I read to my almost-14-year-old daughter every night. I do it because she doesn’t like to read, and I do. So together we’ve read a lot of fun series, and honestly, I’d do it till she graduates from high school, if she’ll let me. It’s the 10-15 minutes during the day that I have her undivided attention. It’s when we have interesting discussions about life, literature, history, etc. She listens to me, mostly, but she’s started chiming in a lot more.
I keep doing it because having a teenager in this day and age has proven to be, well, interesting, and any time she’ll give me, I will take.
Last night, as I was cracking open our book, she quickly interjected that she’s worried about her pet.
She has a bearded dragon named Bowser. We all love that thing. If it sounds strange to snuggle a lizard, I can now firmly say it’s not strange. He’s the teen’s emotional support animal, and he has a lot more personality than you’d assume.
My daughter takes very painstaking care of her dragon. She loves him, she holds him, she worries about the length of his nails, what his current pigmentation patterns mean about how he’s feeling, the kind of foods he eats…everything.
She had carried her lizard to a little neighborhood get-together, and someone had chatted with her about it. This person said how she had had a bearded dragon before, and aren’t they so fun? Of course, hers was like three times bigger than Bowser, but had similar behaviors.
This person had struck one of the biggest insecurities my daughter has about how she has cared for her pet. He hasn’t grown very large – at least not as large as she was expecting.
And there she lay in bed, stressing about what that meant.
I initially kind of waved her off. Like, oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry.
But then she started to sob. She covered her face and said, “But what if something I have done has hurt him? What if I’ve had him under the wrong light, or he hasn’t had enough calcium, or he’s sick, or…”
I looked at her in amazement. I FELT that so much.
That’s being a mom. Especially being a mom of damaged kids. I felt her anguish in that moment, because I feel it daily.
What if.
So I did what I always do, and I started reading and researching. Found a guy who said he was doing a round-up of all the “correct” bearded dragon info, because there’s a lot of “misinformation” out there about how to care for a dragon.
And I had to laugh. Can we just say that misinformation is really just differences of opinion? Unless you are the Almighty Creator who actually created the bearded dragon, everything anyone says about how to care for one is just opinion based on study and experience.
Oh, the irony.
So today, in honor of mothers, and in this age when motherhood is increasingly under attack (and I’m not just referring to this abortion thing, but also the vilification of moms defending their kids against health mandates, against indoctrination from schools, and against long-standing advice/orders from established healthcare authority), I want to salute the moms who anguish about the what if. Who fight to protect their kids in whatever way they have to. Because even when our methods or what we’re fighting for are at odds, that shared instinct is deep.
Mothers are a force of nature. The world can do whatever it likes to try to take them down, but a world without mothers who fight for their children is a world that will not survive.
What do you read to her? I love to read and hope my son will also but even if he doesn’t I like to read to him too. Happy Mother’s Day!
Though they are all in college, my four nephews and nieces (ages 18-22) don't read much; none is what you might call "bookish". I wonder what this means? I certainly don't have a comprehensive answer, but one thing that comes to mind is that novels are exceptionally good at representing paradoxes and contradictions, and the way tragic forces shape life. Do my young relatives need complex representations of reality? Can they do without all this stuff? Time will tell. I wonder.