Jan. 1, 2009, NY Times
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.
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.
I miss the days when I felt that way, curled up in a corner and able to get lost in pretty much any plot. I loved stories indiscriminately, because each revealed the world in a way I had never considered before. The effect was so profound that I can still remember vividly the experiences of reading “Little Women” (in my bedroom, by flashlight) and “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” (in a Reader’s Digest condensed version at my grandmother’s) and “The Diamond in the Window” (sitting cross-legged on the linoleum amid the stacks at the public library). And a thousand others. After each, I would emerge a changed person.
This has nothing to do with the way I “read” these days, with piles of books sitting forlornly on the night table, skimmed and dog-eared and dusty as they wait listlessly for me to feel a compelling urge to return to them, to finish “Beginner’s Greek” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or even, God help me, “Midnight’s Children.”
That I can be sitting here now in another room two floors away from those half-digested stories and be engaged, without longing for them, in an entirely different activity is not something I would have believed possible when I was young.
I am not sure when or exactly how I started merely reading books instead of living in them. I could make the usual excuses about how I no longer have the luxury of time to give in to my imagination; when I sit down with a book, I feel the pressure — of unfinished work, unfolded laundry, unpaid bills. But I suppose the true reason is sadder. It’s an inevitable byproduct of growing up that I formed too many opinions of my own to be able to give in wholeheartedly to the prospect of living inside someone else’s universe.
Unfortunately there is only a narrow window of time, after one learns to read but before one gets old enough to read critically, to fully appreciate the sweet sadness of “Mick Harte Was Here” or the orphan’s longing in “Taash and the Jesters” — I read that one eight times the summer I was 10 — or the trapped restlessness of being the teenaged “Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.”
Among my three daughters, whose ages are 19, 17 and 11, I see signs of an inevitable progression toward being skeptical readers.
I fear Zoe, the oldest, has completely lost the childhood gift of being able to suspend disbelief. Last week, in an attempt to delay the transition, I dug out for her one of my favorite frothy romances — an Elinor Lipman novel called “The Inn at Lake Devine.”
But results of that experiment were mixed.
“How was it?” I asked a few days later.
“I couldn’t stop reading it,” she said, before adding, with regret, “but I knew from the beginning how it would turn out.”
Ella, my middle daughter, has been taught in high school to be an analytical reader. I have mixed feelings about this: good preparation for taking standardized tests, but bad for someone who is trying to revel without reservation in the absurd plot twists of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” It took me hours to persuade her it was O.K. to turn her back on everything she had learned in science class about the time-space continuum.
Clementine, who is 11, is the luckiest. She’s still young, so she was able to leave the rest of us behind for whole days this year when she was off somewhere else, inhabiting the world of a sign-language-knowing chimp in “Hurt Go Happy.”
Currently, she totes around the house one or another of the doorstopper-heavy volumes in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-loves-mortal-girl series. She comes to the dinner table wearing the hollow-eyed, devotional expression of someone who has just glimpsed something wonderful in a distant land.
Although there is much about the vampire books to make an adult reader roll her eyes — Edward is too controlling and Bella has the sort of low self-esteem mothers hope will never plague their own daughters — I understand the appeal. At Clementine’s age, I too would have been able to smell Edward and feel the delicious iciness of his breath on the back of my neck. And at several hundred pages apiece, the series of four easily would have carried me through winter break.
E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com