The Danger of Reading
I taught my children to love reading, but I didn’t tell them about character loss.
There isn’t anything I can say to defend myself. When my oldest child was a toddler, I made a conscious choice. I wanted him (and eventually them) to be steeped in puddles of words. Not conversations, I’m not good at those. I wanted my children to be soaked in words. Books, poetry, songs. Written words. I wanted them to find it normal to have books coming out of every corner of their lives. Book shelves in every room, audiobooks playing them to sleep at night, boxes of books in the car.
And I did just that. It was a joint effort. I am not the only bibliophile in this house. My husband and I have a beloved book series that we always fall asleep to. In keeping with this committment, I filled our house with books, subscribed to audiobook services, and took my kids to the library. I made sure all four of them had devices of their own so they could select and listen to audiobooks of their choice. I taught them to read.
But I forgot to tell them about the risks.
When I was eight or so I discovered Mrs. Frisby. She was a mouse who lived on the lee side of a cinder block. I think. Or a rock. Anyway, she was a single parent with a sick child whose housing was under threat (best I can remember, her home was going to get plowed under). She was in trouble. Enter the super intelligent rats of NIMH. At the time I had no idea what the National Institutes of Mental Health were. There was a very startling day in Mental Health Nursing class when I realized that Mrs. Frisby’s rat friends might have been real. The Rats of NIMH were the product of governmental experimentation, and, as such, were extremely intelligent. They saved Mrs. Frisby and her children. I don’t actually remember how they saved her, but I do know that I read that book eight times. There was something about the rats that I fell in love with.
Characters are odd. You sit in your favorite chair next to the shelf of plants you haven’t overwatered yet and open a sheaf of papers bound with thicker paper. A paper sandwich. There, on those pages, you are met by a character. A mother struggling to save her feverish child from a plow, a man so unsympathetic to Christmas that he becomes an adjective, a lover who makes your heart pound. Characters might have lived somewhere in time. The Julius Caesars or Teresa of Avlias, meeting us out of time and space, probably through translation, living again through the miracle of story. Other characters have only lived in the minds of readers. Either way, characters become real. They rise off the page and begin to walk around in your imagination.
My toddler has grown into a giant puppy of a teenager. His coppery hair stands out like he was drawn by the angstiest of anime artists. He is tall enough to rest his chin on the top of my head, but when he finished Harry Potter book seven, he stooped to sob on my shoulder. Not because the ending was sad. It isn’t. His tears were for the characters who just stopped. That’s the way of it for characters. You journey with them for days or weeks or months, and, suddenly, they are gone. Their lives un-ended by death but by the resection of the back cover. No epilogue will make up for the trauma of the end of a good character. I hugged him for a long time, paralyzed by my shocking oversight. When he was running around our backyard in his overpadded cloth diapers, I didn’t stop to think the grief those word-puddles could contain.
I’m not sorry. I am proud of my reader-kids. Extremely proud. Especially since at least one of them is dyslexic. I am just a little shocked I didn’t stop to think about what I was asking them to withstand. To be a reader is to subject yourself to a life of a thousand losses.
As I stood there, proud of the man my boy has become, I did what all good reader-parents would have done: I told him to start the books over.
