Reading Undercover

My mother read ridiculous things to me.

Every night of my young life, I heard a chapter of the Bible, and then I heard a chapter of a novel. But what novel? In my preschool years, it was The Borrowers, or Stuart Little, the Little House books, or Narnia. But then as I got older, she read preposterous things. Ivanhoe and Bleak House. The Vicar of Wakefield. Lorna Doone. Did she actually read Henry Esmond, by William Makepeace Thackeray, to an elementary school student? Did she really read Adam Bede?

Mother sat next to me with her shoes off and her feet up, on the spot at the edge of the bed where I would later fall asleep. She propped the book on her stomach. She read through the bottom part of her bifocals. She was a school teacher by day, and by bedtime she was tired, so sometimes while reading she fell asleep and her chin sagged down, her mouth went slack. I could see her eyes closing. At these times I would read out the next word, or ruthlessly and gently poke her in the arm. She never complained or skipped ahead or closed the book and said, "For Pete's sake, I made your breakfast and your dinner, drove you to school, washed your clothes, supervised your homework, and oh by the way earned a living today, and if I want to fall asleep after wow fifteen paragraphs of George Eliot, then it's a right I have earned." She would just clear her throat and continue. She never phoned it in either. If the eighteenth century angst was flowing, then it was flowing. I honestly can't remember how she put so much life into those texts, but she did.

There were limits, however. One chapter only. Then the lights went out, the goodnights were said, and the book was left on my bedside table.

"Under no circumstances must you read any of that book without me," she would say darkly. "Go to sleep immediately so you can get up for school."

But I really wanted to get on with the book and find out what happened. Stopping after just one chapter was agonizing. Even if the book was about the plight of coal miners in Wales, and I therefore had no hope or capacity to understand it at all, I wanted to read those books, desperately. Lights out, however, was firm in our house.

Now, for some reason, all of us in our house slept with heating pads in our beds. I'm not sure why. The heating pad, however, was useful in that there was a tiny light in the control box. Low, medium, or high, it still shed a tiny orange splotch of illumination on my book. Is it possible that I was reading Dickens at age 8 by the light of a heating pad power switch? I did. A lot. With the dog under the covers. Until I fell asleep.

So I read ahead. Whole chapters. The next night, when Mother cracked the book, I would casually tell her that I'd read on without her, like I'd say, "Oh, I read that. I'm here now." And she'd glower at me and grumble vaguely and move to the new place. Wow! I thought to myself: She is totally buying this! I am so super stealthy! Silently, in the dark, I kept peering at my books in the orange light. Now that I am... rational... I understand that my mother knew exactly what she was doing and exactly what I was doing. Weird! This was the woman who turned on lights behind me every time she walked into a room I was in, because reading in the dark was tantamount to doing a bleach eyewash in her book. How did she let me continue with my heating pad habit?

I do, I must admit, wear glasses now. But she made a lifelong reader out of me, with Dickens and Thackeray and Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Swiss Family Robinson. Now I let my child read until he falls asleep, with the light on, after I finish reading to him. Yes, I've taken away the element of stealth and transgression, but I hope the effect will be the same. She showed me how to immerse myself in reading, and that has made my life immeasurably more interesting.

This post was written as an entry in the Crazy Hip Blog Mama's book giveaway, because I want to win a book from the Kane Miller Publishing Company, specifically one called "Flusi the Sock Monster." I must investigate what's been happening to Sadie's lacey ankle socks.