“She Is Not Me.” What Reading to Your Children Teaches You About Yourself

The thing to realize the soonest is that you’re not raising a miniature version of yourself.

It’s an inevitable epiphany, and perhaps it hits when they want to quit dance class, or when they prove hopeless at piano. God forbid you’re in thirty years of denial. But for me it was when my daughter was three and found a pair of my old high heels. The shoes existed in something like a vacuum: she’d never seen me wear them, and she’d discovered them in the middle of a pandemic when external influence was extremely limited. We hadn’t yet introduced her to screens. But she stood in the full-length mirror with the stilettos on her tiny feet, and if you’ve spent enough time around children, you know the click when you see it. Identity unlocked. Facet of diamond revealed.

I wasn’t a particularly smart child—bright enough. But I was a reader and was given the priceless freedom to choose what I read, without exception. I had always loved animals, so my parents didn’t question why I almost exclusively read books in which the heroes were mice and rats, anthropomorphized. I was something of an animal myself. Always outdoors. Barefoot often. Few friends. My mother—gentle, distant guardian of my secret self—parented me as a “tomboy” because that’s what she thought she had, before the language of “non-binary” helped us both situate me more clearly. My mother forced nothing on me: not pink, not long hair, and not Nancy Drew.

I learned later that my preference for books with animal characters was probably my autism at play: I didn’t “get” humans, and didn’t consider myself one either. Not human, let alone a girl human. The books I chose were the dike holding back the flood of people-ness from which I felt disconnected, from which I preferred to remain somewhat disconnected, oblivious to the reflection of my whiteness in children’s books but keenly aware of my sense of difference. And this is to say nothing of the other flood: femininity and its expectations, girlhood an institution from which I felt even more alienated. By the time I became a parent, I was prepared to be cautious about pink, and in a different way than my mother, who only recognized my aversion and thus respected it. My caution was rooted in lived experience, and I vowed that my child would be protected from the pink army the way I had—and continued to—protect myself.

But I am not raising myself. And my daughter taught me quickly.

In some ways this was easy to remember from the beginning. My daughter is Black, and I took seriously what I had learned from the Black women and parents in my life—not to mention Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop. As a result, my daughter barely saw a book with a white child until she was past one year old, at which point I began taking her to the library frequently. (And how white those shelves continue to be!) I couldn’t control what she saw in the world, but at home almost all the books (white classics) that my parents raised me with before I learned to read myself were replaced with Jerry Pinkney and Kadir Nelson. My daughter learned to read at two years old, and if there weren’t Black children on the pages, there were animals.

In publishing, a picture book featuring a talking squirrel is more publishable than a Latinx protagonist. As of last year, children’s books in which an animal is the main character made up 29.2% of titles; Black children just 11.9%. White children? 41.8%. My own (only) picture book opted for animals in an allegory about the value of anger—my animal roots (and struggles with my anger) on display. Animals are in all our storytelling traditions: a fox is crafty in almost any culture. But my child, unlike me, does not see herself in animals. If I’m not careful, she, Black girl, won’t see herself in many other books either.

She gets older, it gets harder.

My daughter loves being a girl, loves it with her whole self in a way that bewildered me at first. Here I entered parenthood braced to walk her through any doubts she had about the performance of gender…and she lights up at her first encounter with high heels. Our children are not us. She loves the costume of Girl. It’s fun, it’s free, it’s nothing like the gun to the head that it felt like for me. And so I affirm her, chaperoning her gender euphoria through places that meant total alienation for me: books with girls in dresses on the covers, books about dragons but with princesses involved. Girls, girls, girls.

If you are the parent of a Black child, you know it’s a little easier these days to find children’s books with Black characters than when we were small—but there are other swamps to wade through, things I consider heavily in the writing of my own books. Is the Black girl on the page the main character, or is she the sidekick to the white child? Does the Black child speak, or is their presence on the page merely a checkmark? Do the Black children in the book have Black friends and a spoken history or are they victim, like Doc McStuffins, to what I call Black Island Syndrome? Black face plopped into a white ocean, no chance of intraracial solidarity. Newly seven, my daughter has begun to notice other things: “Why does the Black girl always get the worst outfit?” and “Why does the Black girl always make mistakes? Why is the white girl always fixing them?” We talk and talk. But still she loves these books, where girls are doing things in human skin.

She gets older, and it gets harder. I, who was deeply uninterested in beauty or clothing, but whose beauty was affirmed by white standards everywhere I turned; she, who loves fashion, for whom I hunt down coffee table books of Black supermodels, meticulous with my commentary: “I wonder why so many of these models are light-skinned.” “I wonder what else these women are good at, what kind of things they enjoy.” I raise her carefully, with as much autonomy as she can handle. She is not me, and there are “classics” she’s never heard of, childhood canons that don’t serve her. I rewire myself. I see myself with new eyes. We read together and I ask her questions: “Why do you think all the women superheroes look like that?” “Why do you think they gave that mouse-maiden blue eyes?” Patriarchy and white supremacy and this thin, trembling wire. I am not parenting myself.

And yet I am.

In my book The Empty Place, a girl’s father goes missing in the woods, and in his absence she begins to recognize her own void. A father so committed to his journey that he believes his child to be on the same one. It’s not until this girl travels to a parallel universe that she is able to carve her own path.

I want my daughter to carve hers here.

Like the high heels, I see bits of her click into place in the books she chats at me about. She loves a heroine who is fashionable and adored (my child: a true Libra); she loves a mystery that is scary but not too scary. She loves history and time machines. She loves animals but doesn’t feel like one, doesn’t necessarily want them in her books. Under my skin always felt like scales; under hers, a party dress. All the questions I ask her, I must ask myself—as a parent and as a writer of stories.

She gets older, and it gets easier. We read, asking questions the other can’t answer. The more she reads, the sharper her eye—she calls me on my contradictions, points out, like Toni Cade Bambara, the things I am pretending not to know. She wears pink. I wear black. And every day that I live beside her, underneath all the things I say and don’t say, in all the books I write that she may never read, the same message: I see you. There is space for you here. I parent her, and I parent me, and I raise us both carefully.

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The Empty Place by Olivia A. Cole is available from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.