I was quite surprised the night I declared, "It is family game night! What would you guys like to play?," and they responded, "Scrabble!"
My boys have never, ever, ever wanted to play this game. And I have tried many times to entice them to do so. "It is so good for practicing spelling," I would think. "It forces them to look through their mental Rolodex of vocabulary words. How great is that?" But, all to no avail. We tried playing once and it was an utter failure. After that, they flat out refused. It frustrated me, but I could not put my finger on why.
Until December 2009.
The year we found out that Caleb is severely dyslexic.
And February 2010 when we found out that Micah is severely dyslexic.
And it became crystal clear the day I sat across from Dr. Miller as she explained the deep fears and insecurities that children with dyslexia cling to and have a very difficult time letting go of. It takes so much effort for a dyslexic child to find the correct information he is searching for in his brain when staring at a page full of letters, identify those letters correctly, and then be able to verbalize what he is seeing. To then add, "spell those words on your own" ~ it renders him speechless, and paralyzed. One of the top symptoms of dyslexia is the inability to spell. Some learn tricks, memorize words by their shapes, or use photographic memory to recall how to spell a word. But most just cannot spell, no matter how hard they try.
Micah was one of those kids.
He would give an oral recap of a book he had read, "Call of the Wild" for example, and use phrases like "ferocious beast" and "salty cowboys" to describe the characters. When it came time to write a synopsis of the book, however, he would write: The dog was mad. The cowboys were rude. And I would look at him like he lost his mind. "Did he just lose 20 IQ points? What in the world?!?"
I was explaining this frustration to Dr. Miller while she listened with a grin on her face and waited for me to finish. She did not even respond. She turned and looked at Micah and asked, "Micah, do you know how to spell ferocious?" "No." "But you know how to spell "mad" don't you?" "Yes." And then she turned to me and said simply, "He writes "the dog was mad" because he can spell mad. He WANTS to write "the dog was ferocious" but he knows he cannot spell it, so he goes to the simplest word he can think of that means the same thing."
I finally got it.
And a hundred emotions flooded through me in a matter of seconds. Here I was getting frustrated with a little boy who had no control over the way his mind worked and was making him feel even worse because I would not listen to his tearful pleas when he begged me not to make him write because it was so hard. Instead, I accused him of being lazy. Seriously - what is wrong with me?!?
That day changed our lives forever. It changed our schooling forever. We put away pen and paper - for a year - and focused on reading and words and listening and vocabulary.
And now, two years later, my son Micah is writing 2-3 page papers for his Institute for Excellence in Writing class, getting A's on those papers, and asking to play a game of Scrabble with me! He is a different kid.
It had nothing to do with me.
The Lord intervened on my son's behalf. And He changed him from the inside out.
There are not enough letters in a Scrabble box for me to describe how grateful and humbled I am that I belong to a God who knows the needs of my children, is working on their behalf, and doesn't need my opinion or approval to "complete the work He has started in them."
