Essay: Mother’s Day, Harry Potter, and Doing What you Love

When I was born, I couldn’t read (please hold your applause).

As so many of my fellow babies began to learn their ABCs and read sentences, I soon fell behind in school. I wasn’t performing at the expected level of my classmates and so had to be put into the slow reading class, which did not gel with my self-image as a clever clogs/cool dude.

A woman taught me in the special reading class with giant frizzy grey hair and big thick glasses that looked like plexiglass, which I never knew how she could read through. In memory, she was a bit like a mad professor, and there was a rumour later that she was expelled for hitting children, but I don’t know if this was true, as she was fairly sound to me. I was fond of her, and she tried her hardest to make me read well, which involved a lot of squinting at alphabets with caterpillars on them and sounding out letters. Still, my hatred of reading only grew, and the extra lessons felt a lot like going to the dentist every day after school and didn’t …