Resilience and strength
How books are helping my daughter find her place in the real world
My daughter is always reading.
“Just one more page,” is the standard refrain before bed. “Or four.” If someone asks, “Where’s Madeline?” the answer is likely sprawled out on the couch with a book, dreaming with her eyes open.
More often than not, I’m reading novels or comics or essays. Or writing them. And writing consists of more than simply typing. Sometimes, while eating dinner or raking leaves, I will go still and stare into the middle distance with a slack expression, muscling through a plot point.
Something similar is happening to Madeline now. Because books don’t merely entertain. They incite action, create empathy, spark critical conversation and make you a better citizen and more fully realized human being. The more books she gobbles up, the more lives and worlds she has packed impossibly into her nineyear-old brain.
I imagine the inside of Madeline’s mind as a house. It’s a sunny, comfy sort of place. But in this house, new doors appear every day. One leads to a ballroom lit by floating candles. Windows appear that offer views of a sandstorm in Egypt, a giant squid propelling itself through the murky ocean depths. Each book she pulls off the shelf opens up another secret passage. What kind of mansion will her mind become? This is where she will live as a woman, and I want the foundation to be strong.
Each night my wife and I read to her on a rotating schedule. Tonight I will crack open A Wrinkle in Time, and tomorrow my wife will read The Witches. We want her to read classics, and we want her to read whatever is rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists.
We want her to read poetry and graphic novels, and we want her to read Newbery winners. We want her to read across religious and gender and cultural barriers. We want her to be swept away, but we want her to learn.
We want this so that she’s resilient enough to survive and open-minded enough to explore whatever life throws at her. So that she’s educated enough, strong enough to carve out her own place in the world.
Today I find her at the family computer. “I’m writing a novel.”
I’ll admit that my black, poisonous, gravy-clotted heart beat a little faster then. “What? That’s amazing. Can I read it?” “Sure.”
We recently finished The Hobbit and I asked her what she thought. She absolutely loved it. “But … it’s kind of weird it’s all boys?” I hadn’t noticed up until then, but the gender discrepancy is extreme enough that the word “she” appears in the novel only once. Now I lean in to read what she has written.
“Once there was a hobbit, and when you read this story you might think this is a lot like The Hobbit, and as a matter of fact it is. But this story is about a girl hobbit. “How do you like my book?” she says, and I say, “I like it a lot. Keep going.”