Other Reads

This week I also read a totally junky novel called Younger. It was about a woman who was recently left by her husband for another woman and also had her newly adult daughter join the Peace Corps. So, she is alone in New Jersey after an adult lifetime as a SAHM caring for others. She goes to NY and passes herself as much younger (like 25 instead of 44), hooks up with a cute, young man and has a hot time with him, etc. etc. Pretty poor quality fiction, but I zoomed right through it. Sometimes I need a book like this as a "treat" after all the thinking I do about weighty issues!

I then read As Good as I Could Be. This was a parenting memoir and I also zoomed through it quickly, because it was paced more like a novel. One thing that jumped out at me is her mention that most children (including her daughter) start school at age two. Excuse my "language," but WTF?! I guess she is referring to what I would usually call, "day care," not "school" (for a two year old!). The child, of course, doesn't want to go to "school." The author refers to it as, "the worst of separation traumas my daughter and I grew up through was the trauma of her going to school....At first she went to the kind of school...When it was time for a real school--she was two years old at this point...I took her up there for testing." Again with the WTF? I guess I do live in a backwoods area, because this kind of process is completely out of my realm of experience. Taking a two year old to a "real school" that she has to be tested for? Yikes! I look at little Z--also two--nursing to sleep and still being carried around a lot of the time and picture him bopping off to "real school." No way! That's crazy talk!