#ReadingWithJolene

#ReadingWithJolene is a new series that celebrates my love of words. I'll share books I've recently read aloud to my baby daughter Jolene, why I wanted her to hear them, and how I hope to become a better mother and person in the process.

There’s not much you can do with a newborn. In the early weeks of my maternity leave, I found myself bored for much of the day - completely exhausted, but bored. Jolene slept extremely well, an incredible gift for which I will always be grateful, but that meant I only had a few moments with her each day while she was actually awake - and those were usually consumed with feeding.

Now and then I would pull out a couple books off the shelf and read to her while she dozed in my arms. I adore the Nancy Tillman collection, as well as the classic Eric Carle board books, but Jolene was never really alert - I was reading because I needed something to do with her, because I love words, and because it felt like the kind of thing a good mother should do.

As she’s started spending more time awake, I’ve been taking a greater interest in the books we read. I like books with interesting words, expressive characters, and an engaging narrative or plot. I also love books that challenge, that humble you to be a kinder, more compassionate, more thoughtful person. 

Yesterday I sat down on her oversized fluffy lamb, propped her up to lean against me (she’s still too small to hold her own head up), and read Rocket Writes a Story, a lovely, sweet book about a dog who writes his first story, with the encouragement of his teacher, a tiny yellow bird, and ultimately befriends an owl who flies all the way down to the ground to hear the story. I loved the emphasis on writing, on words, and on challenging yourself to try something new, and while I know that Jolene will end up being whoever she wants to be, I can’t help but hope she’ll share both her parents’ love of writing.

Today, when it was time to read, I was downstairs, and scanned the children’s books that have already started to spread like ivy over our bookshelves. I wasn’t in the mood for a hungry caterpillar or a busy spider, or a mischievous cat or a well-loved child. I wanted to read something for adults. I almost didn’t care what it was - Jolene wouldn’t know the difference - as long as it was short, well-written, and would hold meaning for me as the reader, the mother.

I pulled out the transcript of George Saunders’ commencement speech at Syracuse University, which has been packaged up in a beautiful little book and shortened into a lovely animation. The message is so simple: Be kind. And yet it’s one of the hardest challenges to live by, no matter how much you surround yourself with it. Some of you know that my email signature includes one of my favorite quotations, often attributed to Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” And some of you also know that before my grandfather died, he listed out 101 life lessons to me, which I used in my eulogy at his funeral service. His number 1 life lesson? “Be kind to other people.” It’s so, so simple. And so, so easy to forget.

I figured now was as good a time as any to introduce Jolene to the message, so I cradled her in my left arm and with my right arm held the small book, the whole time gently rocking back and forth, lulling her to sleep. By the end of the book I was in tears. As a human, I want to be kinder. And as a mother, I want so badly for my daughter to be kind, and also for others to be kind to her. I want kindness to be so important to her that it would be the first on her list of 101 life lessons.

And then it dawned on me that, in addition to the friendly animals and the adventurous insects and the mischievous pets, I could read to Jolene from a book with no pictures, no rhymes, and no parents hugging at the end. I could read to her anything I wanted. What a freedom - and responsibility.

I was so excited by this realization that I immediately grabbed Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise: New and Selected Poems off the shelf, and read 3 of my favorite poems from that collection, each marked with a dog-eared page: “Otherwise,” “Let Evening Come,” and “Notes from the Other Side.” They are each so beautiful that I read them all twice, and explained briefly to Jolene (who was drifting in and out of sleep) what I thought we might learn from each one: gratitude, trust, hope. 

I was hooked on this new approach to reading with Jolene. I could continue immersing myself in words I love, sharing them with my daughter and challenging myself to find new meaning, new perspective. I wanted to read important truths and beautiful language out loud, in the hopes that she might absorb some of it and I might remember to live the way I want to live as her mother, as one of her first and most influential role models. We could hear the words together, and I could practice putting them into action. 

But this seemed like enough for one day - my tiny two-month-old still doesn’t have a sense of her own existence, let alone how to make sense of that existence and how to use it to make the world a better, kinder place. So I laid her down in her crib, shut the door, and went back downstairs to gaze at the bookshelf, smiling at the thought of what we might read next.