I was born right on the cusp of cultural change. Having divorced parents, or both parents working, only started to become an acceptable normal thing when I was a young child. My mom was a stay-at-home mom, or a Homemaker as we used to call it, so most of my childhood memories are Mom centric.
Mom did the bulk of raising me, and I remember it quickly becoming apparent that I’m strange. Unlike other females I play sports, and play them well. I like building things, destroying things, playing Cops & Robbers, music and singing, and don’t wear skirts or dresses because they get in the way. I’d rather play tag or wrestle with boys then play dolls or house. As soon as pack social dynamics kicked in by kindergarten, I found myself already on the outside watching.
When you find yourself out there, on the fringe and watching, you tend to look for other things to fill your time that aren’t people. That becomes harder when you realize you can’t learn the way everyone else does. Not only did I have the joyous stamp of the creative brain, ADD and Dyslexia, but I was a third deaf on top of it. Learning to read was a bitch. It was even more of a bitch when I grew to love it, and then could not read more than one page at a time. I had to take long breaks between pages, otherwise I would crumble into a pile of tears because I was so tired. On top of all of those handicaps, I also had weak eye muscles, which made reading exhausting physically on top of mentally, thanks to all the mental issues. Even though it physically and mentally hurt to read, I loved the library and books; they were safe.
When the deck is that stacked against you, you wind up in Special Ed. There are many levels and varieties of Special Ed, but socially it all means the same thing. The real kicker, in my case anyway, is I wound up in Special Ed because they couldn’t figure out how to teach to me in a classroom setting. When you go through this process they put you through a barrage of tests to figure out how you’re broken. In my case I scored off the charts on damn near everything, but because I was forced to read so slowly, and because my brain processes the act reading in an abnormal way, I could not keep up in class. So they put you in Special Ed saying you will get the attention you need, but instead you wind up with a over-glorified preschool teacher who refuses to teach to you at your level, and instead insists on going over your ABCs. Certainly not entirely their fault, they are used to people with much different mental problems than me, but that then puts me on the outside of the outside.
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