I am a Writer and a Parent (or Was)

Sharon Bayliss, the author of The December People series, invited parents who are also authors to chime in on her Mama #bloghop today.  While technically I’m no longer actively parenting because I am an empty-nester, I figured I’d jump in and participate just the same.

On her invitation, Sharon posted a number of questions as writing prompts.  I’ve decided to talk about the following:

• What impact (if any) do you hope to have on your children by being an author? Would you want your children to follow in your footsteps?
• How old will your children have to be before you let them read your books (if ever)?

My parenting journey is somewhat different from most, as my ex and I started out as foster parents.  We didn’t plan to adopt a child; things worked out that way.  That story turned out to be amazingly long and complicated, so I’ll save it for another day.  Suffice to say, in early 2009, we adopted a bouncing baby 13-year-old girl.

Adopting an older child is absolutely not for the faint-hearted.  Like most older kids coming out of the foster care system, our daughter had more than her fair share of emotional and educational challenges.  Especially heartbreaking was the fact that when she came to us a month shy of her 11th birthday, she still hadn’t learned to read.

First, we logically turned to our local school for help.  While the administration expressed plenty of concern, their attempts at getting our child caught up seemed woefully inadequate.  They simply didn’t know how to deal with a child who hadn’t attended school since she was five or six.  In many ways, our public school system functions like an assembly line equipped with a conveyor belt.  Kids are dropped in on one end, and their brains are slowly filled with knowledge as they progress down the line.  Unfortunately, this system doesn’t work when a kid is dropped into the middle without preparation.

The school decided, in its infinite wisdom, to mainstream our daughter into a 5th grade class, while sending her to sit with kindergarten kids for part of the day so she could learn to read.  Our daughter was humiliated.

It wasn’t long before we discovered that she was throwing away her homework assignments because she didn’t want her peers to see she was doing “baby work.”  Ultimately, we pulled her out of  public school and placed her in a supervised home-schooling program offered by a neighboring district. I ended up teaching her to read with the help of a really fabulous book: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

It worked.  In just over three months our daughter went from having zero ability to recognize even the simplest words, to reading Dr. Seuss.  It wasn’t long before she was pointing at buildings and reading off the names of stores, or noticing what was written on street signs.  It was a huge victory, and it is probably the most important and life-changing thing I ever did for her.

Despite the fact that I taught my daughter an important life skill, I still carry a certain amount of sadness for her.  While she gained proficiency with the mechanics of reading, she never acquired a love of books.  My ex and I tried everything.  We tried reading to her.  We set aside time each day for her to read.  We bought her the stories her friends were reading like Twilight and Harry Potter.  Nothing worked.  We realized that a true love of fiction is something learned in early childhood.  It comes from parents reading to their children when they are small — something that we never had the opportunity to do.

When I published The Wannabe Vampire in 2012, I hoped that my then 17-year-old daughter might read it.  She never did, though she was extremely excited for me when the book came out.  She was equally thrilled when I wrote Shampires, especially because she contributed to the book in a small way.  The character Carl sprung from an inside joke we used to share.

I’d hoped that including my child’s input might be enough to motivate her to read at least a few pages.  It didn’t work.  Her favorite phrase with respect to books, which she repeated often, was, “Reading causes cancer.”

The day our daughter turned 18, she withdrew herself from from school.  The next morning, she was on a bus back to her biological family, with whom she still lives.  She never finished her education.  She will turn 20 later this year, and to the best of my knowledge, she hasn’t returned to school, enrolled in Job Corps, or found a career.

The saddest part?  She left her books behind.  Even the first book I remember reading to her, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, had been discarded.  Most of her library I found in the dumpster behind our house after she was gone.