By Lauren Lieberman.
The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 1 of The Camp Abilities Story.
Just as sports started early with me, so did adapting, although I never called
it that. It was just normal family life. My older sister Ann had a beautiful
head of brown curly hair and was way beyond her years in academics. She
was also born hard of hearing. When she needed hearing aids, our parents
spared no expense. In those days, hearing aids didn’t work very well, so she
had a hard time eliminating background sounds. We learned to face her
when we spoke, and to avoid covering our mouths. It was my first lesson
in lip reading.
My younger brothers, Marc, and Eric, were active, energetic, and fun
little boys, always ready to play games outside. Marc had dark curly hair,
sparkling eyes, and very long eyelashes. Eric’s curly reddish-blond hair and
huge dimples enhanced his adorable smile. What I was too young to notice
was the delay in their development. Both were held back in first grade so
they could catch up with their peers. Eric, the youngest, had oral motor
problems. He often needed to be reminded to swallow. My parents were
concerned about both boys, so they took them to a Doman-Delacato clinic
in Philadelphia. Marc was diagnosed with dyslexia, which was not a common
label, and difficult to treat in the 1970s. Both were given homework
exercises involving patterning therapy. My mother sewed patches onto the
knees of all their jeans, and every day the boys had to crawl, first moving
one arm and then the opposite leg forward in what’s known as reciprocal
crawling. They crawled through the tentacles of our 1970s lime-green shag
rug as if they were crawling through a field of grass. We’d call out “right,
left, right” as they traced patterns around the large wooden dining table
for fifteen minutes every day. Eventually the patches faded to white and
the tentacles of the rug wore thin.
The training didn’t end there. Using only their eyes and not their
heads, they had to follow the beam of a flashlight for a set amount of time.
We glued a penny to the middle of the flashlight for Eric so it would be
easier for him to follow. For Marc, we used a penlight. He had to follow
the pinpoint of light––up, down, left, right, up, down, left, right––for ten
minutes at a time. These exercises helped to strengthen their eye muscles
to make it easier for them to read.
The therapy became a family effort. I helped Eric with his lip strength
by pinching his lips between my fingers using two hands. His job was to
pull his lips apart to develop lip strength. It was a messy way to build
lip strength, and not much fun for me as a child, but I was told it was
an indispensable exercise, so neither of us gave up. He was as invested in
the exercises as we were. His dimples emerged each time his lips left my
fingers—five, six, seven, giggle, breathe, wipe, start over.
Every day, Ann, the boys, and I had to come home half an hour before
dinner to help our brothers with their exercises. My parents always rang us
in from the neighborhood with a large bell, and when we started going in
early, our friends asked us why. We told them we had extra chores. At nine
years old I was a bit resentful about the imposition on my schedule, but
deep down, I knew what I was doing would help my brothers. It was not a
chore; it was a commitment to each other as a family that would ensure each
of us would reach our full potential. That was the first time I recall feeling
the satisfaction of caregiving and the commitment to reaching potential.
Marc is now a district judge in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Eric
a manager at the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York
Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Ann has her doctorate and is a professor
at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, I was experiencing my own challenge: a very short attention
span. Today we would call it Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), but in
those days no diagnosis or prescription existed. To deal with the obvious but
undefined condition, my mother invented a practical explanation. She told
all of my teachers that, like Ann, I was a bit hard of hearing and therefore
had to sit in the front of the classroom. It worked. Up front, I was much
more attentive with fewer distractions. I innocently perpetuated this story
about my hearing deficiency throughout my school career and told all my
teachers I had to sit up front. In college I did the same, but when I took
my adapted physical education classes, I realized I was not hard of hearing
at all. I had inadvertently learned ways to cope with my ADD.
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