The Amazon Wish Book

The Amazon Wish Book arrived a few weeks ago.

Despite the half-hour of entertainment it offered Beckett on a dull Saturday, the whole ordeal was cringey. The branding worked it’s magic, as Beckett vigorously flipped past the pink pages to any blue page with toys that say POW or VROOM.

I don’t know when he made those gender distinctions, but he was on board. I felt concerned that this world we’ve built for him limits him to “boy stuff” only.

I immediately thought back to Tomie dePaola’s Oliver Button Is A Sissy. Oliver Button was a little boy who was teased mercilessly because he loved to dance and draw and play with paper dolls. The boys in school even wrote “Oliver Button Is A Sissy” on the school wall. This precious child persisted, defying gender norms by just being a child at his own version of play. After performing a tap routine in a talent show, Oliver returned to school to see that some of the girls had boldly crossed out “sissy” and wrote “STAR.”

On my children’s literature tour in 2017 I had the pleasure of meeting the late Tomie dePaola at a book signing in New Hampshire. As he signed a box of Strega Nona paper dolls for me, he looked up and said, “This is all I wanted to do when I was growing up, play with dolls like this.”

All of a sudden I flashed back to Oliver Button Is A Sissy and realized who I was speaking to...

Oh, hi, Oliver Button, good to meet you.

So, for context, here we are with this children’s book about defying gender roles from 1979, which, presumptively, would have been reflective of dePaola’s childhood in the late 1930s, a time of highly defined gender expectations. For further context, RBG had just taken on gender equality in Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue seven years earlier in 1972.

And dePaola’s Oliver Button still danced and drew and played with paper dolls.

Beckett is Oliver Button’s age, and his baby brother is trailing right behind, wide-eyed at everything his brother does and every way we respond to him. They are going to do what their little hearts feel called to do. I just have to make sure that I’m writing STAR on the wall above their heads and teaching them to do the same for others.

#tomiedepaola

My Bottom Line

As a kid I used to read books like Number The Stars and wonder how the Holocaust could have happened.

Today I realize it happens because there is an important component of bravery we don’t teach our kids...the risk. We don’t talk about being at peace with what we may lose when we say “no” to bosses, authority figures, influential friends or colleagues.

Bravery requires not waiting to act until you have something on the line. Bravery requires us to not wait until there is no one else to speak for you.

Reading books like Number The Stars to our kids gives us the opportunity to discuss what’s important to us and what our values are. It helps us lay the foundation for them to figure out their values for themselves.

With intentionality, those conversations can happen at any age. Literature is a fantastic way to prompt these hypothetical conversations, so you don’t have to talk about the peaceful protestors on the news that are being pepper sprayed. Beckett is too young for Number The Stars, but there are plenty of picture books on the theme of bravery that we do read.

He’s also my captive audience right now and I get that. So, if your kids don’t want to snuggle up with you anymore for a picture book, try reading their required school reading while they are and asking a question or two at the dinner table or in the carpool line. If your kids are really too cool, I don’t know, copy important quotes on sticky notes and put them on their bathroom mirrors or steering wheels. Maybe text them quotes you found powerful or significant. You’re uncool no matter what, just lean into it.

It’s our job to keep them safe and prepare them to be grown-ups, so while they’re young, the bad things can just be like those “ghost stories” Lowry mentioned. But one day it will be their jobs, and they have to know when their bottom line has been crossed.

“And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.”

― Lois Lowry, Number The Stars

Bringing Some Hermione Into The World

I might as well have been reading under the covers with a flashlight after my bedtime.

Last week, I found myself regressing into Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I’m not going to pretend like this was some parenting adventure. I read zero words of this saga to Beckett. And, please, when I do, it will be a calculated experience with such high expectations that there will be no way his reaction could possibly meet them.

No, I reread it for me. I returned to Hogwarts for another year, because that’s just what I needed to do. Harry, Hermione, Ron...bring it on home, friends.

With the election drawing near and our current reign of terror cultivating more harm and fear; with schools reopening and our babies befriending classmates through plexiglass...I retreated to Hogwarts.

My reading experience last week was so different from my first Harry Potter experience, the one at age eleven when I did actually read under the covers by flashlight after bedtime. My initial Harry Potter experience showed me comradery, love, and courage. It modeled honoring diversity and how to be a defender of good in the world.

I realized this time, through her preeminent series, J.K. Rowling laid a foundation for a world I had no idea would parallel our current reality. She primed a generation of hearts and minds for the day we would need to find our own roles in Dumbledore’s Army.

This realization made me wonder: What am I doing to fight the good fight as an adult? What kind of good am I wielding? What is my metaphorical wand?

Last week, Harry Potter reminded me that we read fiction, and read our children fiction, to prepare for a future we cannot predict. Philip Pullman said it best at a speech at the University of East Anglia: “I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference [...] We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding; we should act as if life were going to win.”

So I’m back now from Hogwarts, trying to figure out how I’m going to bring a little Hermione into the world.

#harrypotter #jkrowling #votelikehermione

Voldemort May Rise, But...

I thought I knew how November 8, 2016 would end because the storybooks had always told me so.

Harry Potter...Voldemort is defeated.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe...The witch does not prevail.

But we know the ending to November 8, 2016.

It was not enough to vote early and wear my “Hillary is my homegirl” t-shirt hidden under my teacher sweater...I should have known.

As my post-traumatic feelings rear their ugly heads, I remember something special about the early hours of election day 2016...A little girl named Grace.

I read my first graders Grace For President, Kelly diPucchio’s precious picture book, about a little girl that runs for class president in a competitive campaign against a classmate. She persists despite her challenging, but complacent opponent, and wins. We discussed the vocabulary...campaign, candidate, slogan...we analyzed the theme and beginning, middle and end.

In 2016, in what I thought were the moments leading up to a watershed election, this book was particularly exciting. My version of working the crowd of brilliant first graders… Dedication and a commitment to meaningful, love-filled change always win.

What I forgot about are the complex stories, the stories with multiple plotlines. I forgot about the stories in which we wonder how the protagonist will ever overcome. I forgot about the complex stories when the dark side is sometimes victorious.

Voldemort will rise and Aslan will fall.

This week when I read Grace for President to Beckett, though, I was reminded at the end that there is an illustration of her, as an adult, being sworn into office. I was reminded that her story didn’t end when she won her class election. I was reminded that real stories only end when we stop. We have to acknowledge that sometimes the bad guys are victorious AND trust that ultimately we will persist with our belief in what is good. Ultimately, we can fall and rise again. Ultimately, means nothing at all really. The only conclusion to the story, the only final word, is that we keep going, keep trying.

I’m afraid of what’s to come, but I know we’ll figure it out. Ultimately, Grace taught me to persist.

#graceforpresident

#kellydipucchio

#childrensliterature

Chasing The Monsters

 

All I keep thinking is that I’m not supposed to be a part of this.

Look, I love holding on to my little boy as long as possible. I love keeping him safe in our nest by the sea. This card-carrying codependent loves making sure his Chromebook is plugged in and handwriting is neat. (Just kidding, we don’t have cards, but if we did, mine would be laminated.)

This was supposed to be his moment. Kindergarten. Ed Vere’s Max the Brave reminded me of that this week as I was reading to Beckett. This charming picture book is about a kitten that is so brave he decides to go chase some mice. Yet, he has no idea what a mouse is. So, he goes out asking all sorts of creatures if they are mice. He is eventually tricked by a cunning mouse that a giant monster is actually a mouse and the mouse is actually a monster, sending him right into the belly of a monster. Max is spit out, and returns home to spend his days chasing “monsters” his own size.

Guess who does not swoop in to rescue her baby? HIS MOTHER.

Eric Carle said, “I believe the passage from home to school is the second biggest trauma of childhood; the first is, of course, being born. Indeed, in both cases we leave a place of warmth and protection for one that is unknown. The unknown often brings fear with it.”

The pandemic stole his transition from home to school from him and, quite frankly, I’m mad about it. Instead, I have to sit here and watch him get swallowed by the “mouse” over and over and it’s not fair. I have to tell him “no” when he gets called on by his teacher and doesn’t know the answer and looks to me for help. I have to bite my tongue when he doesn’t know the directions to his assignment because he was picking at the side of the chair. I have to be the asshole that lets my kid be uncomfortable despite everything my instinct is telling me to do. I can’t let covid-19 take away his opportunity for the self-regulating, independence-cultivating and self-discovery that happens when our kids do things when we’re not looking.

I can’t let Covid give me an excuse to continue rescuing him from the monsters — at least some of them. Otherwise, I just take away his pride from learning how to chase them on his own.

My Kids Are Super Weird

Sometimes my kids are super weird. And that makes me nervous, because before my logical thinking prevails I remember how the world treats “weird.”

I thought about that this week as I read Julián Is A Mermaid to Beckett. Jessica Love’s enchanting book is about a little boy that rides the subway with his abuela and sees women dressed as mermaids on their way to a festival.

The moment he sees them his imagination takes hold, and Julián transforms into a mermaid with flowing black, wavy locks, embraced by a current of sea creatures so enmeshed they are only identifiable by their faces and appendages. He is not just imagining being a mermaid, he is a mermaid.

They return home; and while his abuela showers, this little boy uses a lace curtain for a fin, a fern for flowing hair and a flower arrangement to create a colorful adornment of his new oceanic coif. He becomes a mermaid. His abuela finds him like this, and it happens, the “uh-oh, busted” moment. The moment where the fear and shame so often creep in.

That was the moment in the book that struck me. I know that moment, as I’m sure many parents do. That moment when we find our kids being super weird. That moment when we realize our magnificent kids are the ones that might get picked on on the playground. That moment that we worry on an intrinsic level if the world has a place for our spectacular little mermaid. Our fear for their differences manifests in a way that shows our kid something other than unconditional love for the brave work of becoming who they are.

His abuela was surprised, but she didn’t scold him for pulling down her curtain. Her response was to get her pearls to add to his costume. She helped him become a mermaid. And that is showing some unconditional love.

Perhaps that’s really my responsibility as a parent. I can’t control who my children become or how the world responds to them. Despite my deepest maternal inclination, I can’t guarantee life will be comfortable for them. I just have to have faith they will find their place in the world, and that I’ve given them the love they need now so that they can carry it forward. I think the best thing I can do today is give them my pearls for their mermaid costume.

Where's The Magic?

Where is the magic going to be?

I keep stewing over that question as I anticipate Beckett’s kindergarten year in front of the computer screen.

I’m grateful for the decisions that were made, but carpet read-alouds, science experiments, and math centers don’t happen over a screen or behind shields or six feet apart.

So where is the magic going to be?

I asked that same question four years ago as I took a trip to study some of the most magical children’s books from my childhood.

Prince Edward Island, where I discovered the island that inspired L.M. Montgomery‘s Anne of Green Gables, my childhood kindred spirit. New Hampshire, where I visited the H.A. and Margret Rey Curious George Museum; and the Morgan Hill Bookstore where I met the late Tomie dePaola. Boston, where I floated through the Public Garden like McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings and E.B. White’s Trumpet of the Swan. Concord, where I toured Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House of Little Women. Amherst, where I celebrated the art of illustration at the Carle Museum. Springfield, where I played with Yertle the Turtle with Beckett and studied Theodor Geisel at the Seuss Museum and Sculpture Garden. New York City, where I dined at the Plaza for an “Eloise” tea, searched for Stuart Little in Central Park, gorged on a Harry Potter-themed pasta dinner in Williamsburg and retraced my steps for Knuffle Bunny in Park Slope. Only to land back in Greensboro, where I somehow did not collapse in disappointment from my experience.

This trip reminded me of something that serves me so well today as I prepare for this next phase of Covid-life. The magic is everywhere. These authors exemplified adventure, mischief, courage, heartache and joy, and they did it from their own imperfect lives. These authors lived through wars, pandemics, loss, abandonment, rejection and they still brought us the magic. They gave it to us through a curious monkey, a hungry caterpillar, a six-year-old girl at the Plaza, a cat with a striped hat, a good witch in Italy and an orphaned boy who learns he’s a wizard. When the trip was over I didn’t collapse in disappointment, but I was reminded that there’s always room to bring the magic.