My daughter loves this books about a unicorn named Sparkle. We got it this past February, when she was about six months old, and I read it to her every night after day care. Around 9 months, she began to interact with the book and demand it herself, three or four times a day. I couldn’t take another time reading it, so I looked it up and found out they were part of a series and ordered the rest. She came to them slowly, wandering away, disinterested, when the book didn’t tell her the story she was expecting. She has only recently become interested in the Halloween edition—Sparkle goes to a pumpkin patch with his human friend, Lucy. Lucy tells Sparkle how much she likes to be scared, how she enjoys the feeling. Sparkle disagrees. Hijinks ensue.
About the tenth time we read it, when I got to the page where Sparkle is alone in the pumpkin patch, night all around him, listening for a monster of his own imagination, my daughter began to cry. “She can’t be crying about this book,” I thought, so I kept reading. But I was wrong. She was as terrified as Sparkle was, and cried and cried until I said, “It’s ok. It’s just a story.”
Yesterday, she made me read the book again. When we got to the scary page, I tried to skip over it, but she made me go back. She cried. She crawled into my lap to nurse to feel better. When she was sufficiently comforted, she crawled out, opened the book to the page with the night sky, and made me read it again. She did this three or four times—opening to the purple and black page and crying, crying, until I would read and make the rest of the story move forward, past the point of fear.
There’s a Hans Christian Anderson story called The Boy Who Left Home to Shiver. In it, a little boy has never shivered in his life so he goes on many adventures, looking for this sensation. He travels through a scary wood, meets fabulous creatures, and never shivers. He battles a dragon, and because he never shivers, he isn’t intimidated and he wins. His prize is the hand in marriage of a princess, of course. They marry and have a long and happy life with many children. At the end of his days, he turns to his wife, now a queen, and says, “I have lived a beautiful life with you but I still am unhappy because I’ve never shivered.” She looks at her fool of a husband, gets up, grabs a fishbowl that sits on one of their shelves and dumps it, water and goldfish and all, over his head. And he shivers.
I do not know if my daughter going back again and again to the thing that scares her is a “face my fears” type of situation. Or if she just likes the sensation of being scared and then the relief of comfort. I only know I have someone very fierce on my hands. And I’m going to try to do as she does, in the coming weeks, when it feels like the whole world is conspiring to make us shiver.
I love this story. Your daughter is both fierce and wise beyond her years. I'm going to follow her example and keep feeling the fear and doing it anyway!!!
I love this. Thank you. Your daughter seems like a sensitive, knowing soul. Reading this reminds me of the first time I felt a book perfectly articulate a feeling that seemed so potent, but unnameable — one of those feelings you wondered if other people were having. A certain loneliness or wistfulness or fear. Finding it in a book made me feel like someone else understood me, someone much wiser than me, someone almost divine, and I was so in awe of the fact that a book could do this to me. Books allowed me to experience these feelings safely and brace myself against them by practicing what they feel like and becoming stronger (in theory, at least). These moments of resonance with books seems so blissfully human. Your daughter is finding it early. With a mom who helps other people feel that same feeling when they read. Thank you!