Reading After Kids & The Art of Auto-Fiction

Hannah and I have been online friends for years now. We both contributed an interview to a series called Boarding Pass on Anne Ditmeyer’s blog, Prêt à Voyager, and I’ve been following her since—often to see what how she’s styling her incredibly chic hair (since cutting it short); often to see where she’s going with her incredibly charming girls; and always to find out what she’s reading. I’m thrilled that she agreed to share some of her recent favorites and talk about being a reader… 

Reading After Kids & The Art of Auto-Fiction
By Hannah deBree

My friends and I have this ongoing conversation about how our brains changed after having kids. In general, we get less sleep, we are required to provide solid answers in meaningful conversations (every. single. day.) about what happens to bodies after people die and who was the first human and why don’t birds have hands, and we are multitasking jobs and families and groceries and romance more than we ever knew was possible. The truth is, it takes a lot of brain power, like never-ending brain power, to be a parent.

Before kids, I was an avid reader, sometimes finishing three to four books a week. Seriously, what a luxury to have all that time! Some weeks I’m winning if I get a few chapters read, and there are days I feel lucky if I have the mental space to read at all. Though I don’t read with the voracity I used to, I still think of myself as a reader—even if the act of reading has changed. I used to be able to focus, block out the noise in my brain, get lost in a book for hours on end. Now when I read, the focus isn’t always as focused, the noise in my brain remains a dull hum of tasks to be done and items to add to the grocery list, and the time I spend reading is mainly at night when I am my most tired self.

But the act of reading is, in itself, a freedom, an escape from the present tense, a journey for my brain. I might open a book distracted and exhausted, but at the end I feel as if I’ve restored a bit of that brain power and am glad for the break.

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Thinking About: Girl Engrossed in Cellphone

There was an article in The New Yorker recently, “The Useless Agony of Going Offline,” about a man who started the year off with a three-day tech break—inspired by his reading about how a selfie can turn tragic. “Guy Looking at Device,” the headlines read. (Have you heard how many people died taking selfies?) He writes: “I’d ring in the New Year by logging off, then not use my phone, my computer, or any social media for a full seventy-two hours.” He admits this isn’t the most ambitious plan—pre-emptively, no doubt, for anyone who scoffs at the brevity of a 72-hour “break.” But for most of us, it’s probably harder than it sounds.

While in Las Vegas with Aron last year, I would leave my cell phone in the hotel safe, figuring that he’d be reachable in case of emergency and that having my undivided attention with him was the more important thing. But when I brought it down to the pool to read the newspaper one morning, I found myself scrolling through Instagram and Feedly and all the usual suspects to see what I’d missed. “What is wrong with me?!” I sort of thought to myself when I realized I’d been staring at my screen again rather than just enjoying the pool. Into the water I went…

So, in a way, it made me feel better to read Mr. Malady’s article. He describes an all-too-familiar scenario of multitasking and parallel tech-play with his wife at night before describing his three-day-hiatus, with the slightly tongue-in-cheek tone of someone experiencing the longest days of his life that leave him in a state of “disdain for the logged-off existence”:

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Scenes from the (Valentine) Weekend

It was a funny mish-mash of seasons over the weekend: signs of spring seemed to burst forth from every tree as we drove up into the mountains on Sunday to play in the snow. Our activities were equally all over the place, which made for a full, fun, holiday weekend. Some highlights…

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