I Misspell Therfore I Am :0)

I Misspell Therfore I Am – Saturday, May 27, 2006 – 2:34 AM

Reading over my last entry I noticed that I misspelled the word college. I have a track record of misspelling things. I did go back and correct it though.

Lessons in learning:

Half the stuff I did in my early twenties I did to be the total opposite of what the mother conditioned me to be. I didn’t get that rebellious streak until my early twenties when I left her house. Until that personal Independence Day the pressure to do well in school was always strong. She would brag to friends that I was tired of getting A’s because after an A+ there was no higher grade to be given. She thought it was something to brag about when I stressed over getting a 98% instead of a perfect score plus extra credit points. Sometimes the family would stand the children up to play Jeopardy with against each other while at the grandmother’s house. They’d give us these quizzes as competition and if we lost the mother told us how embarrassed she was that her stupid daughters lost to their younger cousins. The pressure was intense and failing meant getting slammed with a bunch of insults backed with rejection and alienation.

The competition didn’t stop once we left the grandmother’s house. We got paid for grades. We got $10 per A, $5 per B, nothing for C’s, paid $5 per D and paid $10 per F. I raked the money in every report card. My sister might as well as filed for bankruptcy by the time she hit the 9^th grade because the mother did in deed keep track of what we owed her. Later on we found out she’s dyslexic but at the time we didn’t know it. Poor child, the names she was called! When the mother got paid every two weeks she would give the two of us yet another competition. The first one to tell her what the meaning of a word was got $20 to $25. I usually won. It seemed that in languages I excelled, in art, in science and history I excelled but I couldn’t spell worth a darn. Of course this was not something that was acceptable but like my sister’s dyslexia it wasn’t something that was going to change quickly.

Hearing and Spelling:

For some reason I can’t hear the vowels in most words which would be okay if I was writing in ancient Hebrew. I can spell in Spanish and German but I can not spell in English. For some reason I can not hear the vowels. I get them backwards or leave something out because I simply can not hear it. Something changes when the vowels hit my ears. I hear the word. I understand the word but when it comes to spelling it the trouble begins. I have no idea why.

Rebellious streak returns:

I stopped trying to learn to spell because I knew it bothered my mother. Sometimes the people in the system would misspell their names purposely to identify themselves as separate from the outside family. Maureen use to spell her name Moreene for the sole purpose of making a distinction between free will and being under the mother’s thumb.

All these years and I still can’t spell. I try, oh how I try but it just doesn’t happen. I play the game book worm to try and get better at my spelling. I try and remember the corrections spell check does so that next time I can get the word right. All this effort but still I can not spell worth a lick. This is why the word college ended up coming out as collage because I CAN’T SPELL. I couldn’t hear which vowel it was and I overlooked the spell check thing-a-ma-bob. So while I’m not trying to be the exact opposite of everything my mother told me to be I still do struggle with spelling. I guess some things never change.

Joan of Arc