My Mom, the Librarian

The transition from elementary to middle school was like walking on broken glass for me. I felt this lurching emptiness as I realized that over those long summer months, I had fallen completely out of touch with some of my good friends. I could feel depression starting to pull me under and I remember it being one of my darkest moments. I was off to school without friends and for some reason, it was the first time I felt nothing for learning.

Thankfully my mom was intuitive enough to sense this early on because I really wasn’t my usual self. I wasn’t looking forward to anything. I was just wasting away.

She came up with an idea to do homeschool for half the day and the last half I would go to school and finish off, getting the socializing and P.E. time I needed. I don’t know if she ever knew how much I needed her then or if she even remembers this. I was at the beginning of my teenage roller coaster and really trying to figure myself out. I was an extrovert, but I was feeling anxiety dealing with a new and larger social scene.

I remember mom sitting down with me and sharing her two greatest obsessions:  English literature and history. Her enthusiasm really built the foundation for my love of reading and writing. I never had a teacher that impacted me in these subjects as much as my mom did. They quickly became my favorites and still are to this day.

She didn’t make it easy! There was plenty of poetry memorization, long reports, and lots of reading.

For some reason, it never seemed like work though. I wasn’t stressed. Mom didn’t just lecture, she gave me lots of quiet time to read, think, and write. Some days, we would go to the library and I would get completely lost and come home with 10 books on aviation, Africa, military tactics, and zoology. I was given free reign to explore and I can trace my love for reading back to those lazy library days. 

Jenn struggles to pull me out of libraries to this day. I have such fond memories of our library in our home, the Springville Library, my high school library where I fell asleep with books on my chest more than once, and the library at BYU-Idaho where I studied books while looking for studious girls to date (on the side, of course!). 

Libraries were simply my home away from home…mostly because my mom introduced me to the power of libraries at an early age. It was ok to get lost in biographies, history, and science. There was always time for reading!

There is something about letting books carry you away into some other world or into a subject you didn’t think you cared to know about. You get lost and never want to get found again.

Mom fittingly became a librarian. I love to think of my mom as my librarian in life just guiding me to the next book. She recently sent us with almost 50 children’s books which our kids and the Rwandan kids that live with us have been devouring like mad. 

Overall, reading was a constructive outlet for me to leave all the preteen concerns while I was on my young “sabbatical”. At age 12, I dove into adult novels, read textbooks and really got addicted to historical fiction. I would come to dinner blurry eyed and sun-burnt some days after reading outside all day, hence the freckles! Mom saw this and rather than over-structuring or worrying about what level I was at, she let me get addicted to the process of exploring and researching concepts.

I think if we perceive that our kids are finding their thing whether it is music, hands-on building projects, reading, the outdoors, or art, it is a good time to give them time and space to explore where they want to go with it. This is a key Montessori principle that I have seen the power of in my own life from my Mother's example.I believe this is one of the areas that schools fall short at times. It is hard to give students time and space when you have 30 other students that you have to cater to. It is also impractical with a set curriculum.

What if we identified when our kids were in ruts and took them on there own explorative “sabbatical”? What if we took them out into the woods for two weeks in the middle of the school year? 

Would they fall behind? Maybe, but It could make all the difference. I believe having them fall behind emotionally would have far more severe an impact on their motivation to learn than anything else. It's easy to feel like we need to follow a precise school schedule, but if there is one thing Africa is teaching me, its that there is no time like the time when you are needed as a parent.