My house walls are wallpapered in bookshelves filled to capacity. There are frequent evenings in my house where the whole family climbs into mommy’s bed with a stack of books and some plans for snuggling.
We are readers.
Having been a professional communicator for a very long time - and also a plain ol’ logical person - I know from both experience and observation that there’s almost no way to succeed in life without feeding your brain. It’s as simple as good input=good output. If you feed your brain good “food” then you’re a much more informed, capable, valuable employee, parent and person – and if you feed your brain poor quality “food” then you can’t push out good quality effort for your work, your children or your world.
I had thought that most of the world had the same general view – it was certainly what I saw around me. Almost every single mom I knew pushed their kids to read as they regarded reading as one of the key components of a sucessful future. Moms were all about reading, I thought. We volunteered for the Scholastic program, spent years chanting "Goodnight Moon" by heart, we paraded the kids to the library and sounded out words with them. We also read ourselves - we fed our careers, hearts, souls and minds and we kept perenial stacks of books on our nightstands.
So a tepid discussion of reading from a group of moms was a bit of a shock.
Months ago Momversation presented a video from their panel of supposedly "typical moms" who almost universally stated that they just don’t read “anymore” (they were supposed to talk about 5 books that changed their lives).
Thankfully, there were a couple moms who were quite confident in stating that they still read - but the overall tone and premise was mommies don't read.
Motherhood has just been so ultimately demanding and all-consuming for the Momversation panel of supposedly "typical moms" that reading has just fallen by the wayside as a result.
That video has bothered me ever since. Aside from the dismissive tone toward reading there were also disturbing competitive mommy undertones in that video; from the one-upmanship in the choice of trendy, new, highly marketed books that some of the participants called their “all time favourite” books to the underlying implication that busy, good mommies are so utterly consumed with being a busy, good mommy that they just don’t have a single speck of time for something so self-indulgent and worthless as reading a book.
But. But. But - there’s certainly time to write in their blogs. And make video entries and responses. And travel for numerous guest appearances on TV. And travel to write richly compensated blog advertorials. And write their own books.
The logic fallacy in that last paragraph was pretty mind-boggling. Time to write – but no time to read.
I look around me and I see reading moms everywhere - yet a panel of supposedly "typical moms" says otherwise. I look around me and I see a society of readers and life-long learners, yet the celebrity bloggers say otherwise.
Why wasn't there a single working mom who rolled her eyes and said tiredly "I have to read for work every night" - which is a much more common conversation among the moms I know than a lament about being "too busy to read". What ever happened to all the moms who valued their post-secondary educations so highly? Where are the moms who are teaching themselves new skills? What about all the moms I know who are filling in the holes in their education with some Ayn Rand, Dante and Aeschylus? Where are the legions of moms I know who are feverishly keeping up with their industry so they have a career to return to?
I find it unbelievable (but sadly more and more common every day) that women are expected to suspend our own intelligence, experience and sense of logic so we can believe that Moms as an entire group (we are all the same, after all) are universally giving up on reading once we give birth - because the mommy celebrities say we're much too busy.
We're expected to believe that being a mom means you don't read - or if we do manage to force ourselves to read we're not tackling anything more challenging than teen vampire fiction and People Magazine.
I don't know that kind of mom.
