By Susanne Thomas
No one told me there was something wrong. But most people don’t confuse numbers and struggle to learn new concepts. I saw the world through sights, colors, textures, and scents, but the rich inner world was trapped inside, unexpressed. Circumstances changed when a miracle and my mother guided me through education into a world of storytelling without boundaries.

Photo by Pixabay

I don’t remember most of what happened. The sweet and ugly sides of my story feel intricately connected where the beginning is hard to define. I’ll start with the concrete evidence: the journals. The stories and cluttered ideas are stacked neatly in my closet, each sentence riddled with misspelled words. The raw enthusiasm focused solely on sticking the plotline to the page. I guess my love for storytelling didn’t change, but everything else did.
I was homeschooled in middle school. I took classes at a co-op, a like-minded community where students learned the typical writing, math, and science subjects. Despite feeling normal around my peers, I remember drawing lines between my words because spacing didn’t feel intuitive. All the letters wouldn’t clump together the right way. Math was tricky, too. I memorized how to write numbers, not remembering if 15 or 51 came before 16 (or was it 61?). And my mental spelling book contained suggestions, not rules, where adding silent “e’s” and “h’s” was normal. But not to my mother.
During fifth grade, I abruptly needed testing on my math, English, and writing proficiency. We drove through the mountains of Asheville to get there. Summer sunshine washed over the pavement and cascaded the twisting road in vibrant shadows. Our destination was a massive, German-style mansion hidden under sprawling oak trees. Rose bushes swept across the picket fence, ushering us to the side door. We greeted a woman dressed in black who sat behind a massive desk. I obeyed when directed to “sit down” and tried not to fidget, but her stiff face, movements, and questions felt as scratchy as the pen trained to the clipboard she held.  She asked me how to spell “boulder, rocket, cricket,” and more. The words kept on coming, her pen scraping at the thick paper. Sweat trickled down my neck. I knew I was messing up, but how could I tell her that speaking was harder than writing down such words?
It came out like, “I think I’m messing up some.”
“Just do the best you can.”
I kept guessing until the barrage finally ended. She rose from her chair, pulled some papers off her desk, and strided into the dining room. I trailed behind. I was to write a story about whatever I wanted.
Finally. I settled down with some notebook paper on the cold glossy table, drawing inspiration from the lantern chandelier and spiraling stone staircase on one end of the room. The story that followed felt like a warm hug, with princesses and dragons and castles mounting in the sky. When I finished, she told me to go play outside while she and Mom retreated into a long conversation.
Upon our return ride home, I jabbered about the giant rope swing and mysterious gardens I had explored. Mom stayed silent, concentration wrinkling her eyebrows. She didn’t tell me I had dyslexia. Or that there wasn’t a strong chance of improvement, according to the learning specialist. She didn’t tell me I had a story to tell but couldn’t express it.

We stop the co-op, because classes couldn’t fix this problem. What follows feels like disordered snapshots: some faded, others torn, more stained. I brush them off with strained recollection, squinting to unscramble what memories are left. I see the dismay in Mom’s eyes when I can’t remember how to spell words studied the day before. The fat pink eraser turns smaller and blacker from mercifully hiding mistakes. Math lessons stretching all day. Spelling tests covered in red.
“Is spelling really that – you know – important?”
I sink underneath her glare. “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you get to quit!”
In the afternoons, once we finally stack the books away, I escape to the wild backyard. It stretches across the valley, a dense network of trees splintering the sunlight into shards of gold. A hollowed tree becomes a village for fairies and dwarves, the family treehouse my personal mansion. Oceans of grass splay into the hillside. Pirate ships emerge from trees, their sterns groaning under heavy leafy sails that clap against the wood. Fall winds roar through the woods like a lion’s fury, its brazen claws scratching my skin. 
While I spend my time outside, my mother, a devoutly religious woman, spends hers on her knees. Every form of curriculum adds to the pile of failed hopes. I need to learn essay writing for the standardized tests required to enter college. Was that even possible?
Then I grasp a special snapshot. It sharpens on one vivid morning when Mom begins our grammar lesson with unprecedented energy. I squirm in my chair, expecting crushing English rules and examples of Jane and Joe doing something ungrammatical. Instead, she hands me slips of paper with carefully typed phrases. Were they sentences, run-ons, fragments? I must decide. Suddenly learning soaks in some color, connecting fragments of understanding in my mind. In minutes I master the concept, one I barely understood the day before. My mother starts dancing across the kitchen floor.
Sometime later, an idea pops into my head. “What if something similar worked for spelling?”
We trace tricky words with markers, each vowel a different color. Slowly “chrysanthemums” and “restaurants” aren’t so scary. Repetition and correction become faithful companions, and I make friends with Office Word to write my stories. Red angry lines highlight every other word. I persist as rhythm, tone, and rhyme morph into building blocks for creative poems. Plotlines and crazy dialogues strengthen inside my mind, so I express them in new forms, like comic strips and a family newspaper. After 11 children’s stories and countless poems, the spelling errors are exceptions, not crutches.
My choppy stories become coherent paragraphs for essay prompts. Gaining momentum, I take classes that routinely analyze and annotate classic literature, which expands my horizon of literary technique. Somehow, I don’t see the progress as miraculous change, but instead as normal and typical and expected. Conveying ideas and absorbing lectures feels natural. I catch the familiarity of standardized teaching and break down concepts in ways I can understand. But still – an internal pressure builds up inside. There’s nothing different or special behind the eyes I see in the mirror each morning. I’m failing to find meaning. “Accomplishments” don’t give me purpose. The future becomes a shapeless abyss.
One afternoon, the turmoil inside erupts into an argument against Mom. We’ve pulled into a parking lot somewhere, darkened rainclouds spilling spring fury. The sound of raindrops competes against our words. I demand to know how my life could have any meaning.
She says, “you’re loved, and you have a promising future.”
“How can you say that? What evidence do you have? How could I know God exists in my life?”
We lock eyes, my ruthless badgering met with sudden resistance.
“I’ll tell you exactly why. Because your life is a miracle. Your struggles aren’t random, they have a name. The learning specialist diagnosed you with dyslexia three years ago. I didn’t tell you so you wouldn’t feel limited.”
Wait, what?
She keeps going.
“When I realized every teaching hack I could find wasn’t helping, I called Grandma up.” Yes, my grandmother: a staunch Christian raised during World War II who knew how to pray for miracles.  “We prayed together, and Grandma saw a vision – of you – standing before a huge brick wall. Suddenly, unmistakably, impossibly, she saw the bricks crumbling from the foundation up, leaving nothing in your way.”
I could imagine the problems fading from Mom’s mind as Grandma’s raspy voice filtered through the phone speakers, her Savannah slur coloring every word as she says, “You keep praying and trusting. You’ll see, she’s going to be okay.”
Now Mom looks down, concentrating. “That night, I got an idea. Something I hadn’t tried before and knew it wasn’t my own. I got an idea to approach grammar from a more creative angle to make the concepts stick. I made the lesson in the middle of the night, and the next morning you nailed it. After that, the divine solutions kept coming.” The learning barrier melted into a blessing, one lesson at a time.
She says this quickly, but it takes way longer to process. Mom stares out the window; I stare at Mom. I’m crying, she’s crying, the rain splashes across the windshield in lazy waves.
Suddenly all the messiness makes sense and the battles aren’t aimless attempts at homeschooling. Perhaps the struggles forced me to extract barriers from my thinking. I wouldn’t be academically improving if Mom hadn’t gotten the crazy idea after Grandma’s vision that derived from their humble prayer. Suddenly I feel very small, once again surrounded by big scary problems with only my wild imagination for company. If a miracle kept Mom from giving up, I had to believe God was leading me through life. Suddenly the future didn’t look so scary if I chose to respond with faith.
I’ve discovered a newfound respect for my mother. This understanding is welded into my mind, a pillar of marble rising from the mound of scattered snapshots. I’ve given up hanging them in coherent order, so I pull out a clean journal from the pile of memories stacked in my mind. I have a story to tell, but this time I can share it.

Photo by Vladyslav Dukhin

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