Turning the page on reading

I love reading. I love reading fiction, being transported to worlds real and imagined, past, present or future. I love a good memoir, how I get to slip inside another person and see the specificity of their story and universality how our stories are alike. I love reading poetry, especially the kind that aims a tight spotlight on just this moment and reminds me in a few short lines of the link between the mundane and the divine.

At age 13, my son still struggles to say the alphabet correctly all the way through. He has spent hundreds of classroom hours matching, tracing, cutting out, pasting and pointing to letters and words, without much of it sticking. I expect that by adulthood he’ll have a number of site words that he’ll recognize, like his name or words like “exit” or “stop” (or “X-box”) that have a context and format that make it possible for his brain to transform lines and shapes into meaning. But novels and texts are unlikely.

The thought that he won’t have the opportunity to experience reading leaves me sad. As a person who finds wisdom, adventure and joy in reading, coming to terms with my son’s situation has been…well, it hasn’t.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with someone who happens to have dysmelia—he was born with only one hand. I haven’t known him long, but long enough that I don’t notice his physical difference anymore. If anything, I simply note how graceful he is in the way he moves around in a two-handed world. He is retired now, and it seems to me he’s had a satisfying career and enjoys a rich and enjoyable life.

He was talking about how he is sometimes contacted by parents who have recently given birth to a child with dysmelia; it’s clear, he explained, that the parents are grieving for experiences their children will never have. But this grief is often based on their own attempts to replay their own childhood in their minds and attempt to live it one-handed, and that often just doesn’t work. He tells these parents that he has participated in research in which his left hand was held up to a mirror in order to trick his mind into believing that he had a right hand; the fMRIs taken while he looks at the mirror show without a doubt that the place in his brain that should light up when he thinks about a right hand has simply been assigned a new task. It has been filled, he chuckled, with more sensible things. Because he has never had this hand, he can’t say that he’s “missing” a hand or that he misses it. And his life, while not without challenges, has been just fine.

I came away from our meeting with my head spinning. I thought about how other people experience immense joy because they are great at physics, or speak Spanish, or play the piano. Do I ever feel sad that I can’t do those things? Not at all. I take pleasure in other things that I’m good at or enjoy. So why do I persist in grieving for my son’s relationship to reading, simply because I enjoy it? Could this feeling be not really grief, but pity? Am I actually insulting to my son and his gifts and his reality by feeling sorry for him instead of helping him find wisdom, adventure and joy in other places? It suddenly seemed so.

I wrote this first draft this morning. This afternoon someone posted this picture on Facebook, with the comment about how this so perfectly captures the magic of reading. “I opened a book and in I strode; now nobody can find me.” The sentiment has definitely been true for me. I noticed that the place in my gut that would have normally twitched was actually still. And that’s not something I could have learned in a book.