Reading time

There once was a young boy named Will
Reading gave him a thrill
He took his first look
And stuck his whole head in a book
that came from a store in Nashville.

Okay, no, I'm never going to win any awards for my poetry. I'll keep my day job...er, get a day job.

On a typical day, I try to read a few books to William right after we get up in the morning. We have a decent selection of board books, so I try to rotate them. He likes to scratch his fingers at the pictures and gnaw on the corners of the books, but as long as he's enjoying himself, I figure it's all good. He loves them. He has come to expect us to read "Goodnight Moon" to him every night, but he seems to love reading other books, too. Today, I pulled out Dr. Seuss' "The Foot Book," "Caterpillar Spring," and Baby Einstein's "Neighborhood Animals" and a children's bible.

I, big sap that I am, got all sad when reading part of one bible story to him. You all know how I am with editorial comments, so I'm sitting there reading the story about Noah's Ark to him and trying to not add on comments like "Well, actually, God was very angry at men for being bad, and oh yeah, he actually sent the storm that flooded the earth, and well, many scholars believe this is all an allegory anyway and it's pointless to look for an ark on a mountaintop." And then there's the creation story, and I wanted so badly to say, "Well, there are actually several creation accounts in Genesis. There's the account by the priestly writer, and the one by the yahwehist..."

But I resisted (mostly). This is supposed to be fun Reading Time with Mommy after all, not Dissecting the Bible for Babies. But then I got to the story about Moses. The story tells how Moses' mother feared for the life of her son, so she placed him in a basket and then put the basket in the river. Another woman, a princess, found him and raised him as her own son. The reason I'm a big sap is that I read the part about the mother releasing her son in a flimsy little reed basket into the river, not knowing if she'd ever see him again, and I got a little teary-eyed. I mean, we don't even know for sure how much of that story is true, but man, I'd never thought much about that part of it until now. The thought of putting William in a basket and sailing him down a river, even if it were to try to elude danger, well...let's just say that it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that it gives me heart palpitations. And why doesn't the bible tell you more about how Moses' biological mother must have felt? What ever happened to her? Did she ever get over the loss of her son? Did she find out what really happened to him? Did she have more children? Why, why can't we know more about this? Think how helpful this would be to regular old readers; it's the sort of thing we can relate to.

Is that one of the things that they never tell you about parenthood until you experience it yourself? Suddenly you have a whole new take on things that you've never really given much thought to, and sometimes it's disturbing? Like I can't watch television shows that have dead babies or babies in serious danger. It makes me upset. I think about how I'd feel in that situation, and my whole stomach clenches up and presses itself into my diaphragm, making it hard to breathe.

The other new, much more mundane thing that I've recently experienced as a result of parenthood is tendonitis in my right wrist. I've been wearing a splint on it for a couple of weeks. See, the books tell you things like oh, you'll lose a bunch of hair after the baby's born (nope) or it'll take a while for the weight to come off after you've given birth (yes, but it did eventually come off). No one tells you that you might get pains in your wrists and lower arms from constantly lifting a heavy baby. I mean, yes, when you spell it out like that, it sounds perfectly logical. But it had never occurred to me. Where's my worker's comp, huh? Seriously, I should write a new-parent book and include all this stuff. Maybe somebody, somewhere, would benefit from it.

Edit: At the behest of my father, I went back and reread the beginning of Exodus in the real bible, not the kiddy version. Turns out that the pharaoh's daughter allowed Moses' real mother to come nurse and take care of baby Moses, so she at least got to be with her son again and know that he grew up just fine. That makes the mother in me feel much better. I mean, it's still lousy that this other woman got to call Moses her son and be his mother, but at least his real mother got to be part of his life while he was growing up...and more importantly, she didn't see him for the last time when she put that basket on the water. The kiddie bible should have added that part for nervous moms like me; after all, who do they think is reading this stuff to their kids?