Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:

>Alison wrote:
>
>
>>>It's a real test of a book - anyone who thinks pasteboard books are easy
>>>
>>>
>to write should be forced to read their limp lines and bathetic sentiments
>out loud forever and ever - I remember in particular one horrible book about
>bunnies that for some reason my kids demanded night after night - the only
>book I have ever thrown away<<
>
>
>I hated those books and I am so, so grateful my son outgrew them relatively
>quickly. There was one, in particular, about a dog that had to find a lost
>lamb--or something like that--and I remember once thinking, around the third
>time I had read it that night, that the person who'd written it should be
>condemned to hear it read (or to read it aloud to themselves) for all
>eternity.
>
>
Oh Jesus bless us.  For YEARS I had to read my elder a book called
_Robert The Rose Horse_, a really dumbassed story about a horse who is
allergic to roses, goes to The Big City, and becomes a police horse.
But Jake loved the damn thing, so much so that if I had the temerity to
change one word, he corrected me.  We both had it memorized.  Jake
hasn't been two years old in 24 years but I can still remember parts of
it.  For his last birthday his mother actually had a wonderful gag gift
for him, a fresh copy of the book.  On the nights I didn't get stuck
reading it, she did.  See, I can remember long stretches of Puccini's La
Boheme, too, which I first heard when I was 14, but the recall is
decidedly more pleasurable.

>Not only did he not want me to read
>the poems I'd written for him, but he didn't want me to read any of my poems
>at all. When I got up to read, he got so upset my wife had to take him out
>of the building so he wouldn't disturb the reading. He was crying so hard
>and so angrily, I was half-expecting him to start hyperventilating.
>
That's astonishing and a bit scary.  I read stuff at length in front of
my children, albeit now they are adults, only back in November, but it
the history of a divorce, mine, and the kids were characters in some of
the poems.  They knew beforehand what I was going to do and were able to
roll with it.  But I can remember being terribly scream-and-cry upset by
children's stories and recordings at that age.  My parents thought it
was very funny that I'd cry over something as seemingly innocuous as
"Tubby the Tuba," but there we were.

>It was as if he had been afraid that by saying the poems aloud I
>had given something away that was no longer mine/his/ours; or as if I had
>violated some privacy that he had configured in his mind, that poetry was
>something he and I did together and was not meant to be shared; or some
>combination of both.
>
I wonder if children "in general" have that sort of reaction to things
that they feel are private shared aspects of their lives with their
parents.  I hate being reminded of Elton John's "Your Song," but I am
anyway: "I hope you don't that I wrote down the words."

>And it was only about poetry
>that my son seemed to feel this sense of ownership; he did not have a
>problem with my telling stories to other kids, or with my reading his books
>to other kids.
>
>
I can theorize about this even to myself.  Someone else will have
to...if there's even any need.  Some things are SO private we just keep
them to ourselves.  I can only recall feeling embarrassed by some of the
shit my parents would pull at family gatherings, telling everyone that
Kenny cried over a children's record, Kenny was too sensitive.  It was
like growing up inside "Married With Children" only not as funny.

Ken