One of the hardest things to accept about motherhood is how it limits my reading time.

I have been fondly recalling the days when I would take the bus downtown (ah, freedom!) and spend the day in our wonderful library, wandering about and stumbling upon new books. Now when I go to the library I drive us in our car (where’s a space? oh there’s one, no, that’s a fire hydrant. Wait — a public lot. They want how much to park my car?), and I put the kids in the stroller (no, don’t touch that, stop shrieking, you can have a drink later, it’s okay, baby, Mama will push again in a minute). Not much chance to look at books, and lots of glares from the baby-haters and the patrons who came there to get away from their own kids. Definitely not the same refuge it once was.

So I was trying to read a blog today on the computer — okay, blogs aren’t Leaves of Grass, but Teacher Lady cracks me up — and my toddler kept trying to crawl into my lap, holding a book, saying “Read it to me! Read it to me!” After a few attempts to put her off, and then a discussion of the importance of “Mama, please will you…” I read her the book. And another book and another book.

My selfish side gets all sulky and resentful about this. My morning reading time has become her morning reading time. But the finer side of me is absolutely exultant. I’m not just a reader anymore; I made another reader! There aren’t enough of us in the world, but I made one more! It’s not just the joy of motherhood, which is real despite my grousing, but also the cameraderie of spiritual kinship. Mother and daughter joining in the cosmic book group.

I realize this may not last. She is her own little person and may abandon books the first time she meets a soccer ball. But today I think I’ll bite back the urge to roar, “Leave me alone! I want to read!, and settle that squirmy body in my lap and open the page. “Far, far up in the north, in an Inuit village, lived a boy named Atuk…”

This week I re-read an old favorite, The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. I have loved her work for years, and was in a fairytale kind of mood, so I picked up a copy at a local secondhand paperback store (apologies to the author). I have owned something like six copies of this particular book, but I keep giving them away (as I probably will this copy, too, eventually). I like to think of it as seeding the world with good books.

McKinley has a rare talent for writing fantasy with strong women characters without sounding like she has an axe to grind (not that I mind politics, but disguising it as fiction tends to ruin the fiction). I noticed on this re-reading that a particular skill of hers is the conveying (conveyal? conveyance?) of silence. Her hero, Aerin, challenges a newly-awakened dragon. Without ever saying something as trite as “It was very quiet,” McKinley leaves the impression of days of uninterrupted, and somewhat desperate, stillness and solitude. McKinley’s books often reveal a deep appreciation of the soul-sustaining power of friendship, but in the end, the hero has to face the dragon alone.

And isn’t that real life? I have been languishing for ten years in a doctoral program. I have family and friends who are supportive; I couldn’t have managed this much without them. But somehow I keep waiting for some circumstance to change, or some hero, figurative or literal, to come along and make the process easier. Maybe someone could… maybe if I… if only, if only…

But the truth is that after all the help is given, and all the bonds are built and sustained, no one can face the monster for me. I’ve never read a story where the army faced the dragon. In every fairytale, the solitary hero brings down the monster. So here’s to dragonslaying.

Pardon the burns, please. I’m a little out of practice.

Three years ago we got rid of our television. Frequently new acquaintances express shock and disbelief when we tell them. My favorite was a phone call I received from the local PBS station during a fundraising.

Perky Fundraiser: It’s our spring fund drive and I would like to
ask you a few questions. Which of our programs
do you like the most?
Me: I don’t have a television.
Clearly Skeptical Fundraiser: Uh-huh. Well, when you did have a
television, which of our programs was your favorite?
Me: Um, I’m not going to donate money to a TV station
when I don’t own a television.

When she still pushed for money, I hung up.

But mostly when we tell people we don’t have a television, they begin to justify themselves. “Oh, we never watch television either.” “We need ours to get a break from the kids.” “We just use ours for background noise.” Keep in mind, we never criticize anyone else for having a tv. Everyone just assumes that we refuse to have a tv because we are condescending, intellectual snobs, living above such plebian pleasures.

But the real reason we don’t have one is because I am an absolutely undiscriminating viewer. I watch whatever crap is on. And I watch it for hours. And I don’t even enjoy it. In fact, I don’t even remember it. I could watch six hours of McHale’s Navy reruns, and at the end of the day, be unable to tell you what show I watched.

I heard an author interviewed once who also had no television. He said he once spent a few days in the hospital room where the tv was broken. To pass the time he made a list of books he had always wanted to read, but never got around to. He said when the list got to #1000, he decided to get rid of the television. And he’s never looked back.

Not having a television means so much more time to read. And if we really want to see something, we can watch DVDs on the computer. We just have to be deliberate about it. So we will continue to live the tv-less life for the indefinite future.

At least until we have a house full of sick children who all want to watch cartoons between bouts of vommiting. I think I might reconsider then.

My toddler is already turning out to be a booklover (fingers crossed). She knows the titles of all her books and “read it again!” is a frequently heard demand. In her rare cuddly moments, she has a special fondness for Beatrix Potter’s children books.

I had never read Beatrix Potter before I had children. I vaguely remember my own parents reading me an abbreviated version of Peter Rabbit when I was little, but nothing else. I bought my girl four or five of the books simply because I knew they were “classics.” Somehow I had always (unfairly) associated Beatrix Potter’s sweetly Victorian dressed animals with the saccharine sentimentality of Precious Moments. Yeah, it’s nauseating to most adults, but kids like it. This is apparently a common misperception, because I just read a writer who described Potter’s work as “excessively cutesy.”

But have you actually read these things? Potter dresses up animals in pretty dresses and sets her stories in British gardens and woodlands. Sweet and picturesque. But there’s a dark side to Beatrix.

Malevolent forces seek the destruction of the main character. Peter Rabbit? His father got killed by the gardener, Mr. MacGregor. MacGregor’s wife put him into a pie and ate him. Mr. MacGregor tries to step on Peter to crush him to death. The fishing frog, Jeremy Fisher, narrowly escapes being digested by a fish. Benjamin Bunny flees the death-dealing claws of the cat. And — my favorite — Benjamin Bunny’s grandfather invites the badger, Tommy Brock, into his home, who waits for him to fall asleep, then kidnaps the children, pops them in a sack and takes them home to eat. They are rescued in the nick of time when he fights with another predator.

In Beatrix Potter’s books, danger lurks around every corner. Malign entities wait to devour. So I’ve bought my toddler classic, cutesy children’s books that say, in effect: Look out! The world is trying to eat you! And she seems completely cool with it. She’s terrified of the vacuum cleaner, but baby-eating badgers? No problem.

I, on the other hand, haven’t been sleeping so well.

We have lived in our “new” 100-yr-old house for two years now. When we moved in I had visions of a lovingly restored, tastefully decorated home in period style. I have surrendered to the reality. Our decorating style has been and will always be books. Every wall that will hold one has a bookshelf. Thank God and the deceased builders for those stout 100-yr-old floors. The shelves are double-stacked with books. There are books on the floor, books in the bathroom, books in the kitchen. This will never be a Southern Living home. Even if we had an infinitely increasing income, what house could we find or build that we could not stuff full of books?

The part of me that wants to impress people (shameful, niggling, coward-voice) would like to present a home that is orderly, organized and pretty, like so many of my friends have. But it will never happen. Loving books is like having children. Your skin gets stretched out, your feet spread, and nothing snaps back the way you hoped, but there is this new life to share, and it’s all worth it. You’ll probably even do it more than once. The life of the mind wreaks its own havoc. Ideas and narratives and information multiply and fill my house to bursting, bending the straight shelves and cluttering the counters. Disorderliness is the price of fecundity.

So here I am in my fertile, messy, joyful house of books. Floor to rafter, ever after.