close reading

He's getting closer to two now and getting nearly as attached to books as he is to television. In both cases he's looking for ritual, for safety and a world in which he knows just what to expect. This is why for a while his reading included just one or two books, just like his watching included just one or two DVDs vieweed ad nauseam.

{By ad nauseam I mean fuck you late-stage Children's Television Workshop, fuck you Paul Rudd in an Earth costume, your comedy does not reward a 200th viewing}.

In books now N. is reading in his own personal way. It may sound all Parenting 101 (which it is) but it was helpful to see how Kelvin and Justine are raising their kid -- bringing her at a young age through multiple reads of the same book in a row, letting her focus on different details besides the linear narrative. N. will typically tolerate two reads of a book in a row now, the first generally linear, the second time him steering toward scenes that confuse or interest him, or scenes with many small objects in them that we can name one by one.

The beauty of the naming ritual is that its power dynamic is fluidly reversible. During these reads I'll ask him to point at something that I name. That game has largely changed its rules to where he now points at whatever he feels like and I name it. Him not understanding the power dynamic positions him well to subvert it. Perhaps him choosing to ignore the power dynamic would be a better way to describe it.

It's been encouraging to see him reach for books for self-contained entertainment. At night as an early part of his bedtime ritual he'll sit in his crib with all of his books, several open at a time. We're either cultivating a child with multiple reading interests or one with a serious attention deficit or both. The argument for heredity v. environment wouldn't be clear in either case. Just a few weeks ago I couldn't imagine him reading on his own and there it was growing beneath the surface. More happens than we can see, in everyone.

A good part of early parenting is a crashing bore and a forceful drag. It's like becoming a completely different person, losing the balance of your marriage and your life and how the hell are you going to protect this kid from a world in obviously accelerating decline. There were things in the beginning that kept us from instinctively believing it could work out at all, and on some level I think that volatile mental poison is still with us. You can lose your center and get to a point so twisted you find work your sole relief. What I know is that the times when he and I read together bring a deeper kind of joy, I think to both of us.