I started to hate math around the time letters were introduced into it. This was, what, as early as third or fourth grade? It starts so young these days, man. I was just a kid. 
Anyway, I was fine with letters in English--loved it, even--and I could tolerate the numbers in math, but once they started combining them? Nope. Pretty sure my school subjects are meant to be separate. It's like when little kids hate their food touching. Academics are the same: math and english shouldn't touch. Some people are like, "Well, that's kind of petty. You're not a little kid. I mean," (here they usually scoff) "you don't actually complain about your food touching anymore, now do you?"
I usually reply with "You bet your bottom dollar I do." I don't know why it's considered a shameful thing to admit. Have you ever seen broccoli juice slowly absorb into white rice? It's not a pretty sight. Even the description is making me gag.
Understandably, I struggled a bit in math once letters got involved. It's a natural reaction to the colliding of two worlds. Because I live in a family that says they'll love me no matter what but simultaneously starts talking about my quick path to jail anytime I get an A- or lower, my father began helping me with my math homework.
Most of the math problems around this time were something like this: 5+x=10. Maybe a bit more complex, but you get the idea. Now, I don't know why my father didn't teach me to simply subtract the five from ten, leaving you with the value of the variable, but he didn't. Instead, he told me I should start trying out numbers in place of the variable to see what worked.
What numbers, Daddy? I asked, looking up into the face of the man who had finally failed me.
Any number, he replied. Just try one out. Six, for example. Is six plus five ten? No. It's eleven. So if six plus five is eleven, what number plus five would be ten?
I had no idea. Theoretical reasoning is not something you can just throw at an eight-year-old and expect her understand. The part that confounded me the most was the whole pulling numbers out of thin air part. Of course six didn't work, because where the heck did six even come from? Several times, I attempted to tell my father that you can't just have any numbers you feel like. That's greedy, and numbers don't grow on trees.
Frustrated and weary, my father retorted that if we had an unknown variable, we could, in fact, pull numbers out of thin air. He said, we could try seven, we could try eighty. They may not be right, but we could try any number we want. Like magic, see? he said.
I had to be like, No, Dad. That's like dark magic, the scary stuff. It's a sad day when you've realized your father has stumbled into the occult. That's probably how Voldemort got his start, you know? Dark magic stemming out of frustration with math. 
It's impossible to count how many nights my dad and I sat at our kitchen table after soccer practice, my math homework strewn across the tablecloth and our dinner pushed to the side as he attempted to beat the knowledge into my brain. It went on for far too long to be assigned a practical number, but I read somewhere that if you don't remember an exact detail, you should just make it up, so I'll try to give a ballpark figure: two million nights.
As the years dragged by, I like to think I got better at math (yet for some reason, estimation was never my strong suit). Eventually, the math I was being taught outgrew the memory and mental capacity of my dad, and I had to turn to my grandfather for help. This worked for another couple of years, but this year may be the end of that as most of my math homework is now done on my new, fancy calculator. A Texas Instruments 84 Plus Silver Color Edition, in case you were wondering. There are names of diseases that are shorter than that.
This calculator is the first one I've had that needs to be plugged in and charged. Listen, I live in the Silicon Valley. The outlets in my room are already taken up by my fifty Apple products. I don't need yet another blinking charger to stare at me like a monster's red eye when I turn off the lights and try to go to sleep. And despite the calculator costing about as much as my iPod, it doesn't live up to the hype. The sorely misleading APPS button on the calculator sadly leads me only to the settings for different programs.
When I look back, it seems like I've come a long way in math. From not understanding variables in algebra to...not understanding more advanced variables in more advanced algebra. So not much has changed, and I'm never going to use the quadratic formula in real life. What else is new? Yet math has given me stories and memories I'm grateful for. I still wish there were no letters in it, though. But I guess--wait, hold on a second.
I'm back. Sorry for the interruption. I had to go charge my calculator. What was I saying? Oh yeah. But I guess you can't have it all.