Books have been an integral part of my life. Just as we are what we eat, I believe that we are what we read. In the mundaneness of my everyday life, of keeping house and bringing up children, books open up my mind to worlds that exist outside of my limited circle. They add richness to my ordinary life. Through reading, I stay open to new ideas and keep up with the changing times. I am never lonely as long as a book is at hand and there is always a pile of unread books waiting for me.
Considering the place that books hold in my life, it wasn’t a surprise that one of my very first visions about being a mother was a sunny picture with books. I saw myself and my children lounging on a beachside or a poolside or a mountain top, with our own books in our hands.What I didn’t realize is how much work and how many years would go into making that dream a reality. And how fleeting it would be when it came true.
We all know about the benefits of reading for children. It is good for building focus and concentration and improving language skills, along with increasing knowledge in general. At a deeper level, reading affects how we think; it builds empathy and a wider worldview.Above all, the main reason I wanted my children to read was to enrich their lives with a love of stories, to experience a taste of what I had been enjoying all my life.
Thus began our journey, slowly progressing from board books to chapter books, from graphic novels to classics. I read out to them all the time from all kinds of books. My husband, having the better imagination between the two of us, conjured up many tales at bedtime that are still talked about. We surrounded them with stories. Eventually, they got hooked and started reading. We spent many a weekend hour inside the bookstore, enticing the children with the promise of a snack at the store’s café. Occasional Saturdays were spent as reading marathons, when all of us sat and read for twelve straight hours. Accounts were created on a website to track what each of us read and how far we were from our annual targets. It was bliss.
However, with the advent of virtual schooling this past year, a lot has changed. The digital world encroached on the children’s lives like never before. They started spending hours in front of the screen for school and many more hours completing school work. All ourefforts over the years, spent on keeping their screen time under check, got swept away overnight. It was disheartening to see how they moved away from reading books, and even writing with a pen on paper.
Despite this setback, I rallied on, still surrounding them with stories in whichever way I could. I talked to them about the books I was reading. I took to playing carefully selected audiobooks, that all of us would enjoy, at dinner time, or during a long drive. Sometimes, finding a suitably quiet interlude in all the day’s activity, I would read out to them. It was encouraging to see that a teenager and a tween still love old favorites like ‘Winnie the Pooh’ or Kipling’s ‘Just So Stories’.
This gave me hope and I carry on, exhausted but not defeated, because I cannot imagine a life without the colors and richness of books.
