It’s Always The Quiet Ones

My other children are the ones that other people notice – their achievements, brains, and personalities make them all difficult to ignore. But our L is often overlooked. Most of his life, that’s on purpose. He loves being able to slip into a roomful of people and be able to sit unnoticed while be observes everyone else. He’s a world championship people-watcher and madcap wild inventor, and the most impressive person that the world never notices.

If ever there was a walking example of perseverance, it is my 13-year-old son. Born with a vision disorder that manifests in double (and sometimes triple) vision, he has no visual memory of words or numbers. On a practical level, that means that he has no “memory words” or math problems that he can write out from memory. Because of his double vision and its partner-in-crime dyslexia, math problems and reading words never look the same way twice.

Every word he reads must be sounded out. Even the simplest of math problems must be calculated. He cannot look at 4+4 and immediately think 8 because his brain doesn’t recognize that it’s ever seen 4+4 before. It took an incredibly painful and frustrating three years before he could move beyond First Grade math because of what happened to his brain once we added a second digit to the addends. And so he has plodded along, one problem at a time, unable to pull up the math tables he can recite by rote. His brain doesn’t connect those numbers with the lines of figures printed on the page.

The frustration he feels will boil up in him until he escapes to the sanctuary of our Lego room to find solace in creating.

Nobody sees his daily war to continue learning how to use the letters and numbers which stubbornly refuse to behave for him. Page by page, he plods along determined to unlock the puzzle they present. He refuses to stop learning just because it’s hard. I don’t actually think that the idea that he can quit has ever occurred to him.

I asked him the other day what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he rattled off a list that included soldier, Lego master builder, electrician….and maybe a priest.

“A priest?” I asked.

“I don’t know if I have what it takes though,” he sighed at me. “Priests have to be willing to never give up and stand brave even when things get hard.” He shook his shaggy head. “I don’t know if I could be the kind of guy who never quits.”

Then he turned back to the worksheet he’d been diligently laboring over for the past two hours and doggedly returned to the task at hand.

Whatever other faults he may have, I don’t think that quitting will ever be one of them.