Changing boys to girls in literature for kids

I read in pursuit of many different kinds of experiences but one of them is the "I'm not the only person who does _________ (fill in freaky thing I thought I was alone in doing)" revelation. The freaky thing is, let's be honest, never really THAT freaky, but still, it feels great to know you're not alone in whatever it is -- offering sex so your husband will clean the bathroom, re-gifting baby clothes, never washing pacifiers or - in today's case -- editing children's literature as you read. I love this piece, reprinted in Slate: Bilbo Baggins Is A Girl, in which the author describes switching pronouns when reading great children's literature to her daughter, so that male protagonists, like Biblo, turn into females. She shares a bunch of statistics about how under-represented female characters are in kiddie lit and family movies -- and the female characters that do exist are often unexciting or exciting in a way that seems like a freakish exception to the rule ("She's a PRINCESS KNIGHT!! Would you get a load of THAT? Holy mackerel, that's mind-blowingly cool . . . and also totally weird.")

The first thing I thought when I read the title of the piece was, "Maybe if Bilbo Baggins was a girl, I would've liked The Hobbit better."  Because I read it a few years ago, for the first time, with Primo, and I'm embarrassed to confess I did not love it. I found myself skipping pages at a time without telling Primo just because I was zoning out and kind of couldn't wait to get to some good stuff. Now, I very much doubt that my boredom with the text was a product of there not being a single female character in the entire work -- I think it had more to do with the long, to my mind over-written descriptive passages about the countryside -- but I don't think it would've hurt my interest any if Bilbo, or any of the dwarves, or hell, even Smaug, was a girl. Sometimes, David'll drag me to an action film or some other cinematic experience almost totally devoid of female characters (or at least interesting ones) and I'll find myself saying, "It's just so boring. There's no women in it." Maybe I'm just a simpleton . . .  or maybe I'm tired of feeling like I can't connect with a male-centric representation of the world.

In either event, I love the solution proposed in this piece. While I have never changed a pronoun in the way she has, I often slip in some positive attributes to beef up the female characters; whenever there's a "beautiful princess" I even things out with some other adjectives until she's a "smart, strong, kind and beautiful princess." I'm also a fan of sending princesses to get advanced degrees, often an MBA or PhD. Got this idea from my cousin, who first sent Snow White to medical school.

Happy reading!

Love You Forever

There are two children’s books that make me cry every time. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein and Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. It never fails: I get halfway through and I’m sobbing – not just a few silent tears, but a voice-quavering, choking sob that’s embarrassing in public. Which I was when I read Love You Forever to Sec at preschool drop-off yesterday.

In case you’ve never read the book, it starts with a new mom putting her baby to sleep -- she rocks him in her arms and sings:

“I love you forever

I like you for always

As long as you’re living

My baby, you’ll be.”

It’s not Langston Hughes or anything. In fact, it’s pretty corny the first time you read it. But on the next page when the mom sings the same song to her baby, who’s now a rascal of a toddler, it gets a little less corny. And when she sings it to her bubble-gum-chomping school-age kid on the next page, its not at all corny, and reaching the point of being sweet and touching.

When she sings the song to her teenager – that’s when I start to tear up. But it’s only when the son becomes a man, and moves to his own house across town, and she takes a bus in her nightgown in the middle of the night to sneak into his room and sing him the song, that I start sobbing.

This could be me. I could see this happening.

The thought of my baby boy – who, as tall as my shoulders now, isn’t such a baby – moving to his own house, well that just annihilates me. As I read this page, I am assailed by guilt at having felt annoyed when he wakes too early in the morning or bugs me for ten different kinds of snacks, or makes me watch him play video games. I have him now, nearly all the time. When he’s not in school, he is almost always a few steps away, telling me his amazing observations and corny jokes and listening to me talk about shit that I like which most other kids would be bored to tears by. One day, I’ll be just his mother, not his go-to person for just about everything. But though he’ll feel differently about me when he’s grown, I’m willing to bet I’ll feel the same way I do now, the same way I did when he was born and stretched his spindly fingers towards my chin in his first gesture of life of earth – that love and adoration for the little tiny human I ushered into the world. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I do scale his apartment building and creep into his bedroom and sing him the same lullaby I did when he kept me up all night as an infant.

I thought, for sure, the fact that I was reading the picture book in Sec’s classroom would curtail my customary waterworks, but no, they came anyway, and I felt like a maniac, wiping away tears in the book corner, while the other kids played with Flubber and Sec asked me why I was sad.

“I’m not sad, honey,” I replied, “I’m crying for joy.”

Which wasn’t precisely true, but a decent approximation of me anticipating my empty nest syndrome 20 years down the line.

I'd rather bang my head against a wall then listen to another Easy Reader

Hotdamn, its hard to learn to read. It is so freaking hard, in fact, that I don't know how anybody manages to do it. Seriously, as I write this, I am in awe of the fact that I know how to spell the word “spell” and that you know how to read it, and understand what meaning I intended when I typed it.

What I’m saying is that if you are reading these words now, you are a genius! And yes, I am one too. Not only are we genius, we are industrious, patient and full of faith. Because it takes all those qualities to learn how to read. This is what I’ve learned from my five year-old.

Much to my surprise, Primo has been totally uninterested in learning how to read. I thought he’d be the kind of kid that taught himself by the age of 3 by studying the cereal box, but I see now that was insane. I see that reading is hard, even for semi-brilliant children. And the English language has begun to annoy me too, because so much of it is not only non-phonetic but just stupid.

Like the way “k” is weirdly silent sometimes, as in “know” and “knock.”

And the inscrutable pronunciation of “ough” as in “through” and “furlough” (hey, screw you if you’re thinking what easy-reader has the word “furlough” in it – YOU think of another “ough” word.).

Even the way you say “one” is aggravating. Who would guess that’s how you say it?

An vowels. Good God, how are we ever supposed to figure out which exact sound the “i”s or the “e”s make. It’s EXHUASTING having to explain it: I can’t even imagine how exhausting it is having to learn and remember it.

Nonetheless, I have been forcing Primo to read a few pages of an easy-reader book almost every night, continually reminding him that the more he does it, the easier it will be. I don’t blame him for hating it. I hate it too. It’s fucking boring to listen to “Mittens flaps his tail./ Mittens hits the ball./ Mittens hears a noise./ What’s that Mittens?” especially when the reading of those mind-bendingly boring words takes ten minutes. I try to keep things suspenseful by commenting on the action of the book but it’s near-impossible.

“Oh, Primo! What do you think it is that Mittens hears?”

My son gives me a look that says, “I’m not an idiot. I just can’t read yet.”

“It’s a dog, Mommy.”

“Well, maybe but let’s turn the page and find out!”

I am tempted to just crack open The Iliad and have him learn to read with that. I mean, can I really ask my literature-lover to slum it with this awful I-can-read shit?

My kid can read

This won’t seem so exciting to you. I am aware of that.

But for me, this milestone is momentous.

Colossal.

Witnessing him learning to read is exactly like witnessing him learning to speak. I talked a blue streak to him for months and months and it was clear that he understood, sure, but still the day that he uttered “boo” when he wanted me to read him his bedtime story, well that changed everything.

Yes, “book” was his first word.

David and I are book people. It is the one passion we have deeply, truly in common. Reading stories are a kind of religion to us, and if you think I’m overstating the case, let me share with you the fact that I often worry what would happen if one of my kids turns out not to love books. It is an INANE thing to worry about. Of all the things to waste your concern over, it is surely one of the most idiotic, I know. But if it turns out they won’t crack a book for pleasure, it would be like them refusing to come to church with us on Sundays. It’d be their prerogative but it'd be a blow.

So, to see Primo crack the code of words – breaking down the strings of letters to produce meaning – makes me wildly happy.

I’m not saying he’s very keen on it, though. I sort of figured that he would be the kind of kid that taught himself to read at the age of 3 and would keep himself awake til the wee hours reading the dictionary by Kindergarten, and that is definitely not the case. I don’t blame him really. It’s a pain to learn to read. Its hard to sound shit out. It takes patience and there’s precious little pay-off at first. When you’re used to hearing Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll read aloud every night, its kind of anti-climactic to read “The cat sat on the mat.”


I’ve had to remind myself to back the hell off of the kid and let him take his time with this. I figure the most important thing is to keep him loving literature, to keep him hooked on stories, so that he has ample incentive to trudge through the perplexing phonetics system to learn to do it himself.

The kid is reading. So it won’t be long before we get to discuss the finer points of The Sound and the Fury. Just a matter of time.

Not that kind of ass

We've been reading Aesop's Fables at bedtime and Primo is really digging them. He loves the fact that each story can be summed up in a pithy moral which he can then recite in an instructive tone to his sister: "Once bitten, twice shy," "Look before you leap." But some of the language is slightly outdated. Last night I overheard David read "The Fox, the Ass and the Lion."

"What's an ass"? asked Primo.

"A donkey," replied David.

"Oh," he said, "I thought it was a pain in the ass."

David explained there are asses and then there are pains in the asses but usually they're not the same.

But the kid can't get it out of his head. As David tucked him in, I heard Primo say:

"That fable about the crow and the water was good. But I didn't like the one about the pain in the ass."

This is how you know you need to tone down your language around the house.

Tear shit up

Something unfortunate has occurred.

My daughter has stopped napping.

It’s the sort of thing that you know is coming, especially when you have an older child, but you just can’t quite believe that it’s time for it already. I mean, Seconda’s not even two and a half yet and I thought we had a good year at least of peaceful early afternoons before us. My son was at least 3 before he gave up his nap, and with him, it was a gradual process; he’d skip his nap for a couple of days, but I’d persist with our naptime ritual and he’d eventually cave in to sleep since there was nothing better to do, in the dark, in his crib.

Well Seconda has found plenty of better things to do in the dark. Not in her crib of course. That wildcat leaps out of her crib before I’ve even closed the bedroom door behind me. Most of the better things she’s found to do are highly destructive.

What I mean is, she likes to tear shit up. Literally. And the easiest thing to tear is, of course, books, Which in our house is tantamount to hurling the family’s crystal against the wall. I mean, I am willing to accept that my children do a lot of bad shit but tear up books?

“What did this book ever do to you?” I ask her, “All it wanted was to make you HAPPY and you’ve destroyed it!”

There was one time that Primo tore up his very beloved, very fancy, very expensive pop-up Wizard of Oz book. I don’t know if it was a masochistic thing or what, but it occurred during the tail end of the losing-the-nap period when he was stuck in his room for two hours with nothing to do. When I opened the door to release him from nap captivity, I saw all these beautiful bits of glimmering Emerald City and yellow bricks and pieces of poppy field scattered everywhere and I’m not going to lie to you, it hurt. I gave him such a stern talking-to then that he kind of has post-traumatic stress disorder about the whole episode. In fact, a year later, we were just sitting in the kitchen one morning talking and he told me that he had a horrible dream the night before.

“I dreamt that I tore up the Wizard of Oz pop-up book,” he said.

“That wasn’t a dream,” I informed him, “That happened.”

“No, no, that’s not right,” came his reply.

My stern reprimand scarred him enough that he hasn’t so much as dog-eared a page since.

Seconda, on the other hand. could care less about my little lectures or my time-outs or my yelling or my forcing her to read only board books until she proves that she deserves paperback again. During my stern talking-tos, she regards me with this bored kind of expression that is so awfully adolescent, I fear for the future.

“Whatever, lady, keep flapping your lips,” her eyes seem to say, “As soon as you turn your back, I’m ripping Puff’s face right of his magic body while Jackie Paper watches, then I’ll shred that sucker too.”

Mothers on the edge

Since there's no reason to stop celebrating Mother's Day just because its over, I went to the 3rd Annual Edgy Moms Reading on Thursday. Brooklyn isn't just the bloggiest place around, its also got the most kick-ass writers who just happen to be moms, per capita. Had a few glasses of white and thoroughly enjoyed the reading, especially Michele Madigan-Somerville's M.I.L.F poem, which used SAT words that I haven't heard since I quizzed myself with flash cards on the Staten Island Ferry, but sprinkled them with enough sizzle to make a highschooler blush. Amy Sohn's piece, an excerpt from her forthcoming book Prospect Park West, was another hilarious highlight. Nothing says funny like celebs shopping at the Coop. All in all, a fun, uplifting night with plenty of fellow feeling.

Little Literati

Let me first say that this is not a picture of my son. I would never let my child read in a window, especially one without bars on it. It is a hazardous location for a reading nook and I neither condone nor recommend it. Now that we’ve established that, please enjoy the feeling of tranquility this picture inspires. Children. Books. Cooooooozy.

One of the great perks of your child growing older is that he and you, too, graduate to more sophisticated children’s literature. This is a huge deal for me because -- I’ll admit it -- since having my son, I have pretty much stopped reading adult books. Please don’t judge. Don’t act like the cashier at City Lights Bookstore in San Fran, when I was purchasing the three novels my husband had picked out for himself, along with the three children’s books I had picked out, who said: “Oh, I’m so glad to see you buying books for yourself. So many parents come in and just buy books for the kids and it’s so . . . sad.”

That’s the worst. The pity from non-parents (I can only assume this 20-something with a faux hawk was a non-parent). The pity for my brain-dead, no-life-outside-my-kids, last-contemporary-work-of-fiction-I-read-was-the-Corrections, miserable existence. Except I was spared the pity because he thought I was my husband, who does read, voraciously so, both legs of his commute and for a full hour during his lunch break.

I have a statement of defense prepared, if you’re interested.

I was the bookiest, literature-loving-est devotee of the written word you can imagine, the kind of kid who walked down the street with my nose in a book, bumping into things. I used to literally breathe in the scent of old encyclopedias at Sterling Memorial Library in my college years. Even when I was preggo, I read constantly, finishing up my masters in English Lit.

Then the baby touched down and I was obliterated by an exhaustion which frankly, has not let up yet. It sounds like a paltry excuse, I know, but if you are still waking with your kids 3, 4 times a night, and then starting your day of manual labor at 5:30am, I think you’ll buy it. The past few weeks, I’ve been falling asleep while telling the kids their bedtime stories at 7:30pm.

“MOMMY!” Primo yells, “You are saying nonsense! WAKE UP!”

So I may not read books intended for an adult audience but I do read to the kids all the time. We load up on new material at the library at least once a week. Seconda’s only two so her attention span is still limited but Primo’s shaping up to be a bookworm himself which makes his mama proud.

A few months ago, we tentatively made a foray into chapter books and let me tell you, there is no looking back. It is sublime. Don’t get me wrong, I brake for Mo Willems, I swoon for Sendak, I am totally tickled by Kevin Henkes and his deliciously precocious rodent characters. But Primo and I am now entering the hallowed halls of serious literature here. Our starter book was Pippi Longstocking, a hit because of the broad comedy and short chapters. Once he’d been baited with Pippi, I slipped in a little E.B.White. When was the last time you read Charlotte’s Web? That shit is INTENSE. During the last chapter I broke down and cried, though Primo didn’t get what the big deal was. Now we’re onto Stuart Little, a lyrical little gem that’s much funnier than you’d expect.

But the crowd pleaser, no question, is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Witnessing my son get swept away by the irresistible force of Dahl’s fantasy – Primo’s drive to rehash what we’ve just read, to tell the story to his friends, the thrill of speculating what might unfold in the next chapter, and the sweet, sweet sadness of knowing the end is soon to come – it’s kind of breathtaking. And how cool is it that I get to feel this awakening all over again myself, this sweet love affair with other peoples’ imaginations?

Ahhh . . . .motherhood. What bliss! What divinity!

(This message has been brought to you by the League of Little Literati and Foundation for the Furtherance of Dahl Dotage and Devotion.)

OK, your turn. Picks for best first chapter books? Tried and true favorites as well as more recent work, all welcome.