I Blamed Myself for My Dyslexia. Then My Daughter Started Showing the Same Signs
The pencil hit the kitchen table with a sharp little slap. My daughter crossed her arms and glared at the piece of paper in front of her. Seven words. That was the assignment. “I can’t do it, Mom. I’m dumb.”
She didn’t look dumb. She looked exhausted. And I knew that feeling so well it ached in my jaw.
I blamed myself for my dyslexia for years. Not for having it — for causing it. As a kid, I didn’t know there was a word for why letters slid around on the page or why “was” and “saw” were a coin toss every single time. I just knew the teacher’s sighs got longer and my stomach got tighter. I thought I wasn’t concentrating hard enough. I thought if I tried harder, the words would stay still. They never did. So I decided it was my fault.
I remember sitting at the dining table with a spiral notebook, writing the week’s spelling words over and over. I’d fill half a page with each one, hoping the repetition would somehow fuse the letters into my brain. By Friday I’d fail the test anyway. My mom would say, “You’re so smart, you just need to focus.” She meant it kindly. But all I heard was that I was choosing not to focus. Which meant I was lazy. Which meant I was doing it to myself.
I carried that blame for two decades. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was twenty-four, during a meeting with a graduate advisor who watched me read one paragraph out loud and asked, very gently, if I’d ever been tested. I hadn’t. A week later, an evaluator told me I had dyslexia and that it ran in families. I remember feeling relief for about ten minutes, and then a weird, heavy emptiness. If it ran in families, whose fault was it now?
That question came roaring back when my daughter started to read. She was five. I watched her skip small words, guess at big ones, and mix up “b” and “d” so often that her teacher wrote “reverses letters” in a progress note. I didn’t need a test to tell me what was happening. I’d lived it. But I still said nothing at first. I wanted to believe it was a phase. I wanted to believe the teacher was right that she “just needed more practice.”
Then one night, after a worksheet that took forty-five minutes and left both of us staring at the ceiling, she said, “My brain is broken.” I told her it wasn’t broken. But I couldn’t tell her it was nobody’s fault, because I didn’t believe it yet myself.
For a while, I blamed myself in secret. Every time she looked at a page and started guessing before her eyes even reached the end of the line, I thought, This is mine. I gave her this. I sat with that guilt at the kitchen table, during reading time, in the school parking lot after being called in for another “conference.” I felt like a fraud telling her she was smart when I could see her drowning in the same water.
What changed wasn’t one big moment. It was a series of small, practical decisions that took my focus off the blame and put it onto the page in front of us.
First, I stopped saying “try again” when she hit a roadblock. I started leaning over and saying, “Let’s look at this together.” It sounds simple, but it changed the unspoken message. Before, she heard: you failed, attempt harder. Now she heard: this word is tricky, and we’re a team.
I also made a little reading window out of a sticky note. I folded it in half and cut a small rectangle in the fold, so only one or two words showed at a time. It sounds almost too simple to matter, but for a kid whose eyes skip across lines, it makes the page feel less like a maze. She started tracking the words with her finger too. I didn’t correct her. Whatever keeps her place is fine.
The bigger shift came when I let go of the reading levels. My daughter wanted to read the graphic novels the other kids had. I kept choosing “leveled” books because I thought she needed to work up to something. That was wrong. Graphic novels gave her context clues, smaller chunks of text, and a story she actually cared about. We read them together, and I let her narrate what was happening in the pictures. She wasn’t cheating. She was comprehending. That’s the point.
Audiobooks changed our car rides. She listens to chapter books from the library app while I drive, and then she tells me about the characters. Her ability to follow a plot is years ahead of her ability to decode a page. I used to think she had to struggle through text to earn the story. I don’t believe that anymore. Listening counts as reading when it keeps her in the world of books.
I also did something that terrified me: I emailed her teacher and asked for a small accommodation. Could the spelling test be read aloud? Could she answer comprehension questions verbally sometimes? I wrote it as a question, not a demand. The teacher said yes, and it took maybe one minute to set up. I wish I’d done it sooner.
But the most honest thing I did was tell my daughter about my dyslexia. I didn’t make it inspirational. I just said, “You know I have this too. When I was your age, I thought it was my fault. I thought I was dumb. It took me a long time to understand that my brain just works differently. I don’t want you to wait that long.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “So I have it too?” I said yes, probably, and that it didn’t mean anything about how smart she was. She looked at me, then at the page, then back at me. “Okay,” she said. That was it. Not a tearful scene. Just a kid absorbing the fact that she wasn’t alone in the room.
I still feel the blame sometimes. I don’t think it fully goes away. When she cries over a reading assignment, I still hear an old voice whispering, You caused this. But I’ve learned to answer it out loud. I say, “This is hard for me too. Let’s do it together.” That sentence works better than anything I read in a self-help book.
We’re not at the end of this. I don’t know if she’ll get an official diagnosis, or if she’ll always prefer audiobooks, or if the reading will ever feel effortless. Maybe it won’t. Maybe it didn’t for me. But at least now she knows that when a book feels impossible, it’s the reading that’s hard, not her worth. And I know that blaming myself doesn’t help her fix a word, or sit with a hard paragraph, or pick up a graphic novel with a smile. So I don’t blame myself in front of her. I save that for the car, and then I let it go when we get home.
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