“Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.”
— Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, June 26, 2015
Getting married is not as easy as living alone. When you live alone, no one cares if you leave the dishes in the sink for days or forget to put your shoes away or neglect to maintenance the car. When you live alone, you can come home from teaching and only eat a tortilla with peanut butter for dinner, and then write semi-bad fiction for hours before you binge-watch several episodes of “Orange is the New Black” and then come to bed in a clatter of noise and light. When you live alone, you can let all the negative emotions simmer for days in your body until you develop pneumonia, exhausted.
When you live alone, you can tell yourself, “This is better. This is easier. I don’t have to negotiate with anyone. I’m just fine by myself. This is evidence that I am a strong woman.”
And in the middle of the night, when you wake from a nightmare, and the dark room looms over you, and you turn on all the lights, a lump in your throat, you can comfort yourself, because that is the only other person in the room.
When you live alone, you tell yourself, Don’t accountants say getting married doesn’t make good financial sense? And anyway, haven’t you tried marriage already? You failed, remember? Yes, he was a man, and you realized you were gay, but still, you failed.
When you live alone, you tell yourself, Don’t accountants say getting married doesn’t make good financial sense? And anyway, haven’t you tried marriage already? You failed, remember? Yes, he was a man, and you realized you were gay, but still, you failed.
And when you finally meet a woman, and your body and your soul pulls you toward making a life with her, you shrink, afraid. Why do it? Why get married? Why stand in front of your family and friends and look this woman in her brown-ringed-with-gold eyes and say, “I promise,” and “I do”, and “I will love you the best I can for my life”?
It doesn’t make logical sense, right? Sometimes, it will be very hard. Sometimes, it will be unpredictable. Sometimes, you’ll stand in your kitchen and look at her and feel infuriated by something she’s said or not done. Sometimes, she’ll look at you with disappointment or with irritation. Your life together will be unpredictable. You might lose her. Actually, you will lose her. Someday in the future, one of you will have to look at the other one fading away, her white hair spread like rays on a pillow.
Why leap into such pain?
This morning, I woke to Meredith’s soft cheek against mine, her arms around me. I still floated in my dream, but when I murmured something incomprehensible, she pulled me closer and said she loved me. In one week, we get to marry each other, she murmured into my hair, and smiling, I opened my eyes and kissed her.
I used to insist I preferred living alone. Even for months after I met Meredith, after we began to spend hours together, and never ran out of words to say, and found that no amount of time was enough, I insisted — to her — that I didn’t want marriage. Better to have good friends. It’s so much less of a risk. Anyway, why were LGBT people fighting to get into the institutions of marriage and the military? Isn’t it better to create our own ways of being, to live happily alone and then sometimes come together to kiss and spend some hours?
Meredith was patient. She held me carefully then as she does now. She never articulated arguments for marriage (though she thought them), but instead cooked beside me, camped with me and Mitike, watched movies with me, talked with me into the small hours. And then all of a sudden, I understood that I wanted to share all my days with her. I don’t know when this happened, but I think it was probably an ordinary moment (Emerson: “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common”). I think maybe Meredith was slicing red cabbage for coleslaw or she was scratching our dog behind his ears or she was laughing about something I had just said or she was listening carefully to Mitike or she was gazing off into space with her fingertips resting on her eyebrow as she does when she’s thinking. It wasn’t a moment of angel trumpets and bright neon lights. It was just a moment in what had already become our shared lives together, though we still lived at different addresses. And it hurt because I understood, in a flash: even when it’s hard, I want to live beside this woman. Even when she’s sick. Even when we’re irritated with each other. Even when I’m exhausted and I can’t be soft and kind. Even when we don’t know what the next day will hold. Because this hard work of companionship is richer and more what life intends for us than being alone.
If I’d read those words when I was single, I would have felt angry resentment. How dare anyone talk about how the universe intends us to live and learn in relationship, when it’s not an option for some of us, or when some of us tried and then lost it? And I would have been right, just as I am right to say: here in my current life is you, and I choose you to be my wife, to be no other than yourself, to love what I know of you and to trust what I do not yet know, to support you in becoming the person you want to be, to nurture my faith in your abiding love through all our years, and in all that life may bring us.
Marriage is serious, and though it doesn’t make people’s lives easier, it does make them richer.
Last June, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” Marriage is serious, and though it doesn’t make people’s lives easier, it does make them richer. This June, Meredith and I will choose to become more than two individual women, but a couple, committed to struggle with and rejoice in this life together. Because it’s harder. Because it’s ultimately lovelier to walk through this life hand in hand with someone you cherish and who cherishes you.
When I started my column this month, I intended to write about the one-year anniversary of that Supreme Court decision. I wrote several drafts in which I discussed the dissenters’ opinions, and then lauded Kennedy’s statements. In one draft, I wrote my own experience against the backdrop of those conflicting opinions, explaining that it’s still difficult to be a lesbian even in a nation that allows me to legally marry my wife. But none of those drafts felt right, and I didn’t understand why, until Meredith — my best editor — said quietly, “Why don’t you write about how we’re just like any other couple, gay or straight? We’re a regular couple getting married. Write about that.”
Meredith and I are now like every other couple who walks into a county office in the United States and says, “We’d like to apply for a marriage license.” We are like every other couple who takes a deep breath and — though it will be difficult, and though it’s a crazy risk — dives into marriage together.
And that is what last year’s Supreme Court decision was all about, anyway. Legally, Meredith and I are now like every other couple who walks into a county office in the United States and says, “We’d like to apply for a marriage license.” We are like every other couple who takes a deep breath and — though it will be difficult, and though it’s a crazy risk — dives into marriage together.
Last year, Justice Kennedy had to argue to the nation that Meredith and I deserve “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” that we deserve to be included in “one of civilization’s oldest institutions”.
This year, we just get to hold hands with each other and, while our nine-year-old daughter and our family and friends look on, we get to say “yes” to each other, to a life greater than any we would have led alone.
On April Fool’s Day, Google unveiled its new (fake) product, the Cardboard Plastic headset, which enables its wearer to experience, in 4D, “Actual Reality.”
The morning I read this satirical headline on my iPhone, I was standing in line with my fiancée, Meredith, and my daughter, Mitike, at the Orlando airport after three frenetic days at Universal Studios, a place where unreality seems incredibly real — and where a writer on spring break vacation can muse about what is real and unreal, and why it matters.
We visited Universal (which includes the Wizarding World of Harry Potter) because Mitike loves the Harry Potter series. All year, we’ve read the books aloud as a family, watching each movie after we completed the book. For Christmas and her birthday (and possibly next Christmas, too), Meredith and I gave Mitike the spring break trip to Orlando, complete with tickets to Universal. Santa Claus gave her a Gryffindor robe and a wand, with a note: “I think you may need this.” And so the drift from Actual Reality began.
I expected an amusement park… I didn’t expect that, inside Universal, it becomes disturbingly difficult to decipher what is real from what is not.
I expected an amusement park; I expected Meredith and I would share wise smiles at the special effects. I didn’t expect that, inside Universal, it becomes disturbingly difficult to decipher what is real from what is not. Of course, the dragon that breathes fire periodically from the top of the Gringotts Bank is some sort of mechanical creation. Of course, the “magic spells” TK’s new interactive wand could perform are connections between motion detectors. And of course we didn’t reallytake a mining cart down into the bowels of Gringotts.
However, we did sit in a startlingly real old English square and sip butterbeer under the hanging signs of Diagon Alley, and we did converse with a goblin. When we stepped back into the Leicester Square Station, I blinked to see the San Francisco wharf. Later, we took a boat cruise into Jurassic Park, and the stegosaurus looked quite alive, its sides heaving with breath. Back in Hogsmeade again, we wandered into a real Hogwarts Castle, and all the paintings moved and spoke, and I couldn’t remember what was real anymore, actually.
What is real? Our second day at Universal, we stood in a movie theater and cowered at the sound of gunshots in the Terminator 2 3-D show, grinning at each other because we knew it wasn’t real. After all, at the entrance to Universal Studios, serious security guards search every bag of every visitor, and every person has to walk through a metal detector. We were far safer in the Terminator 2 show than we ever are in Colorado movie theaters or Colorado schools.
What is real is terrifying. What is unreal is entertaining.
What is real is terrifying. What is unreal is entertaining — like the ridiculous message in Terminator that robots will someday dominate humans. Let me check my iPhone and ask Siri to make sure it’s not real.
What is real? In the long lines for the rides at Universal, families watch each other. How can that father scold his son so harshly? How didthose two get together? The teenager in that family looks miserable. Why is that twenty-something guy in line for a Harry Potter ride all by himself? And us? What do people see and think when they look at us? So that’s what a lesbian family looks like. Did they adopt that little girl, or did one of them carry her? Do they braid her hair themselves? Or: they’re sinners, living like that.
What is real? In the long lines for the rides at Universal, families watch each other. How can that father scold his son so harshly? How didThe line shuffles forward. We all nod at each other, and smile.
What is real? A woman walks by us in the New York part of Universal, trailing her two children and her husband, fixated on her phone. She smiles to herself as she scrolls through the family photos that she has presumably just posted on Facebook — photos of the four of them in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which they’ve just left. But this woman is missing the way her little daughter stares up at the fake New York skyline in awe, and the way her son tilts his head toward his father to listen. This woman is missing, too, the gentle angle of the late afternoon sun on the lagoon, the real way her family is here together. She nearly collides with us, so absorbed is she in the unreal world of her phone.
What is real? On our way to the airport in Denver, at the beginning of our trip, Mitike called to us from the backseat, “Look at how beautiful the mountains are! Take a picture on your phone!”
What is real? On our way to the airport in Denver, at the beginning of our trip, Mitike called to us from the backseat, “Look at how beautiful the mountains are! Take a picture on your phone!” The Front Range glowed orange in the sunset, and I murmured, “Once, people just enjoyed them without worrying about how to post their experiences on Facebook.” Meredith laughed, “Once people just worried about how to cross them.”
True. But at Universal Studios, twice, I caught myself admiring the etched silhouette of the mountains, glad I could glimpse them, until — twice — I had to remind myself that I was standing in flat central Florida, and that those “mountains” were a movie set Steven Spielberg had designed for the “King Kong: Skull Island” experience. The set is quite convincing. It looks real, even to a Colorado girl.
What is real? We lament that Donald Trump’s candidacy “can’t be real.” When our children have nightmares, we reassure them: “It wasn’t real.” When tragedy strikes, we cry, “This can’t be real!” When a friend’s brother visited her in Alaska, he exclaimed, “The glacier looks like a movie set — it doesn’t look real!”
What is real? We long for it — be real with me, we tell our close friends, our lovers — but it’s elusive. The moment we think we have glimpsed it, it shifts, and we don’t believe it anymore. You love me? Is this real?
What is real? We long for it — be real with me, we tell our close friends, our lovers — but it’s elusive. The moment we think we have glimpsed it, it shifts, and we don’t believe it anymore. You love me? Is this real?
Universal Studios does not try to answer any of these questions about reality for its thrill-seekers. Unapologetically, the park encourages visitors to leave their Actual Reality glasses at the entrance gate with the security guards. The intention, as with every movie and novel, is to forget reality a while, to visit an invented space.
But maybe we also visit places like Universal — and read novels, and watch movies — because visiting the invented for a while reminds us to recognize and love what is real. At the Orlando airport on our final morning in Florida, just as I finished reading the headline about the Google Cardboard Plastic headset, the TSA agent nodded at the three of us to move forward. “One of her moms can go through the scanner with her,” she said, pointing at our daughter. Without blinking.
What is real: people in this country have begun to see us as a family. I smiled at Meredith. No Cardboard Plastic headset needed — sometimes, the 4D experience of Actual Reality is sweet.
What is real: people in this country have begun to see us as a family. I smiled at Meredith. No Cardboard Plastic headset needed — sometimes, the 4D experience of Actual Reality is sweet.
I loved visiting Universal Studios. I returned to Jurassic Park again and again, the little girl in me ecstatic to see dinosaurs “for real.” I loved watching my daughter’s open-mouthed wonder inside Hogwarts Castle, and I loved Meredith’s appreciation of the quiet (fake) San Francisco wharf. I love drifting away for a while into imagination. But I also love returning.
Right now, for example, I’m writing from a corner of the deck at my in-laws’ in Evergreen, Colorado, gazing every so often at the real skyline of mountains, the real blue sky, enjoying the real sun on my shoulders. A three-toed woodpecker and a chickadee take turns visiting the bird feeder to my right, and all around me, the spruce and pines stand in stately silence, real snow at their feet.
At the moment, I want only this Actual Reality: my daughter, running out to hug me and to ask if she can eat a piece of chocolate; my dog, who sprawls happily beside me in the sun; and Meredith, who is napping upstairs right now (still recovering from our Orlando trip), who intends to marry me in two months, and who loves me, for all that I am. For real.
At my first parent-teacher conference at my daughter’s kindergarten, one of the newer instructors asked me why my daughter would often re-read books that were “too easy” for her.
My daughter was already a strong reader by then. She’d taught herself, although we didn’t know about her new skill until sometime before her third birthday; she held up a cup at a restaurant, pointed to the words, and told us, “This says, Have fun.”
It did say, Have fun. We rushed through dinner and zipped home so that I could hold up magazines and novels and point to random (easy) words to ask her what they were. By the end of the evening, we had confirmed that she knew how to read.
There was no stopping her after tha—no.
That’s not true.
That makes it sound like it was never-ending progress: a rush toward fluency and proficiency when it was not like that at all.
Yes, every day, month, and year, she read harder, more complicated things. But as that teacher noted, she would also go back and re-read books—picture books, board books, books without words. She went forward. She went back. She re-read more than she read.
Yes, every day, month, and year, she read harder, more complicated things. But as that teacher noted, she would also go back and re-read books—picture books, board books, books without words. She went forward. She went back. She re-read more than she read. We didn’t push her; she was in charge of her pace. The main thing that we did was to make sure there was always something for her to read. We took her to bookstores and libraries. We let her pick out and renew what interested her. We read to her when that was what she wanted. We left her alone when she needed that, too.
It didn’t occur to us to do anything different. So when the teacher asked us why—more out of curiosity than judgment—why my daughter re-read so often, I was surprised. I muttered something about familiar books being comforting, and the teacher seemed content with that. It never occurred to me to tell my daughter not to re-read. I had done the same as a child, too. And for me, yes, re-reading was a way to soothe myself. But re-reading was also a way of marking how much I had learned.
The text of a book doesn’t change—most of the time. A couple of authors have on occasion gone back to update details. (For example, Judy Blume altered a scene in later editions of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret so that the protagonist used stick-on maxi pads instead of the belt and fastener that was prevalent when her classic children’s novel was first published in 1970.)
But for the most part, what changes is not the book, but the reader.
There are the jokes written for adults (by adults) in stories meant for children that most kids aren’t likely to find funny until later. Or there are the scenes where there are emotional currents that children—the protagonists of the book and maybe the young reader—don’t necessarily understand.
For example, I was reading middle-grade writer Susan Tan’s latest book, Cilla Lee-Jenkins: This Book Is a Classic recently, and came across this passage:
Until right as I was about to put together the triceratops’s tail, I heard a conversation that made me stop and pay attention.
They were still talking about the wedding. And my mom said, “Just remember, this is your day. All that matters is you and Paul. Everyone else will deal.”
“Yeah,” my dad said. “Also the trick is knowing how to manage Mom. She can be a handful, but you just have to know how to keep her happy.”
“That’s easy for you to say, big brother,” Auntie Eva said. “You’re the son—you just have to show up and be yourself and you’ll make Mom and Dad happy. I have to be perfect…”
Cilla is an optimistic, aspiring writer. She’s in third grade and happens to be biracial. Her beloved aunt is about to get married, and the event brings out tensions in the family that Cilla doesn’t quite understand. Adults may be able to unpack all that’s going on, but Cilla’s confusion—her growing knowledge that the grown-ups see all of the events of life quite differently—mirrors the younger reader’s. In a way, the fact that this book may be understood on more than one level means that this book is meant to be remembered and re-read.
But of course, sometimes, re-reading doesn’t make a book seem better.
It never occurred to me to tell my daughter not to re-read. I had done the same as a child, too. And for me, yes, re-reading was a way to soothe myself. But re-reading was also a way of marking how much I had learned.
This column, of course, is all about re-reading. It’s about looking at how books shaped me, and also at how my perception of those books has changed now that I’m an adult. At times it has been a delight and a comfort to greet my old friends. Sometimes it has been painful but rewarding. Sometimes it’s been shit.
Recently, my husband was flipping through the channels when he happened upon an episode of The Golden Girls, a classic NBC sitcom that ran from 1985 to 1992. As soon as I saw it, I said something about how often I’d watched the show in re-runs after school. I remembered watching TV in the basement, eating peanut butter sandwiches. I was a latchkey kid and spent hours alone except for books and the television. I knew even then that the show wasn’t perfect, but in a lot of ways it didn’t matter. It was a comforting place where I could settle.
Of course—of course—as soon as I said something about this to my husband, the following happened onscreen:
Teacher Dorothy, played by the great Bea Arthur, is doing roll call for her adult education class. She says, “Jim Shu.” No one answers. She says, “Oh, very funny. Gym shoe.”
Then an Asian man, played by Ralph Ahn, stands up and says, “I am Jim Shu.”
Dorothy apologizes profusely. She explains, “I thought someone was pulling my leg.”
Jim Shu looks at her up at down and says, “I don’t think I could drink that much sake.”
The live studio audience laughs wildly, even though the line doesn’t really make any sense. Also, sake is Japanese, Jim Shu is probably Chinese, but who can tell the difference? LOL ASIANS AND THEIR FUNNY-SOUNDING NAMES FOR THEMSELVES AND THINGS.
It was like a kick in the stomach. But at the time I first saw it, I probably thought I should laugh along. Even while sitting alone in the basement.
This column, of course, is all about re-reading. It’s about looking at how books shaped me, and also at how my perception of those books has changed now that I’m an adult. At times it has been a delight and a comfort to greet my old friends. Sometimes it has been painful but rewarding. Sometimes it’s been shit.
I guess it’s a measure of what a person I’ve become—Oh, look how I’ve grown—when the space for comfort is no longer comfortable.
And I don’t wish that the children’s books I’ve re-read as an adult were different, nor do I wish to unlearn what I know now in order to feel soothed by old, familiar fictional people and places.
But if I did have to do it over again, I might answer my daughter’s teacher a different way. If she asked why my daughter returned to books that were too easy for her, I would tell her that in re-reading, my child was exploring the spaces she’d been in, furnishing them with new knowledge. And in doing so, she was asking if she needed more.
The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book by Bill Watterson is one of the few books I’ve kept from my childhood.
The book was a compilation of full-color, multi-panel Sunday strips from Watterson’s iconic cartoon, which ran from 1985 to 1995. At one point I had all of the Calvin and Hobbes collections. I don’t know how or where I lost them. My copy of the Lazy Sunday Book is now falling apart.
The strip is about a boy, Calvin, and his stuffed/real tiger, Hobbes. Hobbes is inquisitive, often hungry, more cerebral than his companion, more inclined to inject a note of caution. He’s also very much a cat. Calvin is an intelligent, reckless, and not unfocused boy; but it’s clear that he prefers to keep his attention to his own imaginative world, which puts him at odds with the one his parents live in. Only Calvin sees Hobbes as a real tiger—his parents and most of the people around him see Hobbes as a stuffed animal; the strip plays off the tension between Calvin’s elaborate fantasies and the “real” things happening behind it. When Calvin plays Spaceman Spiff, he soaks his neighbor/classmate/enemy Susie Derkins (who is at first drawn as a huge bug-eyed alien) with a ray gun that turns out to be a water pistol. In another strip, we’re shown a dinosaur chomping through his meal—until Calvin’s mother yells at him to use better table manners; then we see a Tyrannosaurus Rex shamefacedly eating with a fork and knife, knobby elbows tucked in.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes from the day the first black-and-white strip appeared in my childhood local newspaper, The Winnipeg Free Press.
I loved Calvin and Hobbes from the day the first black-and-white strip appeared in my childhood local newspaper, The Winnipeg Free Press. (Wikipedia tells me this day was November 18, 1985.)
My parents subscribed to the Free Press, which had a full-page black-and-white comics spread on weekdays and a color funny paper on Sundays. Along with Calvin and Hobbes, I read Peanuts, Cathy, Bloom County, and many others; I was so devoted to the funnies that when I went away to university, my parents saved great piles of them, and even though I told them they didn’t need to do so, I’d go through those when I came back home, too.
I loved Watterson’s illustrations, which, depending on the bent of Calvin’s imagination, looked like lush watercolors or saturated, eye-popping 1950s superhero comics. He plays with perspective in some panels, and in others he tries styles of art from different periods. And always, the dialog is smart, funny—sometimes heartbreaking.
Maybe at the time, I gave a thought to why such a smart kid had so much trouble at school, why he had no non-tiger friends. Only now do I begin also to think about Calvin’s frustration—all the characters’ frustrations, really.
I didn’t always identify with Calvin. (As a child, I was more of a Susie Derkins.) I enjoyed Calvin—his creativity and his intelligence. But despite that, Watterson never hides how difficult Calvin is. He’s hard on babysitters (and his babysitter is also hard on him). He’s greedy, mischievous. He isn’t a kid who gets As on his report card. Sometimes, he sits at his desk dreaming. Often, he gets in trouble with his teacher, Miss Wormwood.
Maybe at the time, I gave a thought to why such a smart kid had so much trouble at school, why he had no non-tiger friends. Only now do I begin also to think about Calvin’s frustration—all the characters’ frustrations, really.
Calvin’s dad is a enthusiast of the outdoors and cold weather; he bikes to work at his corporate job—and comes homes to chaos and disappointment. In one strip, he goes out early on his boat during vacation. “This is the life! A brisk swim at dawn, a morning out on the boat.” But when he returns with a freshly caught fish, Calvin’s mother sits bleary-eyed at the table and says, “You eat your dead animals. All I want is some coffee.” Calvin complains that there is no TV on this holiday. The dad’s balloon is punctured.
Calvin’s mom is a sharp woman who is clearly not willing to be an acquiescent, smiling spouse. She’s often exasperated by her difficult kid. And Calvin’s neighbor/enemy Susie Derkins is a rule-following, at times anxious perfectionist who has big ambitions. One time, when Calvin does ask Susie to play, she takes over: “OK, we’ll play house now. I’ll be the high-powered executive wife. The tiger here can be my unemployed housekeeping husband…” Calvin immediately regrets inviting Susie, but oblivious, she takes off, saying, “I’m off to Wall Street. Don’t wait up.”
At other times, Susie’s annoyance with Calvin often ironically results in her abandoning decorum and rules as she explodes over his antics.
In all of the human characters in the strip, there is a mismatch between their ideals and what they have right now: the dad would like a more outdoorsy, enthusiastic family; the mom would like a more sedate life; Susie has a clear vision of what she will do in the future and worries about how she can put herself on the right path now. And Calvin—well, the whole strip is really about how in real life a six-year-old is pretty powerless—forced to take baths when adults make them, told to sit in school instead of being allowed to have space adventures.
I find myself more in sympathy with Calvin now.
Childhood can be lonely and frustrating. Kids are stuck in an adult reality learning rules that don’t seem to make sense, conventions that people already seem to know—or assume one should know. I don’t blame Calvin for taking to his own worlds, despite the havoc that he wreaks on the adults and other people in his life. At this point, I probably have more in common with Calvin’s parents than with the kids. But paging through Bill Watterson’s Lazy Sunday Book, I laugh out loud at Calvin and Hobbes’s quips, I marvel at the illustrations, and I find myself remembering and holding onto my enjoyment for just a minute longer—just another minute—before Monday morning comes.
As a child, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.
I began them when I started third grade. When people ask about formative books, I think first of this series: of these books that I read when I walked around the house, that I carried to the dinner table, that I pored over during recess, and that I bugged my teacher to put on her curriculum even as the school year was ending. But I put off writing about them for a long time as it seems that I can’t bring myself to re-read them.
I still can’t.
I’m sorry.
Wilder’s semi-autobiographical children’s novels follow the pioneering Ingalls family as they move from Wisconsin (Little House in the Big Woods) to territory that was in reality an Osage Indian reservation in Kansas (Little House on the Prairie). The family then departs for Walnut Grove, Minnesota (On the Banks of Plum Creek), where they live in a house made of sod, then to De Smet, South Dakota, the setting of By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years. One book, Farmer Boy, follows the childhood adventures of Almanzo, Wilder’s husband, as he tends to livestock, does chores, eats cake, and tries to get along with siblings in upstate New York. The Ingalls family (and the Wilders) sew their own clothes, endure blizzards, illness, and locusts, and still manage to find love, and joy, and adventure with family.
I say that the books are semi-autobiographical because despite the fact that the main character has Wilder’s name and the family travels roughly along the same paths that Wilder’s family did, the novels are very much fiction. Liberties were taken with Wilder’s real life story. And to a certain extent, this is acknowledged. Little House in the Big Woods, after all, opens like this:
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
The book has the opening for a fairy tale, with one solid fact thrown in—sixty years. Reception of the series—and certainly my feelings about it when I was young—concentrated on the harsh pioneer life, on details about playing ball with a pig’s bladder or making a doll out of a corn cob. I know I also identified with the setting of the story because I lived in the flat, cold middle of Canada (albeit in a city, in a house with indoor plumbing and heating). I know I also wanted to be resourceful and plucky, like the Ingalls family. I wanted to make my own bread, sew my own clothes, churn butter, and plant things.
(Basically, I wanted to do crafts and ride in horse-drawn buggies—but to have other modern conveniences.)
More recently, however, writers and scholars have turned their attention to the fictive-ness of the books—and to the mythmaking. Some memorable characters, the handsome Cap Garland, for example, are made up. More important, Pa Ingalls’s reasons for dragging his family across large swathes of Kansas and the Dakotas are elided. Pa Ingalls and his family weren’t benign settlers pitting their ingenuity against the dangerous wild; they were invading Native American territories. They had to do it on their own because they weren’t supposed to be there.
Indeed, Caroline’s Fraser’s 2017 book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, looks at the ways that Wilder’s books not only diverged from the realities of her life but made that life into one of the shaping narratives of American identity. The book also examines how Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, a follower of Ayn Rand, extensively rewrote her mother’s books, often twisting facts to reflect Obectivist values.
But Fraser’s is only the latest in a series of sources that made me re-examine my feelings about the series. Among those:
Louis Erdrich’s books Birchbark House books, written from the perspective of Native Americans and set at around the same time as Wilder’s books;
Scholar Debbie Reese’s blog, “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” in which she talks about the depiction of Native Americans in the Little House series and in other books. This is just one example.
It was a conversation about Wilder’s books that Dr. Reese shared on Twitter that initially made me question what kinds of books from my childhood I wanted to give to my own child (which I talked about here) and, more important, why exactly I wanted to share them.
Does reading the Little House books lead to a greater understanding of history? Not on their own. Would it lead to my daughter understanding me or my life better?
Would it bring us closer?
If that were true, would this I want this particular story connecting us?
I am at a loss. I don’t know how to reconcile my memories, my newer knowledge, and my feelings about what is best to do right now. I have been told I should talk these issues out with kids, but so far I haven’t mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series to my daughter. I’m not actively hiding them. But I’ve chosen to put different books in front of her and to have her explore what she likes on her own. In any case, it’s likely that she’ll encounter them without my interference. She’ll be older.
By then, I hope I’ll be better prepared to talk about them.
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