I went to see Cindy today, the nurse’s aide who has been unable to read or comprehend books. I suspected her problem was emotional, not necessarily medical or biological.

Today convinced me of that. I needed to get her story, and it came rushing out in a stream of tears today.

First, I asked Cindy to read a poem from one of the books I brought her. It was a story about a lamb on a farm, and the photos were gentle and cute.

We are comfortable with one another. She trusts me and is open with me. I’m a strong personality I’m told, so I tamp it down with her.

She was eager to read the page I had chosen for her.

She read a verse easily and well. But she was also crying and shaking. She looked frightened. She had to pull off her mask to wipe off the tears.

The poem was about an adorable baby lamb, and the photo of the lamb got to her. But it was clear this was also a trigger of something very painful.

We sat down in a darkened examining room, and our roles had been reversed. This time, I was caring for the nurse’s aide.

“What is in your head right now?” I asked her. I knew that if there was a reading trauma, its source might surface now; the look on her face suggested great fear,  even shame.

“It’s the fourth grade,” she said. “It comes back every time I look at a book. “That was the worst day of my life.”

She told me a story I found profoundly sad related to it keenly.

Cindy read the verse – haltingly at first, then well, but sweat was pouring down her cheeks by the time she had finished. This was trauma, not just memory.

She paid a toll for that short reading.

I asked if she wanted to stop. She said no. I asked if she needed to see a doctor or a therapist, and she said no. She said this was wonderful for her to do; she was thrilled that she got through it.

She didn’t think she could.

It was very important for her to do that, she said.  She rushed to text her husband.

I said she reminded me of when I first got on my e-bike, I thought I might faint.

This was her story about the 4th grade:

Cindy (not her real name, I am working hard to protect her identity) had a teacher in the 4th grade who kept suggesting that she was either lazy or not very bright.

Cindy was terrified of speaking in front of the class, and her mother had shouted at her for reading slowly and sometimes awkwardly. The teacher, almost sadistically, kept calling on her.

At first, Cindy thought the teacher was trying to help her, boost her confidence, but then she realized it was something else, something cruel.

Her teacher kept saying to her that if she didn’t improve her reading skills, she would have her sent to what the teacher called “the retarded class,” which was down the hall.

Cindy was terrified she would be sent to this class, afraid of what her mother would say, of what her friends would say,  afraid of being labeled in that way. “I couldn’t understand why I would be sent there.”

When she stood up to read in the class one day, she froze soon after her teacher’s threat. She sweated, felt light-headed, and the words on the page she was supposed to read were too blurred to read.

This brought back a wave of my own memories, the tag they put on me was sissy. To have a teacher suggest I needed to be sent to a special class of children with what we now call learning disabilities would have cut me right through the heart.

Cindy said it felt like a lifetime up there in front of her classmates; the teacher insisted she would have to stay standing in front of the class until she read the passage she was asked to read. She said she would wait all day if necessary.

Cindy couldn’t do it. After a while, she broke down and ran to her desk and buried her head on the desktop. She remembers the whole class laughing at her.

She doesn’t remember anything else.

She was humiliated, she recalls, and ashamed.

The class made fun of her and pointed at her, the teacher was shaking her head. And she was held back from the next year’s English class and send to the remedial reading class for the next two years.

She never once read aloud or at home while she was in the class.

She told me more horror stories about her mother, who shouted at her that she would need to work to get through life as if no one would marry her.

Her mother, she said, had no time for her school troubles, she refused to help her or speak up for her. She blamed her for being a screw-up.

So Cindy has never read a book and really absorbed one since, although she learned to fake it often enough. The fourth-grade memories stopped her cold. When she picks up a book, she goes to pieces.

“Listen,” I said, as she gathered herself and settled. “You read the verse about the lamb perfectly. You can certainly read, and read well.” I asked if she could tell me what the verse was about, and she did.

This was good news.

I saw how deep and cutting her fourth-grade experience had been. I told her I sometimes wet my pants in school when I stood up in front of the class. I could never do what they wanted me to do, and they also made me feel stupid.

I told her about visualizations and a new understanding of children’s struggles with readings. It was a different world from her fourth grade. I told her about my Dyslexia and how it didn’t stop me from writing books or blogging.

I told her this was encouraging, her reading about the lamb, and I was sorry to hear about her pain.  We should move in small steps, I said, building her confidence one story at a time.

Cindy was calming down, listening carefully, I had the sense she was taking it all in.

I told her I could see that the wounds were deep; she seemed to have suffered from trauma. Would she consider seeing a doctor or a therapist?

She said no, she and her husband didn’t have any extra money, neither one of them wanted her to go into therapy. I said it was up to her, but I thought we should talk about it some more.

I asked her to take these five gentle books home and find a quiet, safe place in her house to read them alone, without being watched or having any expectations.

I suggested she write down one thing about each book – one line – in a notebook right after reading. She would have a notebook full of books, soon, and with each book, I predicted, she would get more comfortable reading.

Perhaps she could do it with her daughters, and sometimes, with her husband.

She said she would love to do that. She said she was grateful to me for helping her. She gave me a great big hug, and I said thanks, but until I got my vaccines, I shouldn’t be hugging anybody but my wife.

Of course, she said.

It was a successful but wrenching time with Cindy.

The pain in her ran right through me.

I thought of all those countless children who had been knocked down, abandoned by the system, wounded and humiliated.

Some kids fight their way back, some can’t. We are not a great country yet, a great country wouldn’t do that to their children.

I also feel strongly she needs to see a professional, and she said if I insisted, she and her husband would discuss it with me. I can’t take over her trouble, I can only encourage her to deal with it.

I told her I knew a shrink who had helped some of the Bishop Maginn refugee children, sometimes at little or no cost.

As an author, I forget that to the vast majority of Americans reading books is something they don’t have the time or money for, and seeing a therapist is even less inclined to be something to spend a lot of money on.

In many ways, book reading has become a class interest. The vast majority of people get along without doing it.

On one level, Cindy sees what happened to her as just the way life is – school and politics most often suck.  Yet Cindy is unusual in that she is on fire to read books.

There is a very real and important boundary here, a line between what I know I can do and what I don’t know I can do.  And what I shouldn’t do.

I don’t play shrink; the real ones know what they are doing.

But I think I might be able to get her to be more comfortable reading short and comfortable books. And then, if she is so inclined, she can move up the ladder.

I’ll have to see. Her story breaks my heart and touches me.

It is sad, unfathomable,  what people sometimes do to children. And it isn’t even considered abuse.