Dear fellow traveller on this journey of motherhood,
I’m writing this because I posted on Facebook and Instagram yesterday about my successful summer holiday project with my children. As a result I’ve had many enthusiastic mamas writing to me asking me how to kickstart a reading habit. I wanted to write this post to tell you that when I sit and think about that particular journey, I cannot pick out elements that worked because the more I think about it, the more I realise that it was a journey and it took a village. So I thought I would write you this letter so that you can read about what I went through, and share some epiphanies I had along the way which might be useful to you.
I realised, by the time my eldest was two, that there is no right way to raise a child. By this time we’d had many scares concerning both children. Nanga was born prematurely and was in the NICU for over a week, and by the time we came back home Aiya had stopped talking. At one point all he was saying was “where” but that also diminished. He adored his Nangi and he was communicating in other ways, so we thought there was nothing to worry about. Eventually he started school and, a possibly harmless suggestion by his Montessori teacher, turned into a nightmare for me. She suggested that my son could possibly be autistic, and thereafter I made it my goal in life to find a doctor who would confirm this. After many visits, and much money spent, I finally let it go. Experts told me that my son had markers on the spectrum but he was high functioning and I needed to help him. This propelled me to learn everything I could about the autistic spectrum and along that journey I met some wonderful human beings whose patience and kindness helped me learn, understand and grow as a mother. By the time Aiya turned 3 and Nanga was 1 we had a visiting Occupational Therapist, we had tried Speech Therapy and we had regular visits from a Physiotherapist.
I learned many lessons from these sessions. I learned that children are mimics and they copy what you do. This method was introduced to me to get the kids to focus. We’d start with legos (Duplo is great for this because it’s big and chunky), I’d get Nanga to watch and help as well because I didn’t want to create a dichotomy or a rift between the children. And yes, at this time Nanga was a baby. So Shevin and I would have similar blocks and I’d get him to mimic what I made. We started small with a few blocks and then continued. I also learned that activities such as this were best done while facing a wall to prevent the child from outward distractions –to date Shevin still works in front of a blank wall (with only his time table at eye level). This was successful and his motor skills really developed. We also had many sensory activities such as playing with clay and water –all this was a bitch to clean up and I hated it because I’m a clean freak. Shevin needed help with his grip, because he would hold a pencil awkwardly. So we had to work on this too. We did pages upon pages of guided writing activities. At Montessori (we switched to another school at this point) our goal was to socialise him and have him interact with more students and make friends. I told his teacher that his reading and writing would come eventually, but these social skills were essential and to please focus on that. His teacher was a gem. It is really true what they say about Kindergarten and Montessori teachers –they work the hardest and they’re underpaid. I’d give my weight in gold to Rajeeka, whose influence and patience with Shevin was central to his growth. At home we’d work in short bursts; half an hour was maximum, ten minutes was minimum. I was still reading up and talking to other mums about what worked with them. Online forums and communities were my go-to, and I’d pick and choose activities that I felt would work best with Shevin. The reading and the writing came hand in hand at home. Reward-based activities are discouraged but I’d promise to read to him after we’d do writing activities which he hated, because obviously it hurt him. We read before bed time. I’ve explained all this so that you understand how exhausting this was for me. I would lose my temper, I’d become frustrated and depressed. I was eating way too much and putting on too much weight. It was stressful and it took a toll on my mental health. In spite of all this I found solace in my books. So I would read in the middle of the day. I’d give them a book or two and tell them to read because ammi needed to read. I would say no bothering ammi please. Later on I realised that the skill of mimicry had far reaching effects so I started to lengthen the reading time –which worked fine for me.
All of these activities were financially draining. I wasn’t working full-time but I would tutor students privately at home. Yes, the money helped but I did it because it was an outlet for me to engage with other people and let’s face it, I really enjoy teaching and I enjoy the company of teenagers. I love learning new things from them, pretending to be cool, seeing that look on their faces when they have an ‘ah-ha’ lightbulb moment, I love seeing their writing grow and improve. This was a me-activity that I was not going to give up. I was blessed to have some of the sweetest and most helpful teenagers walk through my doors. They would babysit, they would help me carry groceries, they would help me make decorations for MY kids’ birthday parties and show up at said birthday party to help see it through. God really blessed me in that way. Anyway my point here is that there was always a learning activity happening in my house. The kids would be in their play pen or running around. They would distract me and disturb my lessons. But most of the time they would take a book, or piece of paper and pencil and sit at the other end of the dining table and write something. Why? It’s simple. They were mimicking the older kids around them. I’ve taught ‘Othello’ to so many kids at my dining table that Shevin can tell you the story of Othello. We also named a fish Iago because he looked kinda evil. Shevin and Shenine have attempted to read Othello but failed miserably –thank god. This influence really helped shape them as kids because they were curious and wanted to learn.
Along the way I learned many many important lessons. First of all I had to unlearn everything I knew about being a mother. I had to accept the fact that I hadn’t a f**king clue how to be a mother. I was an impressionable twenty-something year old with two kids under five. This was not an easy pill to swallow because since becoming pregnant I had been overwhelmed with a barrage of information from everyone I knew on how to be a mother. While I am grateful to all the advice I got, trying to actively use this advice was very difficult. Why, you ask? Simple. Because my children were waaaaay different to the children that my advice-givers had raised. My children were growing up in a vastly different environment to the one I had grown up in. My children were exposed to a variety of different things than everyone else’s kid was exposed to. This lesson took the longest to learn. My children, and yours, are different. WHY THE EFF do we insist on timelines and growth charts and all that?? Why do we adhere to these goals as if they are some Biblical rule that causes eternal damnation if we don’t?! I could never answer this question because at some point I just gave up. I would smile and nod and gratefully accept all advice given to me, but whether I choose to use it was my prerogative. I’m still the same. I will listen to what you have to tell me. Later on I will ruminate and nitpick what I can take from it, or else I will discard it and save up some brain space. I also learned that my pet project of mimicry exceeded the boundaries of reading. I had to live the life I wanted my kids to live because they’re going bloody mimic my bad habits also. Let me tell you I’m smiling as I type this now because this was sooo hard. My answer to this conundrum came in the form of Atticus Finch, who walked right out of the pages of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ as I re-read that book having run out of books to read in my house. Atticus Finch is a single father who’s raising children in a deeply prejudiced society of Maycomb during the Great Depression and Segregation era in America. I already knew that children were copycats, and I also struggled to live the life I wanted to teach them (because at twenty-something I’m allowed to have some bad habits and do whatever I want to do because I’m an adult, right?!). Atticus is open with his kids; he doesn’t shy away from harsh truths. He tells it like it is. This was an epiphany to me. And I then proceeded to read up on it. Communicating with a toddler works best at eye level; my thick thighs were in ginormous amounts of pain as I would always squat to talk to my babies at eye-level. I would meet them as equals and not as someone superior to them. I also read that adults underestimate children and in the process of infantalising children we do not give them the necessary tools to succeed in the adult world (the researcher in me is cringing right now because I cannot remember my sources to cite them; I apologise to all the behavioral psychologists and child-care experts who know whose ideas I’m citing –please feel free to tell me and I will source these). I remembered the short stories of Saki (H.H. Munro) where children would always show adults that they were smarter than adults and I thought ok here’s a way to teach my children and also help them understand. Misinformation is a real thing, not just now in the digital sphere. Ask yourself how you found out about sex. Who told you? Did you learn it in school? I learned about sex in the back of my school van as a misguided friend told me that when a boy and girl kisses or hold hands in church, they have a baby. I had already held hands with a boy in a church and I wasn’t pregnant, so I knew this wasn’t true. Of course I didn’t go to my mom with this. I went to the dictionary where I didn’t understand the meaning of penis, vagina, sex, vulva, and orgasm. I resolved not to let this happen to my children.
We have this rule in our home that we talk about everything. It started with bad words. I listen to music in the car en route to school and yes, songs today have bad words in them. I’d tell the kids yes there are bad words, I’d explain what I could of it to them on the condition that they don’t use them. I’d also give them a disclaimer saying that this is something I can’t explain now because their cumulative knowledge is insufficient to understand this, but when they’re older I will explain it to them. Knowledge is power to me. You need to know what is wrong so you can not do it. We have regular discussions about what some people might consider wrong, or bad and what most accept as right or good. We understand that context matters a lot and these are a part of our conversations on books. It’s the same thing with sex. My mother is aghast that my children know about sex and ask (what some may consider inappropriate) questions concerning my menstrual cycle, but to me this is better than them getting wrong information about sex or menstruation. Or god-forbid they imbibe the notion that periods are sinful or dirty, or that sex is unnatural –my position here is that both are natural functions and you wouldn’t be here if these things didn’t happen. This is dangerous to me. If my child doesn’t know what is sex, or abuse, that puts both of them at risk in today’s world which is replete with sexual predators. I’d much rather have an Atticus Finch style relationship with my children than learn about their poor choices from a school teacher, or fellow parent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the stigma I’m worried about. I am worried about the impact of misinformation on my child. I’m worried that if my children are swayed easily by wrong knowledge in a world teeming with wrong knowledge, they will make poor decisions and bad life choices when I am not around. Life is so fickle, and this pandemic has proved to be virulent and debilitating; Time ain’t waiting for no one mister. If I don’t teach my children when they are young, curious and willing to learn, then when will I teach them? Teenagers are so hard to connect with. Ask a parent of a teen. If you want to have positive relationships with your teenagers, then you gotta start now. I speak from experience because parents have come to me saying ‘I wish I did this when my kids were younger’, ‘I wish I worked less when they were younger’. I’ve learned from the experiences of these parents. These choices influenced my decisions to let my children read and watch things that may not be ‘technically’ age-appropriate. I know when I was a child I finished Sweet Valley High by the time I was 13 and then I moved on to Sweet Valley University and then to Mills and Boons by the time I was a teenager –I don’t think my mother knew about this, but I am grateful that she never stopped me. I learned so much from these books and I’d like my kids to do the same. All knowledge is good knowledge. Why? because you can then use your knowledge to discern between what’s right for you and what’s wrong for you.
Parenting is trial and error. We have to accept our mistakes; we have to own them and acknowledge them. As parents we’ve made so many mistakes. Our marriage failed and we separated for a while. Throughout this entire process the children were kept informed of all the decisions that were taken, which were not to their benefit. Now we’re back together, and we have acknowledged this. The children know that we’ve made mistakes and they know that we have learned from them. They now make fun of us and take occasional digs at us about when were apart and how absolutely silly it was. But we’re ok with that, because it’s now the norm in our home. This is something that I reiterate to my children and my students: I am not perfect and I don’t know whether what I’m doing will work, but I want to try. We have these unrealistic expectations of our parents and elders, and when we become adults and these elders fail to live up to that ideal we become so jaded. We lose respect for them. This is because we’ve always kept adults on a pedestal. I blame organized and institutionalized religion for this but that’s a topic for a longer post. Break that damn pedestal men, you’re flawed. Own it. Accept it. Learn from it. Who cares what other people think??! You are entitled to learn and grow. You’re entitled to fall and pick yourself up. Let me tell you how liberating it is to not care about another person’s opinion of you –maaaan, that is the sweet spot. I have gained and learned so much from my journey in life, as a daughter, as a mother, as a wife and most importantly as a person. It’s been enlightening. And I’d not have it any other way. I love telling my kids anecdotes from my (short) life that have been life changing. Likewise when the kids go through something they have a very mature attitude to it. Before lockdown they were bullied by a friend during basketball, and they came crying to me and begged me to do something because “you’re a teacher and you can”. My heart broke to see them like this. Once the moment had passed I had to explain that authority is not to be abused, and I had to tell them that bullying is a part of life. I’ve been bullied and you’ve got to stand up to it or ignore it because I can’t punish this child for a behavioral pattern he doesn’t understand he’s perpetuating. I was so thrilled when one of them identified this moment with Neville Longbottom in the first Harry Potter book. (We make many HP references in our daily chats much to my delight!)
I apologise if this has been a long read. I wanted you to understand that context is always important and my recommendation of books for your child to read isn’t going to inculcate a reading habit. It’s the process. It’s how you sell it. It’s how you want to approach it. There is no right way to raise a reader. There is no right way to raise a child. There’s what other people see, and then there’s what you know (read the poem ‘Richard Cory’ if you’ve got the time). You’ve got to watch, learn and understand your environment and what works for you. You’ve got to understand your baby, no one else will, and no one else should know your child as well as you do. I want you to know that motherhood, if you take it to heart, can be so very enlightening because you need to stop and ask yourself what parts of yourself you want your child to have. Because if there’s a part of you that you don’t like, you got to fix it and be open about it. Owning your mistakes and your flaws with your kids is liberating. For example I have, like many of you, told my kids that lying is bad. Once when we were driving I lied to my phone (yes, eyeroll), by saying I wasn’t driving and called someone. I was promptly called out on that. Recently I told my kids that I’m on my phone too much and always in front of a screen and I am trying to change, afterwards when I was on my phone they called me out on it. We try to do Sunday evenings with no phones at all now –it’s hard, but they’re monitoring it. They’ve told me I work too much, and I teach too many other children. I’ve accepted this and I no longer tutor over the weekend. I’m grateful to my children because they make me a better person. They’re sweet, innocent, trusting and curious. They’re also annoying, always hungry, make messes and don’t listen to me. But what to do aney.
Thank you for reading this, I really hope you learned something from it.
Much love,
Shannon.
P.S. I had to change the title of this post, because I kind of didn’t see where it went at the end. So the title in parenthesis was the intended title 😉
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