My Kids Don’t Love My Childhood Favorites. And That’s (Sort of)
Okay with Me.

It took a storm and a blackout to find out that my boys just aren’t going to be the same kind of reader I always was. The day Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard, I knew we were in for at least a few days without power, so we did as many electricity-dependent things as we could. I cooked and baked cookies, my sons (Daniel, now 12, and James, now 10) binged on video games with my blessing. We watched a movie while the winds howled and four trees cracked off at their trunks with a terrifying noise, one crashing so close to the back door that the glass was peppered with flying acorns. Then the movie stopped and the lights blinked out. We ate by candlelight and, at bedtime, I suggested we climb into my bed to read with our single, shared flashlight.

Scanning the shelves, I found one of my childhood favorites: E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan. I loved this book as a kid, I told my boys that night in the dark, and proceeded to wax nostalgic about the mute trumpeter swan and his heroic father, who crashed through a music store window to steal a trumpet so his son could be normal, make friends, find love.

Mom loved it? Kiss. Of. Death. Neither boy cared to crack it open. Then I suggested — given our one-flashlight circumstances — that I read aloud. They acquiesced. We read several chapters that night and, over what would be eight days without power, we finished it (verdict: Cool! James even decided he’d name a future son Louis, after the swan), and started on another E.B. White classic and mom-favorite: Stuart Little.

We didn’t finish Stuart. And every single mom-loved-this! suggestion since the aberrant week of the storm has been rejected, from Misty of Chincoteague and Black Beauty, to Pippi Longstocking and Blubber. I try not to let it break my heart when they shake their heads disdainfully as I eagerly pull A Wrinkle in Time or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from the library shelves. My exhortations feel lame even to me: Tesseracts! A closet that leads to another world!

Which gives me my answer: This conundrum of my kids not loving what I buried my own nose in as a child? It isn’t their problem — it’s mine. Trying to breathe some oxygen onto the tiny ember of reading enjoyment my reluctant reader, Daniel, fleetingly displays has the opposite, dampening effect. And with James, the kid who’s most like me? I end up conveying the unintended message that the books he does love (he tore through the Goosebumps series last summer) are somehow not as good as what Mommy recommends. He doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, even as — let’s face it — I’m kinda hurting his.

So be it. I got them to read some E.B. White with me and I did manage to slip Henry Huggins and Ribsy and Ramona onto their shelves before they got all tweeny on me. So they’ll never wish they were friends with Laura Ingalls, fine. They won’t want to match the pluck and moxie of a strawberry-blond Nancy Drew, whatever. I’m going to play it cool, and when James comes home enthusiastic about the teacher-recommended James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I’ll bite my tongue and refrain from reminding him that I suggested those very Roald Dahl books to him myself. The teacher can have the credit, if the upshot is my kid gets the books.

It’s all good. Though I might still give the Hardy Boys a try.