How to remove obstacles with a newspaper

When I was in kindergarten, my mother would read me stories every evening before I went to sleep. And while I was happy that I could hear the story, I would have liked to be able to read it myself. There were times I didn’t like the stories mom was choosing. Other times I would love one story so much that I would have liked to hear it again and again, every night, and she would get tired of it and say, “no more.” 

I wanted to be able to read. Choose the stories, and re-read the ones I loved for days in weeks. I asked my mom to teach me to read. She was a teacher, after all. But she told me that the time to learn to write and read is when I will go to school. There is no need for you to learn before it, she said.

One early spring afternoon,  I was about 4 years old, I took a blank sheet of paper and put it on top of a newspaper. I copied every letter from the newspaper onto the blank paper sheet. A full page. It took me a very long time. I don’t know if it was one hour or many hours, time seems to pass at a different speed when you are 4 years old, but I felt like it took me forever.

When I finished the entire page, I went to my mom and said – look, mom, I know how to write. Would you now please teach me to read.  

She got angry. To this day, I don’t understand why she got angry, but she did. She told me that it is called rubbish, not writing. She said you should not waste your time with this “pretending” writing but wait to learn it properly in school. Learn to do it properly.

I started to cry. I so much want to read, mom, I said. You didn’t want to help, so I tried to do it alone, but this is all I could do. Why are you angry?

Her voice calmer now, she asked – you wouldn’t give up, would you? I looked back at her with tears in my eyes - I can’t wait, mom; I need to read now.

So, she taught me to read.

When summer came, and we visited my grandparents, I could already read short stories.  It took me a long time to finish one story (and be able to find out what happened in the end)  - but the whole process brought me a kind of joy I had never experienced before. And when I would find a story I really liked, I would hide with the book in the cornfield near my grandparent’s house and read it again and again until I heard my grandma’s voice calling me to dinner.

To this day, when I find a book I like, I look for the cornfield kind of place, a gate to the imaginary world.