Of course, besides the occasional tongue lashing, the most common response from my parents was a look of confusion, pain, and serious concern, and that made me feel even more stupid and abnormal, because none of my other five siblings ever got that look.
I think I might have been relieved if they had seriously punished me. But now, I can see they just did not know what to do.
And they tried hard. At least my mom did. She spent so much time with me that she never spent with the other five kids. She spent long hours during the summer trying to teach me the multiplication tables. I remember her spending time, I must have been four, trying to teach me the alphabet. And she did all this while my sisters and brothers were out with friends, playing games, riding their bikes.
And I was inside while she showed me flash cards. 2x2=4. 3x7=21. 6x6=36. And so on. You know, as I typed that, I could feel again myself, sitting at that kitchen table with her, my head in my hands, as she coaxed me to look up at the card, feeling that hopeless, dejected feeling that I was somehow slow and stupid. How I love my mother for doing that with me. My brothers and sisters all agree to this day that I was her favorite, and I agree, but not perhaps for how they mean it. I was born very prematurely in the Fifties, at 2 pounds 11 ounces. I think she just thought (probably correctly) I just wasn't thriving, and was determined to help me catch up.
I still remember the reward she gave me when I could recite the alphabet. My dad was serving as the XO on a destroyer out of Newport, RI, and she gave me this, which was the most singularly awsome, excellent thing I had ever received in my short life:
It was a toy destroyer called "The Fighting Lady" and it fired a gun and missiles, and had wheels on the bottom so you could roll it across the floor.
When I got older, I had to go to summer school for several years, they threatened to keep me back if I didn't. I had an ex-nun who was good friends with my mother who tutored me in 5th grade, I went to her house twice a week for a year, and she tried to teach me in all subjects.
In Seventh Grade, my dad (who was the XO of Subic Bay in the Philippines) hired a young enlisted man who came to the house in his blues. I recall he was a Radioman, and he tried to tutor me in math.
I remember that young sailor trying gently to talk to me as I put my head down on my crossed arms on the desk, refusing to even look up.
Sigh. All that comes back to me, and I realize how lucky I was. My parents never gave up trying. Never. How I miss them both. And I will be forever grateful to them. Always. It could have turned out much differently for me, if not for them.