Comment boxers in the ring

I love reading my comment boxes. There is usually a little surprise waiting for me there - a new acquaintance, a different perspective, an interesting idea. Of course, my blogging mob is excruciatingly polite so I haven't had to contend with any nasties (one day, I may demand to receive only challenging and scathingly honest comments. Or maybe not.) In fact, I have one Anonymous who is the loveliest Anonymous I have ever met. Anonymous introduced me to a writer called Alice Hoffman, I know...now...that she's famous and prolific...but I had never heard of her before, and now, thanks to Anonymous, I have a new favourite author.

I am writing this as a way of trying to answer rw's question regarding how I decided to write about parenting as "phases of reading". Or something like that anyway. Well...I borrowed about six or seven Alice Hoffman books from the library, to start with, so that started me thinking of how exciting it is to discover a new author, and what the librarian must think of me. Then...in one of Hoffman's books which I proceeded to read...I think it was "The Ice Queen," yep, it was, the protagonist is a librarian and she tries to understand people through checking up on their library book borrowing. Then one of the books I borrowed had a picture of a baby on its cover (a wee little thing, wrapped in a blanket and sleeping in a dresser drawer!) and so that made me think of my kids as newborns.

Then, another thing which made me write what I did in the last post was the fact that my daughter is learning how to drive. I was very excited and proud of her as she went off with her teacher every week and she was making great progress. Then....it was time for me to sit in the car with her as she drove me around...and I completely freaked out. I shrieked and yelled and grabbed the wheel until she pulled over to the kerb, and parked, and then we both looked at each other and I realised that this business of having teenaged children is far too real for me.

I admitted it to my daughter - I needed to get help. So I signed up for a two-hour workshop for parents teaching their kids how to drive, and it was to be helped (I mean "held", but that is a great typo so I need to keep it in) at my local library. So off I went to the course on Wednesday night, and I walked into the seminar room and twenty heads turned to look at me and the teacher said "Can I help you?" and I asked "Is this the learner-drivers' parents' workshop," and it wasn't. I got the day wrong, it was going to be on Thursday. Tomorrow.

So, it was 6:30pm on a Wednesday night, and I had already arranged for my husband to come home early to do the tennis-training lift scheme thing, and I had already made dinner in neatly labelled tupperware containers, and I had already put on my "going out" trousers and I had even put on some lipstick. So, naturally, I stayed in the library and browsed for a couple of hours. And that's when I discovered another new author - Oh Banana Yoshimoto, I feel that it must have been fate that made me mark the workshop on the Wednesday of my diary, yes, we were meant to have met on that fateful evening. Banana Yoshimoto, you rock!

You see - it seems that whenever I ponder the meaning of child rearing, and whenever I search for a new teacher in this strange art of mothering, I find myself back in the library, holding a new book, and feeling a little better.

I wonder if I unswered your question rw? and yes, that "unswered" is another typo which I just had to keep in, because it's just too good to edit. I suppose, if nothing else, I would like this post to show that my comment boxers mean a great deal to me. So...thank you all, and please keep boxing!