Hey, Mom, thanks for the books
I started reading early. My mother says by age two. My favorite babies to carry around with me were neither dolls nor blankies, but books, tablets, pens, books, and more books. In elementary school my mom gave me reading lists because she thought for every contemporary novel I wanted to read, I had to give her one classic. You want to read Judy Blume? Then give me Mark Twain, and a book report. You want to read VC Andrews? Then give me John Steinbeck, then Shakespeare, then Betty Freidan. My book reports were given in the kitchen while dinner was being prepared. Thankfully my mother worked so dinner prep only took about 20 mins. She’d ask me to read a passage and tell her what it meant. I was 10, 11, 12.
I read Tortilla Flats, The Red Pony, East of Eden, and then we went to the Steinbeck House for lunch, toured Cannery Row, found Steinbeck’s grave in the cemetery, and I listened to her explain why it is that we need to read the classics even though they are written by mostly male authors and routinely misogynistic and oftentimes infuriating in their paternalism. (Yes, my mother used the words “misogynistic” and “paternalism” when I was 10 and expected me to know what she meant).
She was furious when she discovered my 8th grade Language Arts text book contained an excerpted version of Great Expectations. Did anyone else’s mother call the teacher and request their kid be required to read the whole novel, because she just couldn’t, in good conscience, allow her child to read an abridged version of any classic literature? Sometimes I was horrified. As much as I loved to read and be smart, I was still a kid. I was embarrassed to tell my friends what I was reading. I was a big enough dork as it was.
But I didn’t stop. Because I was allowed to read grown-up things, too. I remember vividly how special I felt when my mom handed The Color Purple to me after she finished reading it, immediately after it was in bookstores, and how powerful, and adult, and terrifying the story was, and how grown-up I felt that she trusted me with the story, that she trusted me with the content, that she wanted to discuss it with me after. This marked the first time we shared books. The first time I had actually caught up to her. The first time we were equal in our reading.
And it hasn’t stopped. We stumble over each other in conversations about books. It’s the first thing we talk about when we arrive at each other’s homes, immediately going to the current pile and feverishly asking have you read this, or this or this? Do you have such and such yet because I haven’t had time to buy it? And then the joy I get in suggesting things to her, things she’d never read if it wasn’t for my particular interest in international literature, is a feeling of pleasing her, showing her I’m still a smart kid.
We have had problems. She, for instance, has no stomach for sarcasm or the incessant teasing I’m more than thrilled to have inherited from my father. But the books and the smarts? This is something we share, something we do well together, something that means so much to both of us, and is one of few things that connects us. She never knew how to show me about makeup and hair and jewelry and clothes because she didn’t know about those things. She told me about sex, but not about men and relationships and love. It was hard to feel girlie inside but not be able to be girlie on the outside because she didn’t know how to show me girlie things. It was hard to like a boy because she only knew about studying and getting smarter and making sure no one ever made girls feel like they aren’t as smart as boys. So it was probably quite the shock for her to realize how much I liked makeup, clothes, hair, boys, gossiping, playing loud music, giggling until my stomach hurt.
We’re even different with how we handle our books. I leave my books in pristine condition, no one can tell I actually flipped the pages after I’ve finished a book. I have tiny heart attacks when I see books, anyone’s books, turned over to hold a place, bindings bent, and, the worst of all, corners of pages turned in. My mother does all of these things. Unless she’s borrowing one of my books. But when I read one she’s read first, I fret, un-creasing pages and wiping the cover of spilled coffee.
We always had the books. We will forever have the books. The heart-racing, adrenaline rush of buying a new book, finding a new author, telling each other about this one or that one. And if I have a kid, I will do the same thing she did for me. Because the world inside books transcends all that might be different, weird, strange, and painful in the real world, and I think that’s what my mother knew then and she and I quietly still share now.
