I was a really, really bad reader, and it was embarrassing.  The other kids in my classes always laughed and pointed and made fun of me when I stuttered on a word or couldn't sound out a word everyone else knew.  It was terrible.

    

I loved looking at the pictures in my storybooks and textbooks, but the words just didn't translate to my brain.

    

This was in the 1950s and 1960s, and schools were much different then.  Students were divided into rigid categories, basically separating the bad readers from the average and good. It didn't occur to anyone that some of my classmates and I might have learning disabilities that were later identified by

 

the time I had my own children.  We were classified as "lazy" and "stupid."

    

It was so bad in high school that my best friend and I were put in "special" classes.  That meant we sat in a room with other students who, for one reason or another, were separated from the "smart" or "good" students.  But, instead of helping us with whatever our problems - whether reading, behavior or social - were, we were mostly expected to sit still and not cause trouble. That was easy for me.  My main concern was racing out of that class as soon as the bell rang to join my other friends without anyone finding out that I was with the "special" kids.  We all knew "special" really meant bad.

    

I still don't know if I was a bad speller because I couldn't read well, or if I just made a silly childhood decision that reading and spelling weren't important, so why should I study?  I wanted to win the cooking bake-off, not the spelling bee.  My dream was to be the perfect wife, so I wouldn't have time to be a member of the Book of the Month Club, I told myself.

    

I'm not sure how old I was when my learning disabilities were finally identified, and I learned there were actually medical reasons for my reading problems.  Suffice it to say it was much too late to improve my grade point average.  I had left school long ago.  And, in a perfect example of irony, I fell in love with and married a man named "Spelling."  My mother thought that was the funniest thing she ever heard.  ‘Your name will be ‘Spelling,' and you're the worst speller,' she said.  I didn't think it was so funny.

    

Knowing that I wasn't just "dumb" changed my life.  I had long ago given up trying to read anything "hard."  That all changed.  I learned how to compensate for my disabilities.  I wished I could have learned sooner, but I finally felt I was learning to read.

    

I went back to all the books I missed, from "Dick and Jane" to "Nancy Drew," from fairy tales to Archie comics.  I had a lot of reading to discover.

    

And then irony struck again.  As I read more and more of my husband's scripts - for his shows such as ‘Beverly Hills 90210,' ‘Dynasty,' ‘Charlie's Angels,' ‘7th Heaven,' ‘Charmed,' ‘Melrose Place,' ‘Fantasy Island' and others - I realized how much I loved

 "stories."  I started reading storybooks.  Then, I decided I'd like to write one.

    

Now, it's Summer, 2009; and Candy Spelling, the girl who couldn't spell, is a published author.  That spells h-a-p-p-i-n-e-s-s in my book.

 

 

Editor's Note: Candy Spelling is the author of Stories from Candyland and the mother of Tori Spelling.