I remember speaking to someone when I became pregnant with Magoo. I was filled with all of the feelings soon-to-be mamas have. I was excited and nervous and so filled with love. But one thing I was really afraid of was losing myself. I was so afraid of getting caught up in motherhood that everything else would fail to matter to me.
Well, I had the baby and I became a mother, and about 6 years later I started looking at my life. I realized that I had, indeed, lost a big part of myself. I was no longer teaching. I wasn’t really interacting with anyone besides my family.
I didn’t lose everything I loved. I loved reading, and so I read frequently with my children. I enjoyed knitting and crocheting, so I was knitting and crocheting stuff for them. Basically, I still had the important pieces, but none of them were looking back at me. They were all directed outward.
And lest this sound like a bad thing, I want to clarify that I do not believe it is. I think most of our lives should be spent looking outward.
But the thing with motherhood is that a large part of it is a character job. Sure, we spend most of our time serving our families and meeting their needs, but while we perform these important tasks, our children are watching us. They are looking to us to see what we value and how we spend our time and our resources. They are looking at our relationships – those with them, with our spouses, with our friends, with our own selves, and with God.
I always think that the single most important part of being a good parent is to first be a good person. If you love your children and you strive to be a good person, you will probably raise some fairly decent human beings.
But what I realized a few years ago was that I was stagnating as a person. I wasn’t growing very much. Everything I had was flowing out of me, but because nothing was coming back in to replenish me, my gifts weren’t quite as generous as they used to be. I was getting irritable. I was losing my temper. I was getting depressed and anxious. I felt a bit empty.
And so I put a call out to facebook and I asked people if they wanted to join a book club. And some wonderful women accepted.
And that’s when I started to read again.
We have read all sorts of different books over the years. Some good, some bad. But through the act of reading, I realized that I could take time for myself. And I learned that the moments I took for myself didn’t have to be stolen. I could make space for them. I could save space for them.
It’s not like I had spent those years prior not reading. I was constantly reading. But it was mainly news and politics. Important topics for the world but not necessarily relevant (or even beneficial) for my soul and my character.
And then about a year ago, a friend of mine started a Well Read Mom group in our area, and I jumped at the opportunity. WRM is for mothers who want to journey through the classics and great books together, learning and growing in the process.
And this book group has changed my life in many ways. Now I look forward to reading more than I ever have. When I have free moments, reading has once again become what it is that I choose to do.
And the fellowship is amazing. I learn so much from these women – both about the books and about life in general. These books and conversations change the way I see myself, my family, and my vocation. It has redefined what I see our life journey as.
I earned my Masters degree in literature, but then for many years, I simply stopped reading fiction. I liked the simplicity of memoir. You didn’t have to read as deeply into things. What happened, happened. You can, in many ways, take memoir at its face value.
And I still love reading memoirs.
But this group has taught me how much fiction can teach us about the world. After all, stories can be more real than real life.
I remember once I had a friend who wasn’t too keen on reading. She believed that reading just served to indoctrinate you into the mindset of someone else. She thought it was unoriginal. Reading was for people who couldn’t really think on their own.
I look back on that, and I have to laugh a bit. It’s through reading that I have found myself most easily. It is through other characters and their traits and strengths and weaknesses that I can see how I want (and don’t want!) to move through life.
Reading hasn’t saved my life. But it has informed it, and it has made it so very much richer.
How about you? Why do you read? What do you read? What benefit do you get from it? I would love to hear!