When Mom Is the Reading Parent

 Just as countries or civilizations have literary canons—or used to and ought to—nuclear families can have canons, too, books that the members have in common. When my children were younger, I had full confidence that I could usher them into my tradition, unaltered. They would enjoy the books I had enjoyed at their age. For a time, I was right. I would sit a toddler on my lap, take out a childhood favorite of mine, like Goodnight, Moon, and begin to read. It's what my parents had done for me, and now I was the parent.

Occasionally, things would not go as planned, and a child would turn against a particular title; maybe they had a rare allergy to a particular story, or perhaps my delivery was subpar. But in general, if I loved a book, my enthusiasm was catching, and they were charmed by Make Way for Ducklings and The Little Engine that Could, just as I once was (and still am).

But then the expected happened: my children outgrew picture books and wanted meatier fare. They wanted intricate plots, and characters with interior lives. And it turned out that I was of little help. Just like when they skinned a knee, Mom was what they needed. Dad became a hapless bystander, a khaki-clad nobody.

I would search my memory for what I was reading at the age of six or seven, and I would come up nearly empty. I spent the years between toddler and tween (to use a word nobody used then) watching TV, trying to befriend boys whose parents had bought them Atari 2600 consoles and, on the occasions that I cracked a book, reading mysteries. I followed the adventures of boy-detective Encyclopedia Brown and his sidekick Sally Wheeler, and of the Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe. That was about it.

None of my children would have had much interest in solving these mysteries. Truth be told, I didn’t think they were missing much. These books had served a purpose, helping pass time until I discovered Judy Blume and the Bond capers of Ian Fleming. But they represented no interesting epoch of my own literary development. Hence, at about the time my children learned to read on their own, I ceased to be relevant to their reading lives. Once they were too sophisticated for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, they stopped coming to me for recommendations. Smart kids.

Fortunately for them, my wife stepped into the void. She had two things I didn’t: shelves full of classic books that she had loved as a child, and a remarkable endurance for reading aloud. Over the years, she read our daughters all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, all of Noel Streatfeild, all of L.M. Montgomery, all of Louisa May Alcott. With their mother, the girls have traveled through the prairie, worn ballet shoes, been to Green Gables, lived with the little women. At times, they have relieved her of her read-aloud duties, taking the books to bed to read to themselves, preferring the voices inside their heads. She handles the rejection with grace.

With their mother, the girls have traveled through the prairie, worn ballet shoes, been to Green Gables, lived with the little women.

As I have missed out on the new age of fantasy, of Rowling and Riordan, my wife has kept up with the times. She discovered Harry Potter during her junior year of college, in the late 1990s, abroad in England; now she discovers Hogwarts anew with each daughter. And now, she and our six-year-old our son are in the middle of book five. I read the first Harry Potter book but had trouble staying focused; too many names. They are scornful, all six of them, the children and their mother. Lovingly scornful, I tell myself.

During all the years that I have been irrelevant to their reading lives, my children have consoled me that I matter in other ways. “If you died,” my high school freshman recently told me, “Mom wouldn’t wrestle us.” (But that’s not true. She would wrestle them; she just wouldn’t be as good at it. She’d be insufficiently rough.) One of them likes live music, while another is a cross country runner, and I am a good companion for those pursuits. I rock, I run.

But now, in a surprising twist of fate, I am being asked for book suggestions once again. Our high school junior is very interested in mental health, and I bought her Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. The freshman needed a good novel, and I urged on her Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. Later, I suggested we read a book together, and she was game. “How about Oliver Twist?” she asked, eagerly. I was down for it. She finished the Dickens first, I brought up the rear, and we both agreed it was a strange, baggy novel that could have used an editor.

Now they are overleaping me. The 18-year-old is giving me suggestions. After reading an interview with the Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, she was inspired to read Lament for a Son, his very personal work about grief and faith. I studied under Wolterstorff, but I never read this particular book. He never assigned it to me; now my daughter has.

Mark Oppenheimer is the editor of Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, and the author of a forthcoming biography of Judy Blume. He lives in New Haven, Conn., with his wife and five children.