In Our Own Image

We all parent our children hoping they will become kind and conscientious. We want them to be motivated, hard-working, and goal-oriented. We want them to find things at which they can become successful, and we hope that they will be happy and well-rounded and interesting.

But we also, deep inside, want them to be a little bit like us.

We want them to be athletic if we ourselves are sporty. We want them to love coaxing small tender plants from the earth if we are gardeners. We hope they will be math whizzes if we are engineers or painters if we are artists.  We want them to be sensitive or pragmatic, creative or architectural, just as we are.

And, if we are lovers of words, we want them to fall in love with reading too.

It's no surprise, perhaps, that the first grade son of a literature professor is already a pretty competent reader. As his teacher told us at parent-teacher conferences today, he can read pretty much any words that you put in front of him.  (It's the decoding of implicit meaning that is more difficult.)

But far more heart-warming than his teacher's matter-of-fact statement of Son's abilities was the incident a few days ago on the bus.

I had a friend over, and we were drinking tea and waiting for the school bus to arrive.  The main street that leads to our subdivision is under pretty major repaving construction right now, so the bus is sometimes delayed by the one-lane traffic. 

About five minutes after the bus normally arrives, I heard Son unlocking the side door of the house with his key.  I opened the front door wider, only to see the bus sitting right in front of our driveway, facing the wrong way. It was weird, this positioning of the bus, and I couldn't quite figure it out, since the bus was only a few minutes later than normal. The driver waved to me, almost frantically, reassuringly, smiling all the while and pointing at Son who was letting himself in by the other door.  I nodded to her, and she drove off.

"Why are you using your key?" I asked him.

He looked at me, a little discombobulated. "I forgot to get off the bus," he said.

Since he was, in fact, off the bus and standing in our front hall, I was a little confused. "But why are you using your key?" I asked again--pointing out that the front door was open and I was home.

He looked at me a little shyly, and then smiled. "I was reading," he said simply. "I didn't see that the bus was at our stop, so I didn't get off. And the driver didn't see me. But then, when all the other kids were off the bus, she noticed me. So she brought me home."  And then, without any sense of the momentous nature of this event in my eyes, he sauntered away, dropping his backpack on the ground and seeking after a snack.

I stood stunned in the hallway.

My boy. MY boy. My boy. So deep in a book that he forgot to get off the school bus.

There are some things you cannot teach but can only hope one day to witness. For a mother who is also a lover of literature, one of those things is a child so immersed in reading that all the rest of the world fades away.

I have had my moment.

I can only hope it sticks.

I can only hope that, somehow, I have managed to raise a reader.

Just like me.