There are way too many awesome things about being a librarian to list here. You know that joy you feel when you see your kid falling in love with a book you had as a kid? Or when you see him lugging a huge pile of books up to his bedroom so that he can spend hours lolling on his bed, surrounded by his newest treasures? Yeah, well I get to experience that all the time. I'm sure I'd get it even more if I worked in a library that had books that I could half-way understand, but that's another story. The short version is that I really, really love being a librarian. But last night, I broke all the unspoken librarian rules and morphed into a parent. I'm thinking of calling that ALA on myself...
E, our nine year old, has always been a precocious reader, but he's also a timid reader in the sense that certain themes scare the daylights out of him. He tends to choose books that are WAY below his reading level because the subject matter is safer. Let's just say he's a sensitive reader. Heck, he's sensitive about everything; he couldn't watch the Fox and the Hound because there was too much yelling. Seriously. So it baffles me just a bit that he loves books about wars and battles, but being the supportive librarian that I am, I encourage his love of reading and ignore the topic. But last night was different. TDH Man, also a librarian, knows E's love of history and these particular topics so he picked out seven or eight new books for him. He picked them up from our local library the other night and E sat on the couch, engrossed for an hour before coming up for a breath. Last night, before bed, E asked me if he could take a book about the Vietnam War to day camp today. And I did the unthinkable: I told him no.
Even worse, I told him "I think that some people wouldn't be pleased to see a young boy reading a book about war."
Gracious.
Sometimes I'm clueless. I fully admit that. Sometimes I don't even realize what I've done until it's over and this was one of those times. I mentioned to TDH Man that E had asked me about taking the book to camp and he said "Why not?" and I realized what I had done. I'd censored my own child. For shame, really, for shame.
So, this morning, I atoned for my mistake. As he was walking downstairs, the challenged book in hand to pore over while eating breakfast, I called him over to me. And I told him that it was wrong of me to tell him he couldn't take that book. I told him that it shouldn't matter to anyone else what he wants to read and that if he really wanted to read it, he could take it with him.
He tried to suppress a smile, but I could see he was pleased. Whether or not it was because he was able to take the book or because he caught his mom apologizing, I don't know. My hope is that it's a lesson he'll remember.
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