My life in books

I planned so many different things for this post. I was going to write about imperfect parenting (to get myself in a Blogging Carnival for the first time ever), I was going to write about our latest Yon meeting at nursery (where we learned about him being a part of what is called children with "invisible disabilities", how hard it is to get the help you need from the school system, and how annoying it is when people patronise you and your parenting skills. Yes, fun times), I was going to write about sharenting and how unfair it is that we are, once again, not a part of the trend. it's the FoMo thing all over again. I mean, obviously we are parents and we share, so strictly speaking we are sharenting, and obviously we have friends who are parents and they put the odd baby / child photo on Facebook, but I want the real thing - the baby poo photos, the placenta talk, the vomit descriptions. I want to feel a part of the real phenomena. It is not my fault that all our friends have boundaries.
But before I could sit down quietly (not ashamed to say - hide in the bedroom in the excuse that it's boys time and mummy is a girl) and decide which of these very important and post-deserving subjects to write about, Hidai & I had to embark on the very glamorous job of cleaning the house, who was another casualty of my latest illness, and hasn't been cleaned for (let's say) a couple of weeks. Don't worry, I am not going to write about cleaning the house, glamorous as it is.

Cleaning

 It just that while I was cleaning I had to go into the kids room and really look around. It happens every six months or so, that I stop and look around and not just go through the motions, and every time I come to the same conclusion - it's time to Spring Clean the hell out of the room. I don't know why I'm surprised, after all it's the end of June, and the last time we did it was December, to make room for all the Christmas presents.
It just that I felt like they are playing with everything, and that the room isn't in that bad of a shape, and that there is nothing really to do there right now. Maybe around September. I will take a moment to note that the kids share a room, at their request, and that they love it. I, on the other hand, still feel the need to explain and excuse myself. It wasn't us. We were searching for a three bedrooms flat, like we had in Gib, but they insisted on sharing.
I don't really mind it anymore (except for the need to explain, and the incessant giggling after bedtime), but it means they now have one medium sized room filled with LOTS of things. LOTS of things. The fact that they have parents who love buying them things, and especially books, combined with the age gap (4 years) which means that they can't really share the games, books and other bits, the fact that they love different things, and the very sad realisation that they are teeny tiny hoarders who can't throw away anything, all means one thing - LOTS of things. In an itty bitty living space.

Parts of the room

This time I looked around the room and you know what I saw? I saw books. I just counted, and they have 200 books. You probably think I'm exaggerating, but I am not. You have no idea how many books they have. It is totally my fault. I take full responsibility. I love books. Always have.
I have by now wasted half an hour of trying to describe how I feel about books with little to no success.   Books are at the centre of my life. Always have been. They were beside me wherever I went, they were my rock, my escape, my guides, my solace. Books were how I survived the teenage years, how I learned English and Italian, they are who I turn to when I have a parenting question. I still, to this day, keep books I read for the first time when I was about 10 years old. I can still recognise every book I've ever read by reading the first line, I can still tell you which milestone was accompanied with which book, I still can't stop reading when I start a book, I still prefer the book to the movie, and though I don't get to read as much as I would have liked these days (it's about time and becoming more selective), whenever I feel the pressures of life becoming too much, I read.
For me, a life without books isn't worth living.
And when I had the kids I just knew that they would love reading as much as me. How could they not? So I bought every book I found, and the whole thing kind of took a life of its own... Whenever I went in to a book store and there was a sale? I bought books. Whenever there was a holiday or a birthday? Books. Whenever I wanted to buy a book for myself? I bought one for Ron also.

Ron's library when he was 2 years old

When we moved out of Israel we (obviously) took all of our books with us, but we started to buy children books in English so the kids will get used to the language, to the books, to the culture and the references, but to this day the majority of books they have is in Hebrew. Before we moved here we cleared out all the baby things and donated all the toys and books that weren't being used anymore, but even now, there are still so many books...

This is not all we took out of their rooms that time...

Today I was looking at the books and it suddenly hit me, most of them will never be read by the kids. I have so many books there that I read through the years, and my kids won't read them at all, or will read them in a different language. You would think that by now I should have gotten used to it, to those little signs that the Hebrew is slowly disappearing from our life, after all - they, and we, do everything in English, except talk to each other at home, and even that is slowly changing. The kids feel more comfortable in English, and I understand it, support it, and even encourage it. After all, they live here, they have no need to read a translated copy of the Hobbit when Ron is perfectly capable of reading the real thing, they have no need to read children books relating to life in Israel.
But when I looked over all my books, books that I can tell you how old I was when I read them, books that I can tell you when and where and why I bought for Ron, my heart ached.
It ached because there are so many gaps between my boys and me. There is the age gap; there is the gender gap (boys, let's be honest here, will never want to read Anne of Green Gables, and I will never read Football Academy); there is the language gap (the boys speak English as a first language. I don't); there is the reading vs. hearing gap (Yon will probably prefer (or need) Audio books and not written books, which is not the same); there is the were-we-are-growing-up-gap; there is the culture gap; I looked at those Harry Potter books in Hebrew and they were mocking me, they were, at that moment, the representation of every single one of those gaps, and of those naive dreams I carried with me as a young mum, about peacefully reading to my child, about sharing the love for the same books, about passing on the bookworm torch to the next generation. Dreams I didn't even think I still had.
Books are my one big love in life (okay except maybe for the boys and Hidai. Depends on the day you ask) and they have now become one more thing that I won't be able to share with them;

Reading together