I pointed to the word “no” on a sign at the Botanical Gardens. My four-year-old daughter frowned and said: “Cut it out mummy!”

I told myself she was too young.

A year later, she was even more resistant to reading the same sign.

In primary one, reading homework was agony.

“That word is bat, that word is cat,” I said and pointed to the third word “rat”.

Tears ran down her face and she said in a little voice: “Giraffe?”

As the weeks went on I became more frustrated with both of us. I kept thinking, if only I was more patient. Her teacher said she was the perfect angel during class reading, which made me feel worse. So it was me that was the problem.

I met up with a fellow class mom whose child was clearly a budding genius.

“We were having a little trouble with reading but now we are making progress,” I said. I’m not normally a liar, but it was hard to admit the truth. The previous Saturday, she’d taken the wrong child’s name tag in gymnastics.

The other mom said: “I’m sure if she’s your kid she’s going to be good at reading.”

Someone suggested I was putting a lot of pressure on her because reading was so important to my own life. Her ability to read always seemed to come down to what I was and was not good at.

“She can’t actually spell her first name,” I said.

“That’s because it’s so long,” came the glib response. Everyone had something dismissive to say.

Then one day, in primary two, she brought home a beautiful self-portrait with her name written across the top of the picture. She’d spelled her name correctly except that the name was written from right to left with every single letter turned the wrong way.

“You were looking in a mirror,” I guessed.

She shook her head.

We wrote to her teacher: “Can this be normal?”

After a day or so the teacher wrote back to arrange a meeting. In the meeting, the teacher handed me a piece of paper. On it, my daughter had written the alphabet from A to H first in capitals and then in small letters. After H was a bit of a random jumble K, Z, L, M, O.

This will sound strange, but after that meeting, home reading practice actually became a lot less stressful. She had a problem. It was acknowledged. We were dealing with it with special reading classes at school. It was no one’s fault. We put her self-portrait on the wall.