It Wasn't Easy Being Me, Part One

It Wasn’t Easy Being Me, Part One.

　

[This confession has been professionally edited by Thelma Rittwalder, of Wilder, Rittwalder and Wildwalden, Inc.]

　

My folks did the best they could. Really. My father didn’t mean to drop me on my head when I was a baby those first two times. Or the third time. The forth? He claimed he did so to help aesthetically balance out the soft bumps on my hard head. Back then, as a semi-post toddler, I had not developed a physical science based formidable retort so I accepted his heartfelt reasoning. And I also didn’t realize a colloquial synonym for stubborn was hard-headed.

The Issues Explained:

Was it my fault I was born both left-handed and with a specialized form of dyslexia before they knew what dyslexia was? During those antiquated days they labeled you ‘slow’ if your mental skills could not be reflected by standardized norms. Was I slow? No. I could outrun any of the animals on the family farm and always beat my brothers to the dinner table. And I was as equally fast with my vocal utterances. So much so that I was nicknamed motor mouth.

My folks did the best they could. Really. They were always supportive and keenly aware of my unique situation and the needs it created in a right-handed, left-worded world.

The Left Addressed:

At a still unripe young age when I showed an interest in building my parents bought me my own cherished set of left-handed screwdrivers, a left-handed hammer and even a left-handed hand saw. They had to special order the left-handed screws, but did they ever complain? Certainly not my wonderful, supportive folks.

When I showed an early interest in art they bought me left-handed color-coded crayons. As my skills improved they bought me left-handed color-coded colored pencils. I didn’t have the heart to question their sincere efforts by reminding them this wasn’t necessary because I was dyslexic, not color blind. And as my skills progressed they bought me left-handed paint brushes, ushering into the world another brilliant and sometimes humble artiste.

The Write Addressed:

When I showed an early interest in reading and it was evident that the way I saw a word and the way it was actually written and pronounced seemed to come from two different planets, they did what they could to help. They bought me book ‘seconds’, books that were printed backwards by accident. For a while they even tried translating Chinese to English while retaining the original backwards Chinese language format. They finally figured out the easiest way to help was take my glasses and reverse the lens. Amazingly, this really helped.

Though this helped greatly because I could finally read the words from left to right my spelling never improved. Irony thought it was one of life’s little quirky jests that as a young man my vocabulary was more advanced than most adults and I could never convince my teachers of this by the way I misspelled half the words. Pronouncing the misspelled words the way I spelled them certainly didn’t help. Life was tough for my type back during the pre-spell check dark ages.

And even as I approached young manhood, that period I call being a ‘Squid’, where you’re too old to be a squirrely kid and too young to be considered a young adult, even then when it had become evident that I would never become a good speller, my loving parents studied up on the latest reenforcement psychology methods. You will never know how important it was to hear them tell me, "Son, just because you spell or pronounce a word differently from everyone else doesn’t mean that the way you spell or pronounce it doesn’t have some kind of moral, social, political or psychological value." They told me I could have a great career as a bumbling comedian or a clueless politician. Wisely, it chose the less socially frightening comedian route.

The Left Addressed Again:

And on a more physical level, when it was evident in my mid teens, when I woke up one day with my first boner, that even my penis, when hard, turned to the left and I mentioned this to my older brother (this was the one ego-enforcement issue I never let my folks know about) and my wise-beyond his-years oldest brother simply said, "Well, buddy, that’s easy enough to counter. Only get into bed with left-leaning women."

I corrected him because, even though I still couldn’t spell, I knew correct grammar, ‘Don’t you mean left-handed women?"

"Listen carefully and let this sink in because I’m only going to say this one more time. Go to bed with only left-leaning women," my wise-beyond-his-years-and-also-fledgling-prophet brother replied, free of charge.

And, irony of ironies excluded, although my early plays never really caught on, although my early art was seldom bought, my penis at least became a legend among the post hippie, pseudo-intellectual, pro-new age, pro all things progressive women I befriended. And God bless spell-check and left-handed condoms.

Part Two? Nope. It's none of your business.

Reviews

[Willys Watson]

About this less than tall tale, I am left-handed, am a visual artist and writer and did have a form of dyslexia that caused my earlier teachers to believe I was a dullard. And my parents did do what they could to help. The rest of this story was embellished for the highly questionable humor I was trying to convey. And God bless spell-check and left-handed condoms.