The Reader My Dad Wanted Me To Be

I am a reader. I always have been. I remember in the fourth grade I got Where the Red Fern Grows from one of those Scholastic Book Clubs. One night around 2:00 am my dad woke up and found me still reading (and sobbing). Of course I was scolded because I had school the next morning, but that wasn't the last time Dad found me reading instead of sleeping.

Old Yeller and The Call of the Wild soon became The Babysitter's Club and Sweet Valley High when I got a little older. My dad used to take me to the store on Saturday to buy two books. He'd tell me that they were going to have to last me awhile. By the time Sunday night rolled around, both were already tucked onto my bookshelf, finished. The next Saturday morning I'd be begging to go buy more.

Both of my sisters are readers too. Linda loves a good mystery though she can usually solve them within the first hundred pages. Kathy used to like romance novels a lot. If nothing else was available, Dad would find me reading one of her books. It annoyed him like few things could. When I scored high on the reading section of the ACTs, it gave Kathy great pleasure to tell Dad that he should be thanking her for having me on the Harlequin Reading Program. Dad's standard response was, "Think about how smart you'd be if you read something worth reading." I swear I heard that line growing up almost as much as, "If you're going to hoot with the owls, how do you expect to fly with the eagles?"

While I still love a Nicholas Sparks or Jodi Picoult novel (the adult equivalent to The Babysitter's Club or Sweet Valley High and pretty darn close to Harlequin), my reading habits have changed slightly since I've had children. Most of the books I choose have something to do with raising children. Kathy suggested I read The Optimistic Child, which I loved. Nurture Shock was another recent favorite. Right now Brain Rules for Baby is on my nightstand. It's fascinating.

The chapter I'm reading right now is about how parents' relationships with each other affect the baby's development profoundly. The author proclaims that there are four big reasons why parents of infants fight: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression.

The section about unequal workloads has a couple of paragraphs that fascinated me, but not because I don't think John pulls his weight around here. He does. We decided when I became a stay-at-home mom that I would be the one to get up with the kids during the night because I didn't have to function at work the next day. That was/is the right choice for us. However, this passage caught my attention:

"A typical stay-at-home mom works 94.4 hours per week. If she were paid for her efforts, she would earn about $117,000 per year. (This is a calculation of hourly compensation and time spent per task for the 10 job titles moms typically perform in American households, including housekeeper, van driver, day-care provider, staff psychologist, and chief executive officer.)"

The author goes on to compare that to the amount of time the man works, but for us that's really irrelevant. I truly believe that John is a very hard worker both at Nissan and at home. I found this passage fascinating because I'd never thought about what I do in that regard before. I'd never given my job a salary even though I'm the hardest working, unemployed person I know.

Another passage that struck me was in the sleep deprivation section. "If you don't have a lot of energy, and you are called upon to give to your youngest several times a minute (preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, a behavioral psychologist has noted), you quickly exhaust your reservoir of good will toward your spouse. Sleep loss alone can predict most of the increases in hostile interactions between new parents."

According to the author, merely being aware of these stress factors is a step in the right direction. "Couples who know about the Four Grapes of Wrath and who begin preparing in advance are much less likely to trample on them once the baby comes home. When conflicts occur for these couples, the effects are usually much milder."

I find myself on page 81 of Brain Rules for Baby, feeling like this is relevant to my life. I know my dad would have loved to watch me devour a book about early American history or about the life of Theodore Roosevelt, but that relevance piece was missing. I'm certain my interest in books about family life and child development is much closer to what Dad wanted me to read. Just think about how smart I'd be (and my kids) if that was what I had chosen to read back then.