Barbara Dee

The other day Zoey’s mom’s sent me an email.

A couple of weeks earlier, her daughter had begun emailing me about my second book, SOLVING ZOE:  “Hi I just finished reading probably the best book in the world called Solving Zoe it’s actually kind of funny because my name is Zoey with a Y.”

When I emailed Zoey back, she replied immediately, asking about my next book, TRAUMA QUEEN, describing her dog, inviting me to speak at her school. (Although she warned me, “Don’t get your hopes up because I will have to ask my principal if it’s OK.”). She also asked where I’d be signing books next, so she could meet me, and she told me the name of her town. It wasn’t nearby, so I told her that if she couldn’t make it to the TRAUMA QUEEN launch party, or to any of the book festivals I’d be attending this spring, I’d be happy to mail her a signed bookplate.

And then I paused. “Before you send me your address,” I wrote her, “PLEASE, PLEASE ask your parents first!!! Never give out your address to anyone online unless your parents say it’s okay. Okay?”

I waited uncomfortably for her reply, because if she emailed back with her home address, how would I know if she’d gotten permission? I wouldn’t—unless her mom wrote to me herself. (Which a few have in the past.)

For a tween author, it can be tricky having direct contact with readers. You want to be chatty, accessible, and kid-friendly. After all, it’s why kids are writing to you in the first place!

But I’m not a twelve-year-old kid. I used to be a teacher. I’m also a mom of three teenagers whose internet activity I worry about. So when tween readers email me their personal information (everything from where they live to where they go to school, their ages, the names and health of family members, even home phone numbers!), I think I have the responsibility to say something.

Obviously, authors aren’t bad guys, and if a kid is handing over personal info to their favorite author, there’s no risk. What I worry about is kids getting a little too comfortable sharing personal info with strangers. I think it’s part of my job to remind them about internet safety. But of course—and here’s the tricky part– I need to do it in a way that maintains the precious author/tween reader relationship. I can’t sound like a teacher. Or (especially!) a mom.

That’s why I was so delighted to hear from Zoey’s mom: “I have been monitoring the emails & just love it… My husband & I believe this is the “stuff” that make young people want to be “someone” (like an author )  I hope her many emails aren’t bothering you.”

No, Zoey’s Mom, they aren’t. I promise you, authors LOVE to hear from enthusiastic readers! We also love to encourage kids to be whatever kind of “someone” they want to be. Thank you for supporting Zoey’s passion for reading and writing. And thank you also for monitoring her emails to adults you don’t know personally. It means that authors—and I hope Zoey is writing to many others!– don’t have to worry about her safety online.

Until she becomes a teenager, but that’s another whole story.

Yesterday I reviewed Missing, a memoir by author Cornelia Maude Spelman. In Missing, Spelman talks about her quest to know about her mother. Today, I’m happy to feature an essay from Spelman about discovering our emotional legacies. In particular, she focuses on the mother-daughter relationship.

Cornelia Maude Spelman

Discovering Your Emotional Legacy

I invite you to embark on a quest to understand your emotional legacy and the powerful effect of your mother’s past on your own life, and, if you are a parent, on succeeding generations.

Whether your mother is alive and you have an ongoing relationship with her or whether she has passed on, whether you love and revere her or are bitterly disappointed in her, what affected her heart-what formed her, emotionally-formed you, too.

The Importance of Your Mother’s Past

Even if you have frequent contact with your mother, you may never have stopped to think deeply about why she is the way she is. Perhaps you already know some of the reasons but you want to know more.

Your mother may not want to talk about her past. Or, if she’s no longer living, you may think you missed your chance to find out more about her. However, it is likely that you can learn more, even if she doesn’t want to talk about it, and even if she has died.

Important Stories Often Buried

The stories that were most critical in the formation of your mother are often the very ones that she has not talked about. She may not have purposely hidden them. Maybe she thought they were irrelevant to you. Or maybe they were painful and she saw no point in focusing on them.

There are also, in most families, secrets. Both kinds of stories-the ignored and the purposely hidden-are the ones that invite you, if you wish to understand the present, to become a detective of the past. I believe that it is important for our emotional health to know these stories.

How Will Understanding My Mother Help Me?

Regardless of your age, understanding your mother’s heart will help you understand yourself. Understanding yourself will help you live a happier, more aware, and free-er life, because when you become aware of how the past has affected your present, you become better able to make choices about how to be and what to do. It is like the difference between rowing your own boat or being pulled by underwater currents.

Our First Relationship

Our mother is our first relationship, and, whether we are aware of it or not, we have expectations of each new relationship that were formed in that first one with her.

What, then, was that first relationship like for you? Was it warm, affectionate, safe, pleasant, predictable, and comfortable? Was your mother happy and relaxed? Did she sing to you, play with you, smile at you, show pride in you? Was she absent, inattentive, or mostly sad? Did she disappoint you, strike you, criticize or demean you?

No mother is ever perfect, nor is any woman ever perfectly prepared to be a mother. However she was, what made her that way? What did you learn from her that you want to keep? And what did you learn from her that you want to get rid of?

What I Mean By Emotional Legacy

A legacy is a “tangible or intangible thing handed down by a predecessor,” and “a long-lasting effect of an event of process.” By “emotional legacy,” I mean your mother’s behavior, attitudes, beliefs, habits, assumptions, and reactions to important people and events in her life. I also mean specifically what you learned from her about emotions.

Why Are Emotions Important?

Did your mother expess, respect, and manage emotions? For many parents of previous generations, emotional awareness was not valued, yet we know now that emotions are very important, for many reasons:

• Emotions guide us. They are like the gauges on the dashboard of our car that give us important information about the people and situations around us.
• Emotions motivate us. If we’re angry or uncomfortable, something needs to change. If we’re scared, there’s a reason.
• Emotions help us communicate and relate to others. Love, the most pleasant emotion, brings us closer to others. But less pleasant emotions can, too. Being able to share our sadness with someone is deeply comforting. Expressing anger in non-hurtful ways can clarify differences, invite solutions, and resolve problems. Telling another that we are frightened can enlist the support and comfort that we need.
• Emotions affect our learning and our health. It’s well known that children learn best when they feel safe and are able to express their needs. This is true of adults, too, as anyone who has worked in an office full of tension knows.
• Powerful emotions that are unresolved and unexpressed, or expressed without control, can hurt us. We smoke, use drugs and alcohol, eat excessively, or are compulsive sexually in order to deny or run away from emotions. And as we know too well, uncontrolled anger results in violence.

Emotional Health

I became convinced that it is important to recognize and manage emotions because my experience as a therapist showed me that many of us are not able to. Some of us seem to be blind about what we feel, or uncertain about what to do once we do know what we feel. It’s not because there’s something wrong with us, but because we didn’t learn how.

I wrote a series of picture books for young children called “The Way I Feel” books. Parents who read the books to their children have the opportunity, if they didn’t have it as children, to learn, too. Many teenagers read the books, too, because they’re a kind of “Emotions 101.”

My interest in emotions also came from coming to see that my mother was unable to recognize or manage hers, and from my belief that if she had been able to, she would not have died as she did. My memoir, Missing, tells the story of my own journey to understand the emotional legacies in my family.

So here are some questions to think about:

• What were the most important experiences in your mother’s life?
• What couldn’t you say to your mother? What couldn’t she say to you?
• In what ways are you like your mother? In what ways are you different?
• If you could change one thing about your relationship with your mother, what would it be?
• What would you most like to know about your mother?

Cornelia Maude Spelman is a writer, an artist, and a former social worker. She is the author of picture books for children, including a series called, The Way I Feel,” which has been translated into seven languages.

You might expect that we do a lot of reading in my house. But not all of it is for our book clubs or required reading for school. We also read the comics every day in the newspaper, and my youngest daughter has a particular fondness for Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis. We’ve also been known to have a Pearls Before Swine book or two hanging out on the coffee table. Both of my daughters find the books great to pick up when they’re taking a break from homework. It’s easy to spend just as much time as you have reading a few strips before putting it down and getting back to work.

For those of you familiar with Pearls Before Swine, you probably also know that the comic isn’t aimed at young children. The strip is delightfully irreverant, poking fun at people and institutions across the board. Catherine, who is in high school, appreciates the puns, and she loves how each character has a distinct personality: pig is sweet and clueless, rat is cynical, the crocs are really “stoopid.” Catherine is such a fan, that she regularly reads his blog, and often shares with me some of the zany things he posts there. So today I went on my own to check it out and I was surprised to see so many Pearls gifts available for purchase. I’m sharing the link here for all you other Pearls fans who may want to check out Stephan Pastis’s blog or the merchandise to order.

If your book club is one of the many that may be getting together to exchange gifts over the soon-to-come holidays, you may be looking to find just the right thing to wrap up and bring to your meeting. New products for book lovers have joined some old favorites to make it easier than ever to get your shopping done early. Here are a few ideas to consider (and just so you’ll know, I have no connection to any of these companies and don’t benefit in any way from suggesting you check them out):

Book Lovers Calendar—This oversized calendar features lots of big spaces to fill in events, including book club meetings, all throughout 2011. Authors’ birthdays, literary events in history and more make fun reading on its own. You’ll also find totes, coffee mugs, t-shirts and a few other book-related items on the site. A portion of the sale of each calendar is donated to First Book, the organization that gives books to children in need.

Novel Teas—For tea lovers, Bag Ladies Tea offers a line of black teas featuring literary quotes on each tea-bag tag. These are available to buy in single pouches, if you want to give everyone in your book club one, and in boxes of 25.

Postertext—These posters feature the entire text of a favorite book inscribed around an image that goes along with the title. For instance, the Peter Pan poster arranges words around the image of Peter fighting Captain Hook.

Book Club Appetizer or Dessert Plates—This could be a fun way for your group to start off discussions each time you meet. Each plate in the set of four has a different question.

Book Earrings—When my daughter got a pair of these earrings from a friend she was ridiculously happy. Now she wears them whenever she’s in a bookish mood. The company also offers necklaces, hair sticks, and books for dollhouses.

Book Jewelry—Choose from a selection of pre-made bookmarks that will dress up any book, or design one of your own.

If your book club meets long enough, you are likely to lose members. My mother-daughter book club recently faced this situation when we lost four of our 10 members in quick succession. Two moved away, and two decided to commit their time to other activities.

After seven years of sharing great books and even better discussions, the six of us left knew we had to readjust. These are the choices we looked at:

• Disband the group
• Add new members
• Continue on with a smaller club

Fortunately, no one wanted to disband the group. Our daughters will graduate from high school in almost two years, and for the moms, it’s more important than ever to be able to discuss issues that may be on our daughters’ minds. Plus, all of us really like scheduling regular time to see each other during our busy lives.

We opted against adding new members, as well. With two years to go until the girls head off for college, we want to spend more time getting to know each other better as opposed to expanding our social circle.

Our choice then, was to continue on as we were, but with a few changes. With a smaller group, our meeting place is more flexible. We’ve decided to meet for dessert at a local ice cream store instead of over dinner in each other’s homes. We’ve also vowed to throw in a few more fun events, like going to movies and catching a play at a local theater. With fewer members we expect coordinating our schedules will get easier.

Our choice wouldn’t be the best for everyone. I know of another group with daughters the same age as ours that decided to add several new members when their ranks pared down. The influx of new moms and new daughters livened up their discussions and is keeping them energized.

The key to surviving and thriving when you lose members is to find what works best for the book clubbers who remain. Ask yourselves: What’s most important for us when we meet? Do we want more social time? Do we have enough people to generate a lively discussion?  Can our conversations go more in-depth when we have fewer people?

And while I never like to see reading groups go away, you may find that your club has honestly run its course. The decision may not be easy, but ultimately, it’s yours to make.

Our mother-daughter book club celebrated the last time we were all together with a trip to a local cupcake shop.

I’ve just learned about a new website that lets book lovers hang their favorite books on their walls…sort of. It’s called Postertex. The brain child of Peter Kao, Postertex includes all the words of your favorite book designed around an image somehow related to the story. For instance, the words from the New Testament of the Bible wrap around the shape of a cross. The poster for Moby Dick shows an outline of a whale’s tail splashing down.

There’s only a handful to choose from at the moment, but Kao promises he’s working hard to upload three new posters a week. And he’s already got some well-loved classics available, such as The Wizard of Oz and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which features a profile of Alice along with the Cheshire Cat’s smile. I imagine these will make a great gift for book lovers you may know, and you may want to purchase your own favorites to display on the wall next to your own bookshelves.

A couple of days ago I talked about an article David Brooks wrote about kids being given books to read during the summer and how it helped their overall performance in school. I’ve also run across another article written by Laura Miller for Salon.com linking books and literacy.

Here’s an excerpt:

“A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.”

The whole article can be accessed here: http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/02/summer_book_giveaway.

For anyone who owns books or feels comfortable going into bookstores and libraries, it may be difficult to imagine living in a home without books. If you’d like to support organizations that can help put more books in more hands, the Campaign for Literacy page at Bookbundlz.com is a great place to find links to many of these types of organizations.

A recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times cites a study where researchers sent books home with disadvantaged students for summer reading.  After doing this for three years, they found that these students had significantly higher reading scores than other students. Brooks goes on to talk about other indicators supporting the tremendous power of books when it comes to literacy, especially as it compares to learning from the Internet.

It’s no surprise that I’m a strong supporter of reading books as a way to open all kinds of doors, both to learning and communication, and Brooks’s article is an interesting analysis of how reading literary works differs from spending time searching for and reading information on the Internet. You may want to read the article, then head to your nearest library and sign up for their summer reading program if you haven’t already done so. Multnomah County library, which is the library that services my area, even has a summer reading program for adults, so everyone in our family can sign up.

Your local library probably also has lots of ideas for what to read as well, and don’t forget to check out the book lists on this site. The title I list and review are good not only for mother-daughter book clubs, but for individual readers as well.

When Marci’s mother-daughter book club girls were in fourth grad, their group read Rent a Third Grader by B. B. Hiller. In the book, students raise money to help an old police horse remain part of the community. That story inspired the girls to help their local animal shelter by organizing a bake sale.

In addition to raising $300, Marci believe the girls and moms both learned a lot from the experience. “The girls learned how to put into action the good feelings they got from the book,” says Marci.  “They also had an opportunity to learn about each other in a different environment and see each other out in the world.” Besides spending time on a worthy cause with their daughters, Marci says the moms got to see “individual personalities and passions come out.”

If you haven’t yet volunteered with your book group—mother-daughter or otherwise—this summer may be the perfect time for you to consider taking on a project. Volunteering with children can teach them more than how to be compassionate for others and caring of the world around them. It can also teach them skills, boost their self-confidence, and help them appreciate people of different backgrounds and beliefs. Volunteering as adults helps you work together to build community and meet others who also have an interest in the cause you support.

How can you decide where to focus your efforts? Here are a couple of tips:

• Think about your interests to help you decide where to give your time.  Many non-profit organizations can be broken down into three broad categories: human welfare, environmental welfare, or animal welfare.

• Once you define your broad category, think about the things your group members like to do. For instance, if you all like being outdoors, you can work at a community garden for a local food bank to benefit human welfare. You can help clean up litter from local beaches or riverbanks to help the environment. Contributing to animal welfare may involve participating in a backyard bird count or helping restore a wild habitat.

Because you are all readers, you may decide to focus your efforts on organizations that promote literacy. Or, like Marci’s group, you may be inspired to pitch in after something that inspires you.

Check these online sites for more ideas on how your book club can get involved in helping out:

http://www.handsonnetwork.org/

http://thevolunteerfamily.org/

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

http://liveunited.org/volunteer/

http://idealist.org/

http://www.voa.org/Get-Involved/Volunteer.aspx

I remember when my first mother-daughter book club read a book that dealt with teen sex. The moms were pretty freaked out, thinking our 13-year-old daughters were too young to read about kids just a few years older than them having sex. But we soon realized our daughters really wanted to know what their moms thought about it. They would have never brought it up on their own, but when we talked about what the characters in a book did, it was somehow safe to discuss.

Once we got past that initial stumbling block, it really opened the door for our club to read about many things the girls had questions about. I like to think they were better prepared when they encountered some of the issues we discussed in their own lives. Today I’ve posted a guest blog about how reading books helps us connect with our daughters on many important issues of life. You can find it at Helping Moms Connect.