Four New Faves Celebrating Mamas and Grandmas
May 5, 2022 § 6 Comments
(Warning: I put on my most matronly dress to rage at the patriarchy.) Ouch, it’s a tough week to be a woman in this country. A tough week to contemplate the future for our daughters—and, let’s be honest, our sons, since a woman’s right to exercise autonomy over her body has always been inherently linked to the opposite sex. To say nothing of the repercussions SCOTUS’ decision will have for Black or Indigenous populations, or those living below the poverty line, or the precedent this could set for overturning protections for the LGBTQ+ community. We have only to dig into history to see that progress is never a straight line, but it’s one thing to recognize this and another to live it, to watch the work of generations collapse in a single moment. The list is growing long for horrifying things I never expected to witness in my lifetime.
Now, here we are, staring down Mother’s Day, an already complicated holiday for those mourning mothers, mourning children, mourning dreams of having children—and a day that now feels even more loaded, weighed down with the understanding that a woman’s body can be at once celebrated for its childbearing and stripped of its rights.
This is a cheery post, eh? Don’t worry, I promise we’re going to talk about some beautiful, uplifting, joyful books in just a second.
Yes, it’s a tough moment in history to be a woman. But, let’s not kid ourselves: it has always been a tough time to be a woman. Voting rights, equal pay, maternity leave, working outside the home, the right to wear pants, for crying out loud: the list for what women have been made to suffer is endless.
And still, I love being a woman. I love being a mom. I love following in the legacy of the curious, courageous, complicated women who raised me. When the fear of raising a daughter creeps in during times like this, I remember the strength of my own mother and grandmothers. My mom, who suffered the greatest heartbreak imaginable in the sudden death of my father at 51 and rallied to step into roles and master tasks she’d never imagined for herself, for the sake of her teenage daughters. My one grandmother, who for years endured physical pain without a word of complaint, because she didn’t want to miss out on a single family activity. My other grandmother, who attended science lectures in her 90s where she was the only woman, not because she knew anything about the topic, but because her own children and grandchildren’s involvement in the world had inspired her to expand her mind.
Today, I’m highlighting four new picture books that star formidable mothers and grandmothers—the kind I aspire to be, the kind who remind me that we will not go quietly into the night. Not when we know better, not when we’ve learned from the best. (You can also refer back to some older posts for favorites, like this, this, this, and this.)
« Read the rest of this entry »A Wickedly Special Read Aloud
April 14, 2022 Comments Off on A Wickedly Special Read Aloud
Last week, after a two-year interruption, my daughter and I returned to one of our favorite annual traditions: we took the train up to New York City to stay with my mom and explore the magical city where I grew up. Among the many adventures we had waited too long for, I took my daughter to Broadway for the first time, where we sat spellbound before the green lights and belting voices of Wicked. (I had actually seen the show as a Christmas present in 2003 with the original cast, including Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and I was worried no subsequent production could live up. As it turns out, it was every bit as incredible.)
Each time I take one of my kids to New York, I try and pick a special chapter book to read to them—bonus if it’s NYC-themed. (Past trips have featured this and this.) This year, I had my eye on the lavishly illustrated new chapter book, Cress Watercress (Ages 8-12, younger if reading aloud), which has absolutely nothing to do with New York City, but does happen to be written by Gregory Maguire, who wrote the novel behind the Broadway show on our itinerary. How’s that for sneaky?
Y’all. I know I get excited about a lot of books here. But this one is really, really special. A more widely appealing family read aloud you won’t find. A more fitting read for springtime you won’t find. A wittier, more darling, more deeply felt story you won’t find. This tale about a bunny named Cress, forced to relocate with her mother and baby brother in the forest after the devastating loss of her father, is about the highs and lows of starting over: of making a home, finding your people, and learning that it’s possible to make do with “good enough” when “good” is out of reach. It’s a story about love, sorrow, creativity, and renewal—and it’s penned with a depth that elevates it above your typical middle-grade animal story.
« Read the rest of this entry »The Stories We Need to Ask For
April 8, 2021 § 1 Comment
Occasionally, a book comes along that is so extraordinary, I’m daunted at the prospect of reviewing it. I worry I could never do it justice. I wish I could just say, This is hands down the most moving picture book I’ve read so far this year, and I want you to get it without knowing anything about it. Maybe, if you’ve been hanging around here for awhile, you’ll do just that. But I will try and find something eloquent to say for the rest of you.
Years ago, my husband helped his grandparents—first generation Italian-Americans—pack up their house to move into a retirement community. In the crawlspace, he uncovered boxes of mementos, all of which his grandmother had at one point tied up using the elastics from her husband’s old underwear. This discovery became one the family would chuckle about for years (Who salvages underwear elastic?!). But it was also a window into the past, a resourcefulness triggered by the Great Depression sixty years earlier, a self-reliance that perhaps belied pain, worry, wanting, loss. Only now does my husband express regret at not probing for the stories underscoring something he accepted as mere frugality.
All of us grow up surrounded by family history, including the cultural heritage this history often represents. Yet, as children, we often take this history for granted. At best, we’re blinded by our own fixation on the present; at worst, we’re embarrassed by the quirks of our elders, by their old-fashioned ways, by their insistence in holding fast to ideas or customs from their past.
Especially where immigrants are concerned, this silencing is further accentuated by the systemic racism underlying American society. Asian Americans, for example, are expected to fulfill the Model Minority Myth, to work hard towards prosperity, while keeping quiet about their struggles, past or present. The recent media attention on the massive spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans—up 1,900% since the start of the pandemic—has begun to open our eyes to an experience far from new, one we should have been talking about ages ago.
In the spirit of lifting up voices of Asian descent—and because this poignant story is at its heart about the value of listening to stories of the past—I urge you to purchase Watercress (Ages 5-9), Andrea Wang’s powerful autobiographical picture book, evocatively illustrated by Caldecott Honoree Jason Chin, who studied traditional Chinese landscape painting to infuse the story with added authenticity. (If Jason Chin doesn’t get his long-overdue Caldecott Medal for this, you will hear me screaming.) Against a backdrop of 1970s rural Ohio, a girl and her brother help their parents, immigrants from China, pick watercress on the side of a ditch to be served that evening. The immediate humiliation of the act later transforms into an opportunity for the girl to connect with her mother’s past life in China—and the grief she still carries in her heart.
« Read the rest of this entry »When You Don’t Have a Mute Button
October 1, 2020 § 2 Comments
If Tuesday’s presidential debate has taught us anything, it’s that 2020 should have come with a mute button. Because meditation alone isn’t going to cut it. Ditto to stocking our freezers with double-chocolate brownie ice cream. Adulting is hard enough right now without adding parenting (and schooling) to the mix. And yet, our children are bystanders to this hot mess unfolding around them. With our own blood pressure camped out at dangerously high levels, how do we offer some semblance of sanity for our precious little ones?
Back in July, I came across a blog post written by a practicing psychotherapist out of Colorado named Sara Waters. She was addressing the stress parents were feeling while waiting for schools to announce their reopening plans (HA, remember when we thought that was worth losing sleep over?). Like many parents at the time, I was spending way too much time crawling along the bottom of the Internet, desperate for someone to reassure me that my children would be safe this fall. Waters surfaced with the reassuring reminder that, while we might not be in control of what happens outside our front door, we can control what happens inside:
The number one most determining factor of your child’s 2020 experience is YOUR ability to manage your OWN discomfort. Mirror neurons are real and even children who haven’t yet learned to understand or speak language will pick up on the quantum vibrational frequencies of distress that you emit. Your children hear you talk, even when you aren’t talking to them. They hear you complain. They hear you vent. They watch your facial expressions when you are on a phone call or responding to an email or social media post on your computer. They can feel whether you are relaxed or whether you are in a state of stress when you wake them up in the morning, sit down for a family meal, or tuck them into bed at night. […] Whether you like it or are aware of it or not, they will feel what you feel.
I’ve thought about this reminder many times since that last week in July, including and especially when I picked up Cozbi A. Cabrera’s joyous new picture book, Me & Mama (Ages 2-6), a lyrical celebration of the bond between one daughter and her mother. Reading this story is like wrapping yourself in a cocoon of domestic love. Reminiscent of one of last year’s favorites—Oga More’s Saturday—this book speaks directly to the power we hold as parents to set tone, to cue young children’s feelings about the world and their place in it.
We sometimes forget that motherhood comes with its own special set of superpowers. We can smile at our children; we can dance in their presence; we can light up when they walk in the room. None of the stressors in the world can compete with that.
Bringing Down the House
April 16, 2020 § 2 Comments
My kids love hearing stories about when they were babies. They especially love stories that involve crying. Inexplicable crying. Endless crying. Crying that brought down the house.
When our eldest was a newborn, he screamed bloody murder whenever we bathed him. It didn’t matter what we tried. We sang to him. We playfully splashed him. We made funny faces at him. Aren’t babies supposed to love bath time? we asked ourselves. Does he hate water? Does he hate us? Night after night, he’d scream, his face turning purple, his fists tightly clenched, his tiny legs kicking furiously.
A few weeks later, a friend gave us a baby gift. Tied to the top was a yellow rubber ducky. A duck, a duck! Surely a toy would be the golden ticket. That night, after we’d filled the oblong plastic tub from the kitchen tap, we tossed in the duck—and watched with horror as it turned from yellow to fire-engine red. Apparently, the duck had a sensor designed to gauge the proper temperature for itty bitty newborns unaccustomed to bathing outside utero. We thought we were running a nice, soothing, warm bath for our baby boy every night. Instead, we were scalding him. We turned on the cold for a few minutes, slowly lowered JP into the tub, and he smiled like he had never smiled before.
Well, dang.
Earlier this week, a delightful picture book was birthed into the world by Kara LaReau and Matthew Cordell. Baby Clown (Ages 3-6) is about a newborn circus clown who wails and wails and wails, despite the attempts of his adults to hush, soothe, distract, or entertain him. It got me thinking: maybe the reason children relish hearing stories about babies crying is because they seem to defy the natural order of things. How is it possible that these tiny, helpless, innocent beings can wield so much power over their wise, capable, fully-grown adults?
2019 Gift Guide: Favorite Picture Book of the Year (and How Family Should Be)
November 21, 2019 § 6 Comments
How it’s almost Thanksgiving I’ll never know, but the season of giving will soon be upon us. Seeing as I’ve read more this year than any other, I think it’s fair to say my 2019 Gift Guide won’t disappoint. I’m aiming to include something for every child and teen on your list. As has become tradition on this blog, I begin with my favorite picture book of the year (although spoiler: this year I have TWO, so stay tuned). Past years have seen this, this, and this. It has been hard keeping this one a secret…although timing for today’s reveal feels especially fitting.
Growing up, I always preferred Thanksgiving to Christmas. I would never have admitted this; it seemed odd as a child to prefer a holiday of sitting around, eating off formal china, and making conversation with grown-ups—over one with presents and candy and caroling. But there was something about the warmth and coziness of Thanksgiving which seduced me: returning home frozen after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to an apartment abounding with hissing radiators and the smell of roasting turkey. There was the comfort of looking around the room and seeing the people I loved and not having the distraction of which gifts might be under the tree and which, disappointingly, might not.
It’s not lost on me that the timing of Thanksgiving plays a role in its appeal. After all, Thanksgiving kicks off the Holiday Season. It’s a time of anticipation, and there’s nothing more alluring to a young child than possibility. It may not be the holiday of presents, but it’s a road sign pointing towards the presents. Pointing towards the twinkling lights and crackling fires and colorful wrappings.
Still, there can be a kind of magic in and of itself created by family—and, if we’re lucky, it becomes almost tangible on Thanksgiving Day. For a few short hours, the world outside falls away, and the inside jokes and knowing glances and lingering hugs take center stage. Dishes are prepared with love and displayed in beautiful ways, and we relish the bounty of this precious togetherness.
In her exquisite new picture book, Home in the Woods (Ages 4-8)—one of the finest examples of bookmaking I’ve ever encountered—Eliza Wheeler invokes her grandmother’s childhood to tell the story of a family who manages to make magic for themselves, even in the toughest of times. (You might remember Wheeler from this long ago favorite. Since then, she has mostly illustrated others’ texts. So happy to see her back in the seat of author and illustrator, because her writing is every bit as evocative as her art.)
Gift Guide: Moon Nibbles
December 4, 2018 § 1 Comment
On the list of books published this year which make me wish my children were little(r), Grace Lin’s A Big Mooncake for Little Star (Ages 2-5) is at the top. How I used to love reading stories about the moon to my kids (like this, this, and this). For our littlest ones, the world outside their windows is big and new and constantly changing. When they tuck inside the crooks of our arms and listen to us read, they’re seeking reassurance as much as understanding. In that vain, perhaps it’s not surprising that the ever-shifting moon is such a popular subject for children’s book creators, representing as it does the mystery, vastness, and allurement of the universe. « Read the rest of this entry »
Motherhood is Not a Finish Line
May 11, 2017 § 8 Comments
Last week, I was at Trader Joe’s buying flowers for my daughter, who would have the unique opportunity of performing at the Kennedy Center that evening with her community choir. My head was spinning while I was waiting in line to pay, going down the mental checklist of what needed to happen before heading to the concert hall (iron Emily’s uniform, print the parking pass, get the snacks together, etc.). Suddenly, the checkout woman interrupted my train of thought. “These flowers are such a gorgeous orange,” she remarked. I halfheartedly explained that the flowers were for my daughter, that she had a performance that night, and that orange was her favorite color. “These little joys make parenting so worth it,” she mused. “Yes,” I agreed, assuming she was talking about my being in the audience in a few hours. “It’s going to be so exciting.”
“Oh, I’m sure the performance will be great,” she replied, “but I was talking about getting to pick out flowers for your little girl.”
Tugging at the Heartstrings (A Mother’s Day Post)
May 5, 2016 § 1 Comment
“Mommy, I wish this day would last forever,” my daughter said into my eyes last Saturday, in our third hour of watching street performers under a brilliant blue sky in Washington Square Park. It was our annual trip to New York City, something I’m lucky enough to do every fall with my son and every spring with my daughter. We had just spent an action-filled few days looking at art, making art, dining in style and dining at street vendors—but there was something about these unstructured hours in the park, the sun finally making itself felt, where I watched my daughter become totally and completely entranced by her surroundings.
There was a woman with hot pink hair on one side of her; a woman with a brilliant purple head wrap on the other. Emily sat on the rounded edge of a fountain that wasn’t in use, watching shirtless men in baggy blue sweatpants flip backwards and spin on their heads where the water would normally flow. In the distance, she could still keep her eyes on the creepy but fascinating human sculpture—a bald man (woman?) adorned in chalky gold body paint, who stood frozen atop a slim pedestal, waiting for someone to drop a dollar into his bucket, at which point he would slowly come out of the pose and strike another. « Read the rest of this entry »
A Mother’s Greatest Gifts to Her Children
May 7, 2015 § 4 Comments
In this age, where our self-worth seems increasingly defined by how busy we are, I find that one of my greatest challenges as a mother is quieting the “to do” list in my head when I am around my children. I’m not talking about simply spending time with them. I’m talking about being in the moment with them. I might be on the floor playing Candy Land, but I’m secretly fretting over when I should start dinner. I might be throwing a ball in the backyard, but I’m all the while thinking about the mountain of weeding that needs to get done.
My children know I love them. But how often do they feel the gift of my time?
This winter, I fell in love with a picture book by the lovely Scottish author-illustrator, Debi Gliori, titled Dragon’s Extraordinary Egg (Ages 4-8). It’s about dragons, yes, but it’s also about penguins and a landscape of ice and snow, so by all accounts, I should have shared it with you in the height of snow days and sub-zero temperatures. Except that it’s also one of the most beautiful portraits of motherhood that I’ve ever come across in a children’s book (it’s right up there with this one). So, I’ve been saving telling you about it until Mother’s Day, a time for celebrating those who are trying so hard every day to do right by the little ones we love. « Read the rest of this entry »
The Story Behind the Gift (In Honor of Mother’s Day)
May 8, 2014 § 1 Comment
Last year, at about this time, JP came home from school proudly toting a plastic grocery bag filled with the contents of his “work drawer.” I was nearly giddy with excitement at the prospect of getting a glimpse into his work over the past few months, endeavors in addition and subtraction, story writing, and cursive practice, about which I had heard only mumblings in response to my daily inquisition, “What did you do at school?” After we ate snack together and his sister had lost herself in a project, I sat down, folded my hands on the dining room table, and watched eagerly as JP began to unpack the bag’s contents. Not many “oohs” and “ahhs” had gone by, before I realized that most of papers bore the signatures of other children. Daphne. Josh. Helena. “But, honey, where’s the work that you did?” I finally asked. And, as if that was the silliest question in the world (duh), JP informed me: “I gave it away to my friends!”
It wasn’t but a few days later that I casually mentioned this exchange to JP’s teacher. I know Montessori is more about the process than the end result, I told her, but wouldn’t it be nice to see some tangible results of my tuition, ha ha ha? “It is ironic, isn’t it,” she replied. “We spend years hoping, pleading, begging our children to share. Then we complain when they want to give everything away.” How true! « Read the rest of this entry »
An Easter Bunny All Moms Can Get Behind
April 15, 2014 Comments Off on An Easter Bunny All Moms Can Get Behind
When JP was three years old, and I went from working full time to staying home full time, these were the thoughts that kept me up at night: What will happen when my children see me as “just a mom” instead of as a mom and a professional? Will they respect the work I do? Will they think of it with the same importance that they bestow upon their father, when he leaves for the office every morning? Will they grow up believing that women aren’t capable of the same career success as men—or entitled to make the same sacrifices, reap the same compensation for comparable work? Will I be a role model for them or merely someone whom they take for granted?
In the past four years, I have largely reconciled my angst around these questions. I’m keenly aware that even to have the choice to stay home is a luxury not afforded to all—and one that could abruptly end for me someday. The work that I do every day on behalf of my kids, my husband, and our house makes all of us happy. But I’m also aware that when I did work 9-5, the time that I made for my (at the time only) child was quality, focused time. I got down on the floor and played with my son more than I probably do today, when too often I’m in the kitchen or chatting to other moms on the sidelines of playdates. I think about my own mom, who was around every single day, and how out-of-this-world excited I got when my dad’s car pulled into the driveway at night. There is perhaps some inevitability in taking for granted quantity and romanticizing quality.
But perhaps at no time do I feel greater validation as a mother—stay-at-home or not—than when I take out The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (Ages 4-10) and read Du Bose Heyward’s 1939 classic to my kids each Easter season. As much as the story is a celebration of traditional motherhood, it is also one of the earliest feminist tales—for a simple mother bunny outwits her bigger, stronger, prouder, and more handsome male competitors to earn the coveted position of fifth Easter Bunny. « Read the rest of this entry »
What to Read to Your Kids 