Happy Birthday, Mom

My mom won’t see this post, but I’m going to write it anyway. My mom turns 65 today. While we’ve had our differences and frustrations through the years, I’ve never once doubted my mom loves me. That’s something, unfortunately, many kids can’t say. Mom’s had what could be called a hard life, and much of the struggle has been because she can’t read. It’s quite the irony that she can’t when my sister and I love to read and love books so much. And oddly, that’s partly because of Mom.

When my sister and I were little, before we even started school, Mom would have us practice reading every day. I remember those faded, worn, cheap Little Golden Books. She’d also have us practice saying big words like “hippopotamus”. She couldn’t read, but somehow she knew it was important for us to be able to.

Over the years, I’ve helped Mom learn a little bit of reading here or there. Instead of reading her birthday cards to her (including one she got from her sister last week), I’d have her sound out the words. Same with road signs. She ended up being able to figure out more of the words than she thought she could, which leads me to believe that my mom’s inability to read at a functional level has a lot to do with some learning disability and the time and place in which she grew up. She attended a one-room school in rural Kentucky in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Despite her not learning the schoolwork, her teachers passed her because they evidently felt sorry for her. There were no such things as one-on-one tutoring or special education classes, and no one had even heard of attention deficit disorder, which I think Mom probably suffers from to some extent. I don’t know if her educational struggles were there from the start or are a result from having rheumatic fever twice as a young child, but they were there nevertheless and she didn’t even make it through the 8th grade. She grew up in a hardscrabble farming community in a time when education wasn’t at the top of most families’ priority lists. So the deck was stacked against her. And still, nearly 30 years later, she instilled in us the knowledge that reading was important through those simple daily reading lessons.

In another bit of irony, I was the first person in my family to ever go to college, followed by my sister as the second person in the family four years later. No one else in our generation went beyond high school. It wasn’t until the next generation (my cousin’s son) that anyone else ventured to college. I think my sister and I going to college was a result of an early love of books.

So, Happy Birthday, Mom, and thanks.

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