I Wish I Could Read Like a Girl

By MICHELLE SLATALLA writing in The New York Times, December 31, 2008

FOR weeks now, I have been watching my children endure life in the fishbowl of the holiday season. On hiatus from school, they swim patient laps around one another in the cramped space of a family.

Illustration by Hadley Hooper

I don’t envy this. I know from personal experience that the last thing you want, in that awkward decade when you are trying to figure out who you are and where you are headed, is the pressure of being under the constant observation of cranky grown-ups who wonder why you aren’t unloading the dishwasher for them more often.

My daughters cope with having to live around me in much the same way that I remember dealing with my mother. They sleep in. They stay up very late. They put gasoline in the car just often enough to neutralize criticism.

Watching these delicate negotiations makes me glad to be past that stage of life. Most of the time. But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.

Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds — any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch — and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.

Read the rest of this story at the NYT.