As a kid, I read more than I did just about anything else. Piles of my books were scattered everywhere in the house. Books stuffed in my desk drawers, in the bathroom, on our back porch, and in the backseat of our family van. I learned everything from those stories.
I read about broken families, kids who grew up with servants, and ones who lived in old hotels and solved mysteries. Books taught me what to expect from puberty, how to tell if a boy liked me, and that the whole world wasn’t like my own backyard.
I can remember the book hangovers I would have from reading so much. After a morning in bed, living between the pages of a book, I struggled to come back to reality, to get up and make myself something to eat. I was still living in the world of the book. The story was so intoxicating, it had sedated every part of me, except my imagination.
Hungry for more information, I read everything I could—the backs of shampoo bottles, the newspaper, and the encyclopedia.
Didn’t everyone do this?
Apparently not. Mike is not a reading natural. His favorite people aren’t characters from books. He has no desire to spend a day lost in a world of an author’s imagination.
“But didn’t you read as a kid?” I ask him.
“Nope. Never.”
For a long time, I didn’t believe him. Maybe reading didn’t define his childhood, but he must have read. How does a kid learn anything without reading?
But I’ve found out this is true. Some kids just aren’t reading naturals. I have a ten-year-old who doesn’t read. She’s smart, but she learns differently than I do. Reading is hard for her, and she doesn’t enjoy it.
For years, I’ve been waiting for her to find the book that makes her love reading. I’ve bought her books other moms have recommended. I’ve given her books I loved as a kid. But she never touches them.
So, if she isn’t a natural reader, we are working on her becoming a nurtured reader.
I pulled out the huge bin of my childhood books. Opening it was like finding old friends—the Sweet Valley High books, the Girls of Canby Hall, Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, Calvin and Hobbes, and stacks of others. I let her chose any book she wanted, and promised we would read it together. Every night. For an hour.
At least that was the plan. Her brothers and sisters want to get in on the action, so they often crowd around. Sometimes it gets so late, we both yawn through all the sentences. Other nights, I’m working on a deadline and Mike takes the reading duties.
But we’re still meeting every night, reading books snuggled in bed, exploring worlds with each other, and falling in love with the characters.
Together, we are making it through the books—the reading natural and the reading nurtured.
