Sundays

It was Alicia that first noticed that Sundays were my worst days. I always found Sunday the toughest day, but I thought that was because in teaching I would always have to give up a large part of the day to planning, or when I was studying it would be the day I’d have to travel back… it never seemed to be the day of rest it was intended to be.

Delving back into childhood, Sundays held a special significance then too. It was the day my mother chose to give us religious instruction, which largely involved learning prayers by heart. This, I never found easy. By contrast my sister would learn them and then play. I would try, and try and try… until my mother, believing I was just not trying, would give up on me.

It was years later, through my training and experience as a teacher, that I would discover dyslexia and find that I displayed both the signs and had developed the coping strategies. How it went undiagnosed at school I don’t know. I remember hearing an audible sigh in the room from the rest of the class each time I was asked to read aloud. And each time I would stumble, slowly through the text in a way that was painful to both me and the listener. My spelling was the subject of humour for my English teacher. In later life I envied people who could tear through novels… I chose my reading list carefully, knowing that it would take me many, many months to read a book.

Learning prayers by rote involved reading Arabic words, written with the English alphabet. I didn’t know the meaning of these words. This is what an educator would refer to as nonsense word reading and it’s a standard test for dyslexia, as dyslexics typically perform poorly compared with non dyslexics.

So there was a pattern to my lows, which might be connected with childhood. Judy helped me identify other patterns. She got me to note my thoughts and feelings, and where I was. I started to realise that some of my worst depressive thoughts were experienced when I was in bed. The very place that I retreated to when I felt vulnerable and unable to cope was the place where I felt worse. It helped me to break with patterns like this, so that at difficult times I might instead search out Molly, my lovely bichon.

Well, I have another Sunday ahead of me… so wish me luck.