Reading the Signs

I started school in first grade, on par with my classmates. I learned the alef-beis alongside my friends, thrilled to add each letter to the huge alef-beis train which my mother hung up in my bedroom. I’m not quite sure when reading started to become a struggle, but it did. Not in English, where I was devouring books by the dozen. Just in Hebrew, where my classmates were reading sentences with a fluency I could only envy. At first, I did what my teachers told me, painstakingly reading out words one by one, encouraged by a teaching assistant. They gave me different paragraphs to read each day, but it took me so long to get through each sentence that I usually ended up reading about five pesukim of Tehillim over a week. Sadly, after a while, that’s all they’d expected from me.

My teachers must have spoken to my parents at PTA because at some point there were suddenly reading charts on our refrigerator and a new large-print Tehillim on the bookshelf. My parents tried to make it more enjoyable, playing games at the end of each line, putting stickers on the chart, but eventually it all lost its charm. My reading stagnated, until at one stage, my progress ground to a complete halt. By that point, I was eight years old, and my teachers were starting to call on girls to read out loud in class. Each day I would sit, quaking, dreading the time I would be called on to read, and when I was… well, it was painful. Slow, and full of mistakes. Each word took superhuman effort, and eventually I realized that it wasn’t going to get any better. So I stopped trying.

At home, things were happening, one after the other. Most significantly, my mother experienced a difficult pregnancy, and she was stuck in bed for three months. I gratefully took advantage of the excuse of “helping” her take care of my siblings, while the Tehillim gathered dust on the bookshelf. Sure, sometimes she would ask me if I had kriah homework, but I told her I would do it myself, and she really had very little strength to pursue it. My reading was abandoned.

Meanwhile, in school, I had multiple schemes to escape kriah time. Sometimes I’d conveniently go to the bathroom, and some days I’d just whisper the words so quietly that no one would hear the mistakes I was making, or even realize I was reading the wrong pasuk. To further complicate matters we got a new teacher midyear. And somehow, between all of this, the little girl who could not read was forgotten.