I blame myself for my dyslexia — what changed when my daughter was diagnosed
Kitchen table, homework time. My daughter, seven, has her reading sheet in front of her. The word is through. She says though. “Try again,” I say. She says thought. “Look at the letters,” I say, which isn’t a real instruction, and I know it. She pushes her hair back and says, “I just can’t read it.” The page says she should be done in three minutes. We’re on minute eleven.
I blame myself for my dyslexia. Both of them, really — hers and mine.
I know that feeling at the table. I know it from Mrs. Caldera’s third-grade reading circle, watching words slide while other voices went around. I know it from spelling tests where I wrote becuz for because so often that I stopped believing letters had rules at all. By fifth grade, my report card said “Lacks motivation,” and I believed it. If I had tried harder, I told myself, the words would finally stay still. I spent years waiting for that. It never happened.
I built workarounds as an adult. I read slowly. I ask for directions twice. I pretend to study menus while really just hunting for the word “chicken.” The only person who knows is my wife.
So when my daughter started guessing at sight words in first grade, I blamed myself for that too. Not loudly. It started as a small thought: she’s just a little behind, she’s just like me. And she was like me. I recognized the guessing — taking the first letter of “through” and leaping. I recognized the way she’d skip longer words and hope no one noticed. I recognized the shame settling around her shoulders. I looked at her squinting at her homework and thought, I did this to her. And because I’d spent my whole life calling myself lazy, I had no other words to offer her.
The teacher sent home a sight-word plan. Flashcards, timed drills, repeated reading. Every night I watched my daughter grip her pencil like a railing on a rocking bus. Flashcards didn’t help. The word said was said on Monday and said on Tuesday and a stranger by Friday.
My wife finally said, “You don’t have to do the flashcards.”
I snapped at her. “I’m just trying to help her not feel like I felt.”
She was quiet for a minute. Then, “Maybe you’re helping her feel exactly how you felt.”
That landed. After our daughter was asleep, my wife asked me things I’d never answered. When did reading first get hard for you? When did you decide it was your fault? What do you remember about being taught to read? I couldn’t answer the last one without crying. I remembered almost nothing about being taught. I only remembered being tested.
The testing is where the shame lives. When I was eleven, a reading specialist asked me to decode nonsense words. Dath. Kimp. Voot. She kept a straight face. I knew a smart kid would be able to say them. I decided, right there, that I was a fraud and it was only a matter of time before everyone found out. That story followed me for decades. I didn’t want my daughter starting with the same one.
So we changed how our evenings worked.
Her reading homework became five minutes instead of twenty. The teacher wasn’t thrilled, but we held the line. For a kid with dyslexia, the real work stops around five minutes; after that, you’re just building resentment. I stopped making her read every night. Instead, I read to her, with my finger under the line, going slow. I didn’t quiz her. I let her hear sentences and watch them at the same time. There’s a name for it — assisted reading, or listening-while-reading. A tutor suggested it after looking at our flashcards and sort of sighing.
We also got her an audiobook subscription. Audiobooks don’t build decoding, but they build everything else: vocabulary, sentence structure, knowledge, story sense. That’s what comprehension is. She comes home from the bus knowing facts about volcanoes. And she reads with her ears, meeting words in print that she already knows by sound.
If your kid guesses like mine did — skipping words, saying “thought” when it says “through” — it’s okay to stop the drills. It’s okay to just read to them. I wish someone had told me that years ago.
Her assessment came back in second grade. It was a relief, even though it was hard to see on paper. It had black-and-white charts. It had a recommended plan. It had a name, and the name was not “lacks motivation.” In the parking lot of the assessment office, I told my wife, “I wish someone had given me this.”
We told our daughter she has dyslexia. We said it calmly: “Reading is going to be harder for you than for some kids, and your brain works differently. We’ll find the ways it works best.” I don’t know how much she understands. But I’ve stopped staying silent, which is what I did when my parents talked about my report cards. We tell her dyslexic people can be brilliant and successful, and also that some people just read slowly and live good lives. Both are true.
I still blame myself for my dyslexia. Not for hers anymore — I’m getting there. When I talk to other adults with dyslexia, they describe the same mix: the slow crawl, the exhaustion, the conviction that it’s a personal failure. What I’ve learned is that the shame and the reading difficulty are two separate things. They get tangled. They can be untied.
It’s still hard. Last week she read a paragraph about the water cycle aloud at dinner. She stumbled through it, but she made it, and she got most of it right. I didn’t correct her. I asked what condensation meant, and she explained it perfectly because she’d heard a podcast. I don’t know where this all lands for her. She may always be slower than her classmates. I’ll probably always feel a pang watching her squint at a page.
But the blame didn’t help. Not mine, and not the version I almost passed on to her. What helped was boring: fewer flashcards, more audiobooks, more reading out loud with no questions, and a name for what was happening. It’s not a cure. Nobody’s claiming that. But it took the weight off the kitchen table, and that was where we needed it to go.
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