The Problem with Punctuation.

By R.M. Hamilton

As a child, I was not a joy to teach.

Parents who decide to homeschool generally do it for one of three reasons.

A.      To increase academic achievement.

B.      To protect the emotional wellbeing of the child.

C.      To give the child a strong religious upbringing.

It’s a good thing my parents were homeschooling me for reasons B and C. Reason A would have been a total waste of time and broken their hearts.

Nothing at all suggested I was bright. In fact, very little suggested I was even approaching average. I mooned around a lot, in my own head.

Not that I was a silent child. Oh no. Mooning about can be done at the same time as talking. On this, and this alone, I was an excellent multitasker.

“The only time you ever shut up,” muttered Mum (still bitter, some twenty years later), “was when you were asleep.”

I struggled to read.

I couldn’t spell.

I filled up all the expensive math books my mother brought me with pictures of princesses and flowers and castles.

I wasn’t particularly concerned when she wailed that math books were for math. To placate her, I tried to do a few of the sums in the books, but they came out so wrong, she let me return to my doodling in the margins.

The only thing I wanted to do was hang upside down on the swing in the back garden and tell myself elaborate stories. Mum, desperate for something, anything, to prove she hadn’t birthed a complete moron, decided that I was a future Elizabeth Gaskell and the stories I was telling myself must be outstanding.

At great expense, she acquired a small tape recorder that she attached to my back. “Just ignore it and go about your business,” she said sweetly. “And it will capture all the wonderful stories you’re making up and then Mummy will be able to listen to them as well.”

But I hated the tape recorder. It was bulky and horrible and although I didn’t have any of the talent, I did have all the temperament of a genuine artist.

“I can’t tell stories, wearing it,” I told Mum. “I can’t make up stories when someone else is listening.”

Mum looked sad about this. I didn’t know why. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was producing fruit in keeping with idiocy and Mum was frantically trying to reassure herself that she wasn’t raising the village lunatic.

Mum read a lot of books on education. She came up with a possible explanation for my lacklustre performance.

I remember hearing her philosophy for the first time, behind a door. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just happened to be behind that door and Mum has a clear, carrying voice. On the other side of the door was a room full of homeschooling mums.

Because homeschooling can be undertaken for academic advancement, quite a lot of mothers in our circles were enjoying gratifying results with their offspring.

And they were not above boasting about it. In a polite, understated kiwi manner of course. These little contests were cloaked in great civility, but they reeked of the most cutthroat competition. 

Mum, to her credit, did not enjoy these occasions. My mother is not a competitive woman and even if she had been, she had nothing to work with.

It began with the usual verbal parade of “well, it may be nothing of course, but he’s three years ahead in math and already talking about becoming a physicist.”

 And, “well we got her a violin and now it looks like she’s going to be first violin in the Youth Orchestra.”

And, “his potato cannon was so successful that the neighbour thought it was a gun and came over to say could we please stop our son shooting at his pigs,” (this remark was admittedly a bit of an ‘also ran’ comment, but it still elicited the necessary polite murmurs of admiration).

Suddenly Mum’s voice broke in. “I think Ruth might be a genius.”

There was a long, long silence. It was, I felt, a most unflattering silence. Mum seemed to think so as well and she rushed on. “Well, I’ve been reading up on this type of genius,” she explained. “Not like Mozart, who you can tell at once is a genius. This sort of genius takes a bit longer to get started, in fact, when they’re young, they closely resemble idiots and people wonder if they have any brains at all.”

“Ahhh,” said the other mothers. It was a warm, accepting kind of of “ahhhh”. They seemed to think Mum had a point. In any case, the title of ‘child who may be a genius but more closely resembles a brainless idiot’ was not a title that they wished to squabble for.

I was unaffected by the conversation. My academic future did not concern me.  I was far more interested in the length of my hair. Mum had recently snipped it into a short bob. I resented this.

My childhood hero was a little girl called Hannah. Hannah lived in Dargaville and to me she was the personification of female beauty and grace.

She could sing. She could bake. She could play the clarinet. She could draw. But all of these charms paled compared to her hair. Because Hannah had the longest hair I’d ever seen on a little girl.

I mentioned this, coldly, as Mum snipped my hair down to an unattractive shortness. “Well, Hannah doesn’t refuse to brush her hair and walk about in public, chewing the ends of it,” retorted Mum with spirit. She swept up the little pile of ex Ruth hair. “I told you many times I would cut it off if you didn’t start brushing it and stop chewing the ends of it in public.”

Sulkily, I slouched out of the room. I decided to write a letter to Hannah. Mum encouraged me to write letters. It was one of the few quasi educational things she could get me to do. She would provide the envelope and stamp in return for being allowed to proofread the letter.

This was a gross experience for both of us. I hated it because I didn’t like my letters being picked to bits. Mum hated it because the sorts of letters I wrote confirmed her ‘raising the village idiot’ fears.

It was such a bitter experience, Mum had given up on the spelling aspect of the thing. Dyslexia is so ingrained in the family line we might not exist without it. Grandma can spell. And one of her chief requirements in a husband was that he ‘was good with words and could spell.’

Alas for Grandma, Granddad’s spelling was so bad that Grandma concluded that he had the widest vocabulary of any man she had ever met. “He uses words in his letters I’ve never even heard of,” she admitted to her sister in awe.

She didn’t figure out the truth until after they were married. But the marriage was blissfully happy, and spelling ceased to matter. Unfortunately, good spelling turned out to be the recessive gene.

Mum had long ago given up on any good spelling appearing in my letters. Punctuation, however, was a different story. “It’s only a few dots and dashes!” wailed Mum, on a previous letter writing attempt. “Surely you can remember that?”  She waved the offending piece of writing at me. “Just read it and see how wrong it sounds!”

I read, without concern,

Dear nana and poppa how ar yu I am good thank yau for the nice birfday card I liked it a lot my birthday waz gud mum mad a kake and it was yum do you no we hav a nu kat we luv him a lot luv Ruth

Mum gazed at me, desperately. “Can’t you SEE what’s wrong with that?”

I gave her a blank stare.

“You have no full stops and very few capital letters. A full stop signifies the completion of a sentence. A capital letter signifies the start of a sentence. Do you understand?”

This was getting tedious. I decided I’d better understand. “Yes.”

“Good, now take this pen and put in the full stops, Ruth, what is that?” Mum looked down at the mark I was laboriously drawing in my letter.

“A full stop.”

“It is not a full stop. It is a comma. You know the difference between a full stop and a comma. We’ve been over this ever so many times. A full stop is a small round mark. It means the sentence has ended. A comma means a slight pause should be taken. If I spoke only in commas, it would sound like, this, do you notice how there isn’t, a nice flow to this, and that’s how your letters sound.” She finished with a very definite full stop and tried not to glare at me.

I gazed back vacantly.

“Ruth,” said Mum, painfully patient. “A full stop looks like a bouncing ball. A comma has a little tale on it like a cat.”

I brightened. I bent to the paper. “What are you doing now?” asked Mum, hopefully.

“Adding ears and whiskers to my cat.”

It was with memories of the icy reception Mum had given my ‘comma cat’ that I undertook to write my letter to Hannah. I had a lot to say. It wasn’t until I had finished that I realized, despite my best intentions, I hadn’t added a single full stop to the letter.

Mum would fuss. 

Or would she?

Some vague memory of “it’s just dots and dashes,” floated in my head. Well, that was easy enough to fix. I took my pencil and randomly speckled the letter with dots and dashes.

 Dear Hannah how. ar you I am gud I so, liked. going; to your house” on sunday it was. fun and picking. blackberries. waz so mach fun I liked” it a lot and it waz nice, to mak shortbred? with you. I hop! we can’ vist you agen soon luv Ruth

 Ah yes, this was a letter to show to Mum.

She would like this!

And proudly, I carried my letter, full of punctuation, towards the living room to receive my stamp, envelope, and praise.