Dispatches from Babyville: A Lit Legacy

I was a voracious reader as a child, a read-while-walking-down-the-sidewalk kind of bookworm. As an adult, I’ve moved apartments countless times and every time, during the brutal downsizing that precedes packing, I place one childhood book after another on the “Keep” pile, schlepping the yellow-paged books from one shoebox apartment to another. I love these books. They’re my Proustian madeline.

Naturally, I want to share these jewels of literature with my children, now aged 6, 11 and 14 years old. When they were very young, this was easy enough. Toddlers are happy to sit through any readaloud, be it an evergreen Sendak or a psychedelic Stephen Cosgrove. But when it comes to chapter books–the classics–I’ve been less successful in preserving my literary legacy. In fact, my children have flat-out rejected my legacy. Loudly, Repeatedly.

With my firstborn, Primo, I tried Heidi.

“You’re going to love it!” I assured my then nine-year-old. “She drinks milk from goats and she lives on a high mountaintop and her grandpa’s really grumpy.”

“Sounds boring,” he noted–to my mind, prematurely.

A few pages in, he confirmed his initial assesment.

“It is boring,” he pronounced.

So, I upped the ante. I acquired an audiobook version, in which a Swiss woman read the story in the most lilting, hypnotic accent imaginable. Her voice was more relaxing than a bottomless glass of Chardonnay. Turns out one man’s “relaxing” is another man’s “boring-est thing I ever heard.”

We listened while on a road trip, making it through three or four chapters before we arrived at our destination. Once out of the car, the children staged a mutiny and refused to get back in until I agreed to never play Heidi again. So, that was that.

Several years later, I tried Little Women, this time with Seconda, who was about eight. I hooked her by telling her that something really, really terrible happens in the middle of the book. Seconda really digs it when terrible things happen in books, so she agreed to try it. And she did. But we’d hardly made it past chapter two when she put the kabosh on the readaloud.

“But we didn’t get up to the terrible thing yet!” I reminded her.

She raised her eyebrows suspiciously. “I bet it’s not even that bad.”

“Oh, it’s bad. Trust me. Reaaaally awful. Tragic.”

“Does the dad die?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“The mom?”

“No.”

“Just tell me! I’m never going to read this book and I want to know.”

“If you want to find out what terrible, awful, sad and tragic thing happens,” I said, “you have to let me read it to you.”

“Okay,” she said, shrugging. “Forget it then.”

About two years later, when we were in the middle of an argument, she yelled: “And I know what happens at the end of Little Women! Beth dies!”

I gasped. “How did you find that out?”

“The internet, Mom!” she replied. “It’s called the internet!”

And then there was one.

My youngest, Terza, is six years old and, I am aware, my final shot. I knew I had to choose the classic carefully, so I left Little Women on the shelf, opting instead for A Little Princess.

A Little Princess has it all. There’s servitude, and rodent friends and orphanhood. There’s the word “princess” right there, in the title, irresistible to kids of the Cinderella-Ate-My Daughter age bracket.

Plus, I knew Terza liked my literary tastes. My husband and I had read the entire Ramona series to her–twice–using a few of my childhood volumes.

I hooked Terza with a tight elevator pitch. I kept her focused by doing all the voices. I even edited out some of the more boring adjectives.  

She was smitten for one night of bedtime reading and then another. We conducted light literary analysis on the way to school. We bonded over favorite quotes.

It’s not the legacy I planned but then again, in parenting, it never is.

“It’s working,” I thought with no small amount of self congratulation.

And then, on the third night, just after Ermegarde St. John was introduced, Terza cut me off mid-sentence and said, “I don’t want to read this. Let’s read Ramona again.”

“But–but what about Ermegarde St. John? We have to find out what happens to her. She has the best name ever! ERMEGARDE ST. JOHN!”

Terza shot me a “Mom, you’re really losing it” look. It’s troubling when your six-year-old appropriately uses that look on you.

“Can we please read just a little more?” I pleaded. “I really want to read it!”

“You can read it, Mommy. Later. After I go to bed.”

“But you didn’t even find out what terrible thing happens!” I blurted, floundering..

“I don’t care. I want to read Ramona.”

“Okay fine,” I said quickly. “I’ll tell you. Her father dies. She loses all her money! She has to become a servant in her own school!”

She shrugged. “So what?”

To which I could issue no reply. There is no coming back from “so what?”

I pulled Beezus and Ramona off the shelf and started reading, for the upteenth time, Cleary’s sturdy, steady prose. I began to feel, I think, what my daughter does while reading it –  bemused, delighted and more than anything, safe. Klickitat Street is no Sesame Street; you can’t have all sunny days in Portland after all. But when it does rain in Cleary’s world, there’s always an umbrella to stand under, metaphorically speaking, anyway. I understood then, that that’s what my little one is looking for when she reads. Or what she’s looking for right now, at least. Fair enough.

A week or so later, Terza was browsing Netflix when she cried out, “Look Mom! It’s that really boring book you kept trying to read to me. Can we watch the movie?”

“Are you kidding?” I wanted to say. ”Before finishing the book?”

Instead I said, “Sure” and made popcorn. We followed the trials and tribulations of Sara Crews and Ermegarde St. John and her rodent friends. Terza was riveted. She watched the movie again the next day.

It’s not the legacy I planned but then again, in parenting, it never is. I’ll take it.

The following morning, on our walk to school, she turned to me and said, as if conceding a point: “You were right, Mom. That is a really good story.”

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Nicole C. Kear is the co-author of the new middle grade series, The Startup Squad, out this May, as well as author of the chapter book series, The Fix-It Friends, and the memoir Now I See You. You can find out more info at nicolekear.com.