Unlocking How to Read

It's always a joy the first time you realize that you've unlocked your child's ability to read. Seth started reading late ( 3 years 10 months) because I wasn't much of a mom - we were separated for almost two years. However, we made up for lost time, and when we finally started living in the same house (isn't that odd?), he had to be by my side 24/7. He'd even sit outside the door while I was in the can.

I had to read a bedtime story every night; it didn't matter if it was just a round robin between five children's books – Owly, Pooh, Amelia Bedelia, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and the Princess and the Pea.

Once, I attempted to deliver a story extemporaneously – it was the Fox and the Stork, I believe – and I failed miserably. First, because it was meant to be told with pictures; and second, I honestly forgot how it ended. (Did the fox slink away in shame when the stork served the meatballs in an erlenmeyer flask? Or did the stork invoke noblesse oblige and forgive the fox for his meanness?)

I did the same thing with Little Red Riding Hood. By the time I got to the part where Little Red Riding Hood (did she even have a nickname?) finds out that she's actually conversing with a wolf (no LASIK surgery for kids in those days, I suppose), I stop short as it suddenly dawned on me that the poor girl couldn't have possibly killed the wolf with her bare hands. I racked my brains for some memory of a possible weapon she must have found in the room...did she pick up the picnic basket and whack the wolf on the snout (which, just minutes ago, she must have thought was just a wicked side effect of grandma's botox treatment), or did she retrieve Snow White's poisoned apple from the basket and feed it to the wolf? (You guessed it right, that was the ending that I gave Seth.)

Researching on the Internet the day after the story, I found out that there was a hunter who jumped out of the woodwork and blasted the beast to kingdom come. Other versions feature a woodcutter, as it seems to be more humane to slice the wolf open. Anyway, hunter-slash-woodcutter then disembowels the cadaver and extracts an immaculately clean grandmother, who was amazingly alive and kicking - no tooth marks whatsoever were found on her wrinkled little body. Happy, happy, joy, joy! I sure miss those wholesome fairy tales.

Perhaps in Seth's eagerness to be freed from my Aesopian and Grimmsian ignorance, he decided that he would just learn to read by himself. I heard him one day reading a word from an ad in a glossy: G-R-O-W. He was slowly saying, "Grrrr...ooooo.....dub."

I turned away from my writing and asked him what the hell was that all about. I asked him to read it again. "Gro-dub!" He proclaimed in triumph. I then realized I haven't taught him how "W" was read.

He's now into reading contests with his 5-year-old sister, Sabrina. The loser gets the privilege of whacking the winner on the back of the head.