Do Not Deep Strv

Let me start with what I am not saying: that a writer’s kids learning to write is a bigger deal than her neighbors’ kids. Or that a writer’s kids are any more adept at it, have an affinity for it, or any more right to language than the nurse’s kids. It’s not a contest; this isn’t about competition. And yet I think of my new cellist friend who told me recently that her middle school daughter already out plays high school kids. I admit that I thought:  of course she does. She, unlike my  cellist friend herself, had a cellist for a mother. My kids, unlike me, have a writer for a mother. You’d think, then, I mean, wouldn’t it follow that…

My daughter was reciting The Big Red Barn at four. She’s authored several books (see photo exhibit #1) and nobody acts surprised by this. She has a mother who’s a writer, and her dad is no slouch with language either. But I’m finding that it’s her gender leaving everybody unimpressed. Writing is expected of girls. They’re the language masters, the self expressers. Civilized. Boys wrestle, smear dirt on their faces and act like apes. Yet how could there be a language gene dominated by one gender? This doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s a matter of timing; if a boy is going to cozy up to words, he’s going to do it a lot later.

When my daughter was in Kindergarten, I was in the classroom once a week, during journal time. Each day me and another  mom

would stamp their pages with the date then supervise this  exercise, the kids’ first  attempts at language. They were given a control: the words “I like” was written on the white board. They copied that and then they were to supply the last word, phonetically, and draw a picture. The tables were grouped into levels, but even at each table, skill varied widely.

One kid, who had joined us late in the year, could not begin to pick out sounds and put them with letters. He sat there dumbfounded.Being totally untrained and prone to panic, I wrung my hands. I tried asking, “What letter says ‘AHHH’?” He just shrugged. He had no idea. This terrified me. I consulted the teacher;  she told me that he could just draw pictures. Kids were expected to know their letters by the end of Kindergarten, but  not all of them met that expectation. They all learn at their own pace, she told me. It will come, she and every teacher since has assured me

My boy entered first grade unable to write. On the first writing day, he crept up to her, tapped her shoulder and informed her, “I can’t do it.” She comforted him—my god they are good at comfort—and told him to draw a picture instead. All of this was reported to me very gently by that superb first grade teacher, but I, being totally untrained and prone to panic, began to wring my hands.

I started to notice all the ways he was locked out of the world because he couldn’t read (Nope, couldn’t do that either). He never knew where we were going, and when we got there he still didn’t know where we were. He couldn’t read a menu. Didn’t know where the exit was or the bathroom. He had no way to orient himself in the world. Even as I recognized how crucial language is, and how much it bothered me, to see him so far behind his classmates,  even as I began our after school ritual of one hour of reading time (ONE HOUR), I was aware that I was going to miss this innocence when it was gone. It’s a step towards being a member of the world, learning to write your name, and read signs, and books and comics. And it is a step away from the dependency of early childhood.

Would it have bothered my cellist friend had her daughter been tone deaf? Parents really are not supposed to see themselves reflected in their children. It isn’t healthy for the children. Plus, I’m not at all sure the example I set is healthy for my children. I was recently telling friends about progress on my novel (yes, dear reader, progress is being made!). It occurred to me how strange my life sounded to them. “So you just sit at your desk,what  thinking?” one friend asked. I can’t explain what compels me to sit for several hours—more than four—and make stuff up. I don’t illustrate; there is no color to my work. I don’t play out scenes like movies, at least not all of them. It is a life centered around language, words themselves. They fill my head and then they kind of take over, and I become this other self, the self on the page. I like her a lot better than I like the real me, which I realize sounds kind of like Avatar. It is like Avatar. And isn’t that why we liked that movie, because we are all handicapped in the  world? We love our idealized selves better than our flawed selves; we dream of  entering that world and never coming back.

I stayed away from the first grade classroom. It didn’t take a genius to see that my panic wasn’t going to do the boy any good. By Halloween, he was writing. I love the phonetic spelling stage. It’s the reverse of discovering the lyrics to a song you’ve been singing incorrectly for years.  The idea is to let the kid find joy in writing. He has to get used to hearing what he wants to say in his head, and look at it—in his head—then shape it with a pencil. A direct line from the head to the hand to the paper.  It’s a slow motion, distilled, hyper-focused enactment of the art of fiction.

This is the development of a self on the page. Until they can write, kids have no self other than what you see. They are the most literal creatures in the world, other than your dog, who remains locked outside of language his entire life. Which means, doesn’t it, that the literate self, the writing and reading self, is a fragmented self. To be fragmented, learning how to handle that, is part of maturity. While there is sorrow in this, there is also profound awe. Language is the first baby step towards self awareness. And that, Dear Reader, is a momentous, breathtaking, soul shaking step.