Conniption Chronicles: Reading Into It
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far away, I was young and had no children. I had no particular plans to have children; I had no particular plans to not have children. I had no particular plans of any sort. I've never been much good at planning for the future (which undoubtedly explains why I have so spectacularly failed to grasp this whole "career" business that I've heard so much about). The closest I have ever come to planning is in spending a few idle moments looking up from whatever book is demanding my attention on that particular day, staring out the nearest sunny window, and indulging in a few idle fantasies about what my vaguely imagined future might look like.
My idle fantasies about parenthood looked, of course, mostly like something out of my favorite books. I have always approached life through books. I was an early reader, a child who was drawn to the printed word almost from birth. My mother remembers that I would flip through magazines before I had the motor control to perform almost any other task. I was reading street signs at two, Dr. Seuss at three, chapter books at four. By the time I was seven, I was rereading Louisa May Alcott; by the time I was eight or nine, I was reading the Brontë sisters. In fifth and sixth grade, my mother would finish a book—her tastes ran to science fiction—and hand it over to me to read next. I was a reader. It was part of my identity, like having brown hair. In fact, it was my defining characteristic, the reason why I was "the smart girl." In my idle fantasies of parenthood, my children—those tidy, quiet, and entirely hypothetical children—would also be readers. How could they not be? Whatever the genetic code is that turns human beings into bookworms, surely my DNA was dripping with it. I pictured myself as a parent presiding over a family of bookworms, a family whose native land would be first and foremost the printed word. Our family life would be a page taken from my own childhood favorites, a virtual dictation from the literary families that I claimed as my own. We would most resemble Madeleine L'Engle's Austin family in their domestic moments. I would be like Mrs. Austin, stirring big pots of spaghetti sauce on the stove while Brahms played on the stereo, singing to my children over the whirring of helpful household appliances, gathering my brood together every night to sit spellbound at my feet whilst I read from the classics: Kipling, Twain, Shakespeare. Yes, my fantasy children with the bookish DNA would sit at my feet, precocious toddlers all, clutching their beloved stuffed toys and listening, mouths agape, while I read Shakepeare. Later, stuffed with quotations from John Donne and Henry Vaughn, they would grow up to fight evildoers and swim with dolphins. Or something. I was a little sketchy on the details of the fade-out. But parenthood. I had it figured out. That's what it would be like: Austins and Murrys, peaceful and lovely, Mark Twain and Shakespeare. When I met the man who would become my husband, I could hardly wait to dive into that imagined future with him, filled with bookish children and the inevitable Brahms with spaghetti sauce. I don't even have to tell you that it has not all turned out to be quite what I imagined. For one thing, though they are on the menu four nights out of every five here in this Home for Unnaturally Picky Eaters, those bubbling pots of spaghetti sauce a la Austin are not exactly peaceful. Walk away from a pot of spaghetti sauce for long enough to change a diaper, fetch a sippy cup, or referee a fight, and you return to a scene that resembles a blood-spattered horror flick more than the loving domestic scene of a Madeleine L'Engle novel, even if you are playing Brahms on the stereo, which I never am, because I do not actually own any Brahms (maybe I should have checked on that while arranging my fantasy parenthood?). With the sauce erupting all over all surfaces within 15 feet of the stove and the kids chanting protest slogans and throwing sippy cups, even with a Brahms accompaniment my kitchen would still more closely resemble the gory aftermath of a historic International Workers of the World labor strike than any peaceful L'Engle domestic scene, because—as it turns out—my non-hypothetical little darlings have strong feelings about music and who chooses what they listen to. Did anyone ever refer to Mrs. Austin as The Man when she put the needle to her chosen LP on the family stereo, which was almost certainly not splattered with spaghetti sauce? I think not. My kids, the ones I actually had instead of the ones I imagined, are neither tidy nor quiet. They are miniature labor organizers who sing "We Shall Overcome" when asked to pick up their toys. They do not resemble the beloved offspring of any of the literary company I kept in childhood, except for possibly some of the characters in my dad's old MAD magazines. If my kids have inherited any of my bookworm DNA, it is recessive in the extreme. Books? For the first eighteen months of their respective lives, my son and my daughter considered books to be particularly fetching teething accessories. At an age when I was gearing up to read books myself, my kids were—earnestly, and with a single-minded concentration that surely bespeaks some kind of, uh, genius in its own right—eating the books. Eating. The. Books. My mother came to visit and watched in horror as the infant Sam chewed away on the corner of some hapless board book. Children eat books? She had no idea. I had no idea. There are a lot of things about children and literacy development about which I have had no idea. For example, not all children sit perfectly still, mouth agape, clutching a favorite stuffed animal while their mother reads aloud to them from the classics. You know, the classics: Moo, Baa, La La La; Goodnight, Moon; Curious George Rides An Oddly Disjointed Narrative. Some children wriggle whilst their mother reads aloud. Some children wriggle, fidget, jockey for position, kick each other, hum distractingly under their breath, and perform elaborate mimes with their favorite stuffed animals while their mother reads aloud to them. Some children wander off at the very moment of maximum suspense—will Max remain the king of all Wild Things? Do the ducklings make it across the busy street?—with nary a backward glance. Some children have not a single cell in their body devoted to the transmission of narrative curiosity. Some children will flick your hand away in irritation if you point to each word as you read it, like all The Experts tell you to do in order to promote literacy. "Mama," some children will say in tones of extreme irritation, "you are covering THE PICTURES. I want to see THE PICTURES." "But the words," I say, guiltily, like an Austin child caught with her hand in a boot full of stolen candy. "What about the words?" Sam rolls his eyes at me. "I want to see THE PICTURES," he says, while his sister slaps my hand away from the page. "I want hold duh book," she yells. She grasps it and flings the pages backwards to the very beginning. "Dose are nice words," she intones solemnly, and promptly turns her attention back to the pictures. While Sam and Miriam bicker about whether "dat" is a picture of a monkey or a grown-up, I wonder again at the myriad different ways that my pre-parenthood identity has failed to play out in my children. When I started kindergarten, I stood out because I was the only child in the class who was reading chapter books fluently. In Sam's kindergarten class, lots of kids are reading already. He is not one of them. I find that I have to consciously strive to keep from being disappointed by this. I have to remind myself that it is normal to not be reading in kindergarten and that it does not portend anything about the ways that he will or will not experience the joys of reading over the course of his life. I remind myself that it is not a bad thing that my son has an identity broader than "the bookworm." But I have to confess: it is hard. It is hard to see that my children are apparently so untouched by the part of myself that I had learned to value most. I read early; it is the one thing I know that made my parents proud. They still talk about it, their daughter, the precocious reader—an accomplishment that, of course, led to nothing in particular, except a lot of reading. I read early, but that never made me a better person or a smarter one. And my children will not be any less accomplished or valued if they read on their own timetables (bearing no relation to mine), choosing books that have no point in common with the canon of my childhood. "Comparisons are odious," the Austin grandfather was fond of quoting. It does me good to remember. My children will grow up to be their very own selves. Their stories will be seasoned with books, yes, I hope; but also with their own, other interests, other loves. And—this I know for sure—with lots and lots of spaghetti sauce. |
Rebecca Sherman
Rebecca Sherman lives with her husband and two babies—YES THEY ARE STILL BABIES—near Boston, Massachusetts. Before becoming a stay-at-home mother, she compiled an extremely impressive resume including stints as a popcorn popper, dishwasher, housecleaner, retail flunky, and various office jobs with 'assistant' in the title. She has also written on human rights, pop culture, health care and immigration issues, and the causal relationship between yogurt and juvenile delinquency. Read more of Rebecca's The Conniption Chronicles column. search mamazine:
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