Literatorture

Michael isn’t much of a reader yet.

Years ago, his mom and I held out high hopes. At the age of two he knew all of his letters and their sounds, and was spelling out words he saw: EXIT, STOP, OFF, WALK, etc. We assumed he was going be reading Dostoevsky and Joyce in no time.

But despite my efforts, reading to him on a daily basis and providing him a substantial library of early reader books, Michael hasn’t willingly ventured into the realm of reading.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Trying to cajole him into reading his books is like trying to get the cat to take a bath. He drags his feet hard enough to carve grooves in the floorboards.

And he likes TV. Way too much. He is skilled – nay, he is a virtuoso – at wearing down parental will, such that an otherwise sensible and firmly resolved parent can quickly be reduced to a slathering, gnashing primate capable only of acting upon the basest instincts of survival, such as biting and clawing his or her way through the couch cushions in order to find the remote and tune in Nick Jr. or Sprout to quell the dreaded, unending whine of “mommy? mommy? mommy? mommy? mommy? mommy? mommy? mommy?”

This is a fact of which I am very much not proud.

His mom and I have decided we owe it to him to be better than this. So last night, when Michael requested TV time, his mom told him that he must first read two simple books.

This triggered his response of whining, begging, pleading and tantrum-ing as we had expected it would. But his mom stood her ground, and with each outburst she added another book to the total, which made it up to five before he gave in.

She sat down with him and opened up the first book he’d selected, which was a SpongeBob phonics book. This one highlighted the long “I” sound, and explored use of the silent “e”. And as we have done with every attempt at helping him read, we insisted that he sound out the words.

To him, this was some form of excruciating torture. I watched from the kitchen as he twisted and squirmed and nearly hyperventilated trying to compile the sounds that comprise the word “him”. He struggled. He stammered. He whined, wiggled, wobbled and tore at his clothes as his mom slowly and painfully urged him to sound out each letter and then string those sounds together into the one word.

“I don’t remember what the word is!” he protested repeatedly.

“There’s no need to remember. Just sound it out,” his mom said repeatedly.

From the kitchen I witnessed this embroilment as his mom fought valiantly to prod him into figuring out the sounds himself and as he strained to do anything to get out of doing so.

From time to time she’d say “I think maybe your daddy had better help you with this, instead of me.” This is a phrase she pulls out whenever she wants to shock Michael into proper behavior. It usually works.

I couldn’t help but think that maybe she wanted a bit of a break herself.

“Okay,” I said. “Here I come.”

“Nooooooo!” protested Michael, from the floor.

“Yup. I’m going to read with you, and mommy is going to finish making dinner.”

My wife looked up at me with pleading, defeated eyes. I smiled and held out my hand. She ascended from the couch with the grateful expression of a soul redeemed, plucked from the seventh circle of The Inferno.

“All right, sport. Sit up here,” I said.

He didn’t move. I reached down and drew his boneless body into my lap and molded him into an upright position. “Come on. Sit up straight. We’re going to get through this.”

I was determined that we would make it through without fighting. I would give him space, I would give him leeway, I would give him latitude. I would not press, I would not become impatient, I would assist him and help him see that he can do this.

I was determined.

“All right, now. Let’s look at the page. What’s Plankton doing here?”

He relaxed immediately and described what Plankton was doing.

“And what’s SpongeBob holding?”

“A magnifying glass,” he said. “And these are cans of lima beans,” he offered, brightening.

“Right! How did you know they were lima beans?”

“It says so.” He pointed out the words.

“Well that’s great. Okay, since you know this, let’s read the words. Ready? Here we go. What’s this word?”

“I don’t know…”

“Okay, what’s this letter?”

“Y”

“And what sound does it make?”

“Yuh”

“Right. What’s the next letter?”

And so it went. Letter by letter, millimeter by millimeter, we went through each letter of each word, very slowly but no less surely covering each word and then repeating each sentence to reinforce. He became more confident with each word. The sounds and the comprehension came easier to him with each page, all the way up to the last one. Slowly and surely.

In all that time I’d spent with Michael, my wife completed dinner, dessert, an amuse bouche, mastered the five mother sauces, knitted two sweaters and built a replica of the Eiffel Tower from toothpicks. Okay, so I exaggerate. It was only a model of Sutter’s Fort.

But in this time, while he grew in his ability to read, I had grown in my patience. He and I both had our victories.