"Childhood Games"

So did everyone but me play hopscotch or red rover as a kid? I most definitely did not. I had more important things to do. Instead, I actually spent 85% of elementary school reading.  I believe this came from having an English teacher for a father and a women's studies teacher for a mother (she has a degree in literature).

Yep, this was me at fourteen months.

Don't get me wrong, I had Hi Ho Cheeri-o and Candyland (I always cheated so I could get the Queen Frostine card), but the shelves in my room were stacked with books. Dr. Seuss, Curious George, and Maisy the Mouse were my friends in preschool. My mom told me that before I could read, when I was a toddler, I would take books off shelves and flip through them, looking at the pictures and pretending to read words I didn't know out loud in gibberish. And it continued in the same way throughout elementary school, really, with me always having a couple books with me. I brought books on field trips, in case we had down time. I read on the bus and at lunch.

I think it was really a way to escape to wherever I wanted to be. I used to reading as a way to control my environment. If I wanted to be in a fantasy land, then I could open a book and be there. But that fixation also made me a romantic, and a general purist. When I got to high school, I thought life could never be enough for me or measure up the way books did. And maybe that's true, that life will never be like a book. But I am really glad I loved reading for so long (still do! I just don't carry three to five books on my person anymore). I think it's made me educated, and it did give me a way to escape in the darker points of middle school. At some point, I had to wake up, right? To the real world. Those were my childhood games- the ones I played with reality.