My darling daughters,
Good news! Except for the occasional relapse, you’ve stopped chewing your books. Which is not to say you no longer pose an existential threat to them. Between fighting over books and excitedly flipping over their insides, you’re averaging two ripped pages a day.
Most of your books were “pre-loved”, given to us by friends or purchased second-hand from parents whose children had outgrown them. Some even exchanged hands for forty years, delighting kids across three generations before reaching you. None of them will survive you, however. That’s good for the economy, not so good for the environment, and pretty bad for your mother. She spends considerable time each weekend repairing pages and spines, hoping that prolonging the lives of your books would somehow diminish our collective guilt over your destructiveness.
Not every book gets patched up though. Like any good surgeon, your mother makes tough choices over which books are worth saving. For whatever reason, a Peppa Pig title is never given a new lease on life.
Anything by Eric Carle almost always is. Your copy of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” just had its second successful spine reconstruction surgery. And, by the time we let it go to the Great Library in the Sky, your copy of “Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me” had more scotch tape than paper between its covers.
Oh how you loved that book, and I reading it to you. Imagine my joy the first time one of you pointed to the sky and said, “Papa, please get the moon for me.” She’s mimicking what I used to read to her, I thought. And in complete sentences to boot!
Over time, that excitement gave way to doubt. Now when you point to our celestial neighbour and make the same request, I wonder if you really mean it. What if you truly expect me to get the moon for you like Eric Carle taught you I could?
A big part of growing up is becoming aware, slowly and then with increasing frequency, of all the things your parents can’t do. You will learn your mother and I aren’t perfect or all-powerful. I’m sorry, let me rephrase that. You will learn I’m not perfect or all-powerful. Climb a very long ladder and get the moon for you? In a few months you’ll discover I can’t even keep up with you when you ride your tricycle on account of my bad knees. And years later you’ll figure out my bad knees were not the result of noble athletic injuries, as I claimed they were, but of my being fat and lazy.
While I diminish in your eyes with each passing year, you’ll grow more powerful in mine. And that’s okay. I want you to be faster, stronger, smarter, better than I ever was. To learn more than I’ll never know and do things I never did or could. If that includes getting the moon for someone you love, more power to you.
My only hope is that you still love me at my most diminished.