Most memories from my childhood are hazy, but the moment I learned to read shines bright in my mind.
My parents were readers and surrounded me with plenty of popular children's books. But it was my grandmother who always had time for a snuggle and a story. Grams regularly told me funny bedtime stories and read to me until her voice was hoarse. My appetite for more was likely one of the reasons she took it upon herself to teach me to read to myself before I was even ready for preschool.
The circa-1970 easy reader at my grandma’s house was called, appropriately enough, I Want to Read, and it told the story of a set of twins who’d just learned that crucial lifelong skill. Grams read it to me dozens of times, pointing to each word as she went. Somewhere along the line, I started to say the words with her. Eventually she took the training wheels off and I was cruising solo.
That feeling of being able to do something I’d watched grownups do was exhilarating and empowering. My husband reports feeling the same way when he taught his three-year-old self to read by looking over the restaurant ads in the daily newspaper. “All you can eat” were my husband’s first words read aloud, much to his father’s amused amazement.
Because Don and I jumped on the early reading bandwagon, we had high expectations for our daughter, Sophia, and she did not disappoint. She, too, was an early and effortless reader.
Her younger brother, on the other hand, was a different story. Jack wouldn’t sit still for books as a baby the way his sister had. Where Sophia had crawled into my lap with a dog-eared copy of Goodnight Moon, Baby Jack would arch his back and scream whenever I tried to assume the snuggle-and-read position. It broke my heart.
This went on for nearly two years, and I had all but lost hope when my mother—Jack’s grandma—presented him with a unique box of blocks for his second birthday. Inside were 26 chunky board books, each one small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and each featuring a different letter of the alphabet. The minibooks were just five pages long, with simple, colorful drawings and corresponding words. Jack immediately took to stacking them into towers and buildings and bridges and—boom!—knocking them down again. Once in awhile, between construction projects, I’d catch him flipping through one of the books, pointing to the cat and saying, “Meow!” It took a grandmother’s patience to draw out this glimmer of interest. During one of my mom’s visits, she plopped Jack on her lap and read from A to Z with him. Then they lined up the books alphabetically across the floor and read them again. Then they stacked them high toward the ceiling and read them again. After that visit, I caught Jack taking more and more work breaks to read his “bricks.”
It made me realize that reading isn’t one-size-fits-all. And that awareness has kept me from fretting as now-six-year-old Jack hasn’t been as quick to catch on to independent reading as his sister was at this age.
But just like the characters in my own favorite stories, Jack continues to surprise me. I turned the corner the other day to come upon my son sitting quietly with his nose in a book. The title? I Want to Read. Watching Jack sound out the same words I puzzled over all those years ago has me believing in happily ever after.