Reading

I have 15 library books towering over me at my bedside. It's my biggest comfort besides my husband and dog. It was not always this way.

As a child I was told I couldn't read which was a lie. My mother dragged me off to a shrink when I was 7 and said, She can't read. Meanwhile in school I was in the advanced reading group. At the shrink's I was asked to read aloud. I did, but immediately hated the book. Why? Because people don't talk like that! I explained.

My mother insisted I couldn't read because my father had written me a letter announcing his marriage to her friend Renee. Wife number 2. My mother said I was traumatized. 

Now I realize it was she who was traumatized and who didn't like to read. After a decade Tom Lisker went on to marry wife number three Elizabeth Bowden (she had two previous husbands and two grown children from her first marriage). I don't recall if he wrote a letter about that, I was too busy planning my escape.