Mothers are Professionals.

After 23 years of parenting, putting four children through school, I am ready for some official recognition of my credentials. I would love to create an official licensing service for parents, to recognize their expertise. I might not be an expert in all children, but I sure am about mine.

My kids struggle to overcome dyslexia. This gift and disability means their full potential which is sky high finds itself earthbound by their struggles to communicate what they understand and know.

Those professional educators who have the privilege of teaching my children know a lot about education and teaching techniques. I appreciate their knowledge and training. But they do not understand how dyslexia functions and how to best unlock it.

In a nutshell, they believe if my kids would just try harder, practice more, do more exercises and learn more tricks, they could perform like everyone else, which quite frankly, is actually less than they are capable of given the right opportunity.

Our high school desperately needs a workshop to educate the teachers on this issue, as do colleges, especially where my girls attended. But when I discussed this yesterday, one of the advocates for this said, "We'd have to bring in professionals."

Makes sense, and I hope they do it. But just once I'd love to stand before them all and give them my parent's perspective, tell them what its like to watch a kid not be able to read an assignment, even a prompt for one, to not be able to tell one homonym from another, to misspell things so extremely that the spell checker can't figure it out, or even worse, supplies a different word that does not fit, and worst of all, to watch them sit frozen unable to unleash the torrent of ideas in their brilliant minds in a fashion that the verbal world can understand.

I won't get to do that, so forgive me for taking it out on you, kind reader, who bother to come here and see what I have to say.