You know, the thing about parenting is that there’s no handbook. No manual. No real instruction At All.
So people try to create these things. You’ve seen them: You and Your Daughter, The Strong-Willed Child, Raising Boys, Six Points for Raising Happy, Healthy Children. All worthwhile, I’m sure, in their way. All worth reading. And all, when it comes down to it, Not Even Remotely about the child you have standing in front of you Right Now.
I taught William to read. I don’t remember any kind of struggle in it. We had lesson after lesson, infinite practice and (perhaps, on my part) less than infinite patience. But the child was reading Harry Potter not long after he turned six, and he’s the one to whom I find myself saying, “Please put down the book now,” for any variety of reasons.
I also taught Everett to read, and I remember struggle aplenty in that. He didn’t want to learn. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t want it to be difficult, and it was. And then, even after he was solidly equipped with all he needed to know, he didn’t want to read.
I couldn’t understand that At All.
Mercifully, these developmental stages (and that’s what these books remind you of, you know: the Stages) pass, and before you know it, you’re in the clear and the view is all blue sky, and you forget that it was ever difficult at all.
Until you are headed into the school building one morning, saying your farewells to your children, who are off to their school building for the day. And Everett, the one who didn’t want to learn to read, is telling you that he’s returning a book to the library, the one he borrowed before school started, the one about submarines.
You comment that it’s good he’s returning it, and you have a transient thought about how he’s becoming so responsible, and you are thinking about the work you have to do when you get inside.
But he’s still talking, and you hear him. You hear him say that he’s very nearly almost finished with Eragon now, that novel with upwards of 500 pages. And he would be finished were he not also often caught reading that submarine book, or the history book that elicits so many questions, or the one he just got from the library: the one about airplanes. Yes, he’s nearly finished with Eragon, he says, but he might just forgo reading the sequel straightaway.
Oh?
Yes, he thinks he might like to read Something Else instead.
And what might that be?
Genesis, he says, as he turns away.
You know: Genesis. The first book of the Bible. Ambitious, that. Quite a choice for someone in the 3rd grade.
Maybe he prefers non-fiction.
