“She Is Not Me.” What Reading to Your Children Teaches You About Yourself

The thing to realize the soonest is that you’re not raising a miniature version of yourself. It’s an inevitable epiphany, and perhaps it hits when they want to quit dance class, or when they prove hopeless at piano. God forbid you’re in thirty years of denial. But for me it was when my daughter was three and found a pair of my old high heels. The shoes existed in something like a vacuum: she’d never seen me wear them, and she’d discovered them in the middle of a pandemic when external influence was extremely limited. We hadn’t yet introduced her to screens. But she stood in the full-length mirror with the stilettos on her tiny feet, and if you’ve spent enough time around children, you know the click when you see it. Identity unlocked. Facet of diamond revealed. The thing to realize the soonest is that you’re not raising a miniature version of yourself. I wasn’t a particularly smart child—bright enough. But I was a reader and was given the priceless freedom to choose what I read, without exception. I had always loved animals, so my parents didn’t question why I almost exclusively read books in which the heroes were mice and rats, anthropomorphized. I was something of an animal myself. Always outdoors. Barefoot often. Few friends. My mother—gentle, distant guardian of my secret self—parented me as a “tomboy” because that’s what she thought she had, before the language of “non-binary” helped us both situate me more clearly. My mother forced nothing on me: not pink, not long hair, and not Nancy Drew. I learned later that my preference for books with animal characters was probably my autism at play: I didn’t “get” humans, and didn’t consider myself one either. Not human, let alone a girl human. The books I chose were the dike holding back the flood of people-ness from which I felt disconnected, from which I preferred to remain somewhat disconnected, oblivious to the reflection of my whiteness in children’s books but keenly aware of my sense of difference. And this is to say nothing of the […]

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