Reading With Kids: The Early Years
If you’re a literary mama, you’ve likely been reading to your child since birth. But as our children grow, those reading relationships change. The Literary Mama blog team will be periodically presenting some short essays about what those stages of reading look like with some help from guest mama writer, Cassie Mannes Murray. Her first piece is below. Enjoy!
I close their blinds, I pull the always too tight neck of a t-shirt over their blond heads, matching pants, try not to hesitate over the pinch in my chest that they have no footies. I would worry about them overheating anyway. I bring the big one his toothpaste spit cup and the little one his Hot Wheels dragon transporter that cost a few bucks at the big thrift store in town and has lived between the tub and the crack on his side of the bed since we bought it. I make a V with my legs and lean against the bed frame and then, in a pile of our own making, we gather the books for the night. In the summer, it’s not even dusky yet—the sun can still hear my four-year-old’s voice, “do we have a lot of day behind us?”
I wish I could say I cherished each step, but I’m in a rush. The air in our house is too hot. I think about what I’ll eat after they’re in bed—that ice cream cake their dad bought on a whim in the garage freezer—and I question whether I washed their hair. The older one already wants to do it himself. In my head I say to myself “this is his hair salon” while I massage the all-in-one soap into the two year old’s hair on Wednesday, Friday, Sunday. I want to wash their feet for the rest of my life. Can I say that? I use the dollar store Spidey magic towel, it’s crispy with dried magic.
This might not seem like it’s about stories, or families, but it’s about the story I tell myself of what matters. Not the story I want to capture in the frame forever: my two boys between my legs and the baby girl in the next room sleeping on her belly, full of banana mush. But the story that I have to get back to work when I walk down the stairs. Open my laptop and turn on Real Housewives. Not the one where I’ve perfected the voice of the ghost in The Baddies, but am still working on my Norman in Grumpy Monkey. He’s a deep bass. Not that I can slow down. Poor Ghost, can’t you sleep?
This moment, storytime, is the only one in my day when I can take the long way. If I allow it, the minutes before we count down on our hands to turn the bedroom light off and jump all together in their bottom bunk feels like dangling one finger over the edge of a canoe and skimming the water. If I slow my breath down, can get rid of this cough, make stories of the things they point out: the spiky dinosaur tail in the mud of Nubby, Red Truck hot dog nose mechanic, The Bear Ate Your Sandwich has delicious grilled cheese and a meatball sub, they must be licked, AH! A cyclops rock in Your Forest, the two year old calculating which boots are Miss Lila Greer’s in the trellis bridge of Iggy Peck, Architect. “I like the orange socks, which do you like, Mama?”
It’s my back road. Who has the time? Those little hands. They’ll be so big after just one more story.