My teeth clenched in frustration and I tried to relax my shoulders in the face of my daughter’s hysterics.
“I don’t want to. It’s boring.” she wailed. “I hate reading!” Her stomps vibrated the floorboards above my head. I resisted the urge to retort up the staircase about spending the rest of the summer in her room.
Her summer reading has about killed us both and I don’t understand why. I’ve always loved to read; I can’t remember any struggle to learn to love stories or any reluctance to pick up a book and pass the time. We’ve read wonderful, imagination-capturing books to our kids since they were small. Our oldest son, who is the same age as Saige, devours books.
It has all always come so naturally, this battle knocks the breath out of me. At the library, I nudge her away from the movies, pulling the short novels that began my life as a reader from the shelves, but Saige picks Garfield or joke books. “One real chapter book,” I argue, “for your reading log.”
I want her to find the magic and the escape that I know. I want her to fall in love with the characters and the worlds I adore—Harry Potter, Charles and his flying, time-traveling unicorn, an orphan on Prince Edward Island, Frodo and Bilbo, that damn really great Wangdoodle. I want her to be transported and transformed. Instead, she endures and begs for “manga” books, graphic novels with less words per page than the board books I read to Nate. Cheating, I label it, although I know that’s unfair. She is allowed to find interest where I find boredom and vice versa.
Pressed this week to pick one chapter book to compliment 100 Knock Knock Jokes, she chose Juliet the Valentine Fairy a Rainbow Magic Special Edition. I suspected more for the shiny pink cover adorned with a glitter rainbow and magic wand emitting sickening pink hearts than for any merits particular to the plot, but I wisely held my tongue. It had five fairy stories, each with several chapters and so met the required qualifications.
The pink glitter and magic hearts did not prevent our daily dual. Over the summer months, I’ve searched for the happy solution. I have tried having her read to me. We’ve tried reading first thing in the morning, before bedtime, before our afternoon TV time. None of it mattered—the same dramatic protest occurred every single day.
I noticed, though, that it is more the act of sitting down to read than the actual reading, she chafes against. She often settles into the books. She tells me about the stories. And so, at huge cost to my mental well-being, I have learned to restrain myself. I ignore the screaming and the tantrums and the dramatics. I let them play out. I have ceased arguing the merits of reading and lecturing on the ignorance of “hating” to read. I embrace Garfield provided one chapter of Juliet and her rainbow magic is read in the twenty required daily minutes.
And so, I resisted the urge to bellow up the stairs, waiting (not at all graciously) for the histrionics to cease before setting the timer (which breaks my heart because Garrett often reads for an hour or more without asking me if his time is done).The buzzer sounded twenty minutes later, but the silence in the house continued for another fifteen minutes or so before I heard her steps on the stairs.
“I finished it, mom. If I finish one more, I’ll get my free book at the library.”
“That is so cool, we can go to the library tomorrow!”
“Nah, that’s okay, I have Garfield.
Teeth clenched, I march on.
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