How Laura keeps us close
May 21, 2015 @ 4:03 pmI love a food blog called Dinner a Love Story. The author says that in all the chaos and crazy-making expectations of parenting, the habit that anchors her is cooking dinner for her kids most nights. I cook too, but often it feels hectic, under appreciated, and if there’s a love story under the surface some nights it feels buried pretty deep.
But then when the sour faces looking at the plates saying, “What is this?” dissipate, and I’m lying next to my son Petey wearing his PJ’s, and we open our Little House on the Prairie books, everything starts to feel good.
This is one of the times I feel best about being a mom.
Peter and I read through the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder series about her life growing up on the Prairie. We got through Wisconsin, Kansas, and Dakota territory. I tried to sing along to Pa’s songs on the fiddle, making up the tunes I didn’t know. Petey and I looked at each other and shook our heads at the behavior of villain Nellie Olson. “WHY is she SO MEAN, Mom?” Petey asked me, shocked. We mourned when the series was finished. But then one day Pete came home from school having found in the book bins: ANOTHER SERIES! About Rose, Laura’s daughter! I didn’t even know it existed.
Peter’s teacher told him it was too high a reading level for him, but if he insisted, he could read it at home on his own. So he read some to himself, and at bedtime I read to him. We fell in love with Rose, but we also despaired. She felt embarrassed about being a country girl growing up in the Ozark Mountains in Mansfield, Missouri, and was far too impressed when a dandyish salesman came to town. We could see the train wreck coming.
“Why do you think she liked him, Mom?” Peter asked when when I was rushing to cook dinner. And then I stopped chopping the vegetables I knew he would crab about, gave him smile and shook my head. “Sometimes I don’t understand Rose,” I said to him, and that moment felt nice and different, like time had slowed down and we were sharing something.
When the Rose books ended Peter found another series—about Caroline, Laura’s mother. We are loving Caroline. And I am loving how my son seems to find nothing strange in reading these series about girls. He is a very trucks and trains kind of guy, but finds Caroline fascinating. He even decided to dress up as Laura Ingalls Wilder on biography day at school. “You can’t say anything,” I said to my husband, who looked pained. He looked at Petey, “How about dressing up like Pa?” Peter shook his head and explained, “I did not do my biography about Pa, I did it about Laura.”
So I love how my flexible son is able to step into the world of Laura, or her daughter, or her Ma, but mostly I love how we have this thing together.
A few years ago I met a mom of a newborn at a Yale Women event I attended, and she looked so stressed. She told me she had a child a year old, and with her long hours as a banker, she just got home at bedtime. She felt like she wasn’t connecting to her daughter. “Find some books you both like,” I said. “Make it a special time to read them together. If you do that, other things will flow from it.”
No, it’s not original advice, but her face lightened. “That sounds fun,” she said.
It really is.
A lot more fun than trying to get Pete to take more bites of vegetables.
P.S. The terrible thing is that the series of books written about Caroline Quiner, Laura’s mother, is out of print. It’s called The Caroline Years, by Maria Wilkes. You can find used copies, but they’re rare and expensive. The author has also begun series about Caroline’s mother and grandmother that are historically accurate and really compelling. But she stopped writing the series when the publisher decided to abridge them. Then the publisher discontinued those series. I wish they would at least offer the books as e-books. Otherwise, I’m not sure what Pete and I are going to do.