a marathon IEP meeting that began in September, 2019 and did not conclude until May, 2020.  We met every couple of weeks and spent hours facing off.  Once the district people got involved everything just got worse as the stale mate continued.  They wanted to beat me into submission and I refused to give in.  This was the truth of what I was facing off against.  This was my reality.  I am not ashamed of how harsh this is either.  I didn’t publish it at the time as my circle would have frow ..read more

Judgment is a funny thing. It’s one sided. Judgment is a reflection of a person’s personal and inner narrative, but not always their moral compass, assuming of course their moral compass is pointing to good. As human beings, constructed of the weaknesses that comprise us all, we cannot help but judge each other. If one is religious then yes, the Bible states that judgment is God’s and we should not engage in it, but we all do. “Look how fat she is,” is just one example. The judgment too can be directed both outward as well as inward. We all tend to have very negative inner dialogs, much of whi ..read more

I am not a sorority girl. I am not a cheerleader. I do not jump up and down and scream in delight. I do not high five. I am a hugger but a cautious one. I have a hard time connecting with others. I do give my whole heart to people I call friend. I do trust easily even when I know I shouldn’t. I am hard on myself. I do relive conversations, incidents, etc. 1000’s of times over in my head and continue to feel the same raw emotion I felt the first time all over again. I do not forgive quickly or easily, including myself. I do forgive, but not forget. I only trust once. I ..read more

Sometimes I have to reach the peak of my anxiety to admit certain things out loud. Our family is done with public K-12 education, and that’s done with a capital D!  I can no longer feed my child to the wolves.  Yes, this is a position of incredible privilege.  I understand that truth.  I am grateful for this place of privilege that I can remove my son from the jaws of public education and chose to walk another path. There are truths that I’ve known for a while.  The first is my child has developed anxiety in an environment in which he is not u ..read more

2022 WAS A DOOZY OF A YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!! Truly. That was a year that kicked the every loving sh** out of me and kept kicking just to make sure I heard the message loud and clear. I’ve made no secret that I mistreated someone in November of 2021. I didn’t set out to mistreat them, but I was not kind to them. I’ve paid an incredibly steep price for that mistreatment too, some of which was deserved but frankly MOST of it was not. I’ve done everything in my power to apologize to the person I wronged, both publicly and privately, numerous times. In the absence of their forgiveness I learned to forgiv ..read more

There’s a funny vantage point we all have regarding other’s lives, and that vantage point is called an opinion.   That opinion is sometimes seated in wanting others to avoid our mistakes or learn from the life lessons we as individuals have had, and sometimes those opinions are from a place of judgment.  Regardless of the reason behind that opinion, they are still just opinions. Nothing about one’s opinion is fact, and no one has the right to impose one’s opinion on someone else either through stating that opinion, or through judgment. The harsh truth is that each of our ro ..read more

Yesterday a friend asked me to share my origin story with her. As I told her my tale she said that’s not exactly what you’ve shared with anyone. Her question initially derived from wanting to know who my core team was for all the things my son might need. I asked her to explain what she meant by team. She clarified and said those people I turn to when I need answers to questions based on my son’s needs. I responded, there is no team. It’s just me. As I chewed on our conversation more I realized I needed to put that into words. When my son “hit the wall” in very early March, 2016, no one in ou ..read more