What Superstorm Sandy Taught Me About Parenting (That I Already Knew But a Reminder’s Always Nice)

Hurricane Sandy and E.B. White brought my sons and me a little bit closer together this week.

When I was a young kid — surprise! — I was a big reader. I could read any time, anywhere, and I can’t recall a single moment of my childhood in which I was bored. Unlike my sister who was prone to carsickness, I could read in the car, so even a relatively short trip (say, the 45 minute drive to my grandparents’ homes) passed in a flash. I could read upside down, I could read sitting hunched on the floor until my butt fell asleep. After a while, trips  to the library were utilitarian: My mom would drop me off and I’d head to the young adult shelves while she drove off to do errands. I’d grab the next 6 or so books on the shelf from where I left off, check them out, and then go outside to the bench on the library lawn and start the first book on the stack, waiting for my mom to return. Then I’d bring the books up to my room and read until I was called (and called and called) for dinner.

If the lights went out? I would read by candlelight. Sure, I missed TV, but not that much.

Hurricane Sandy stormed her way up the Eastern Seaboard last week, slamming into land more or less right where New York City and Long Island meet. Here on Long Island, we got battered. Before the lights went out last Monday (at 4:25 and 15 seconds, says my grandmother’s antique clock on the mantel, the only one we have that was not rendered a blank screen, and so records actual moments of frozen time), I was sitting in my office, working (or trying to, anyway, as the wind swirled and howled harder and harder). My window looks out onto the backyard, at the back of which is a line of trees bordering a pond. Our next-door neighbor’s tiny house sits in a forest, practically, of huge old oaks and towering, vine-choked pines. In the five minutes before the lights cut out, I watched four trees, one after the other, topple forward. Later that evening, while we ate dinner by candlelight, one of those giant pines crashed to the ground, heading for what looked like a collision with our glass door in the kitchen, but it fell short, burying a branch into the ground instead of into our kitchen.

For all that, we are of course grateful. But we have no power now, and it’s been almost a week (or, if I were to be as precise as my older son, I’d say it’s been one week minus three hours, twenty-five minutes and 15 seconds).

Others have it far, far worse. Entire neighborhoods were decimated, people died, including two young boys — my heart tightens as I type this — who were pulled out of their mother’s arms in rushing flood waters on Staten Island. My home and my family are whole.

And we have books.

I’ve read two thick novels this week, taken out of the library weeks ago. Whereas I usually only have energy for a few pages or a chapter at night before I lose consciousness, I now find I am sitting for a half hour or 45 minutes at a time, while there’s light, and reading, tucked under a blanket in front of the fire. I think I must be using my normal cleaning time, and certainly am using my normal working time, to read, and to play board games with my kids.

But the other amazing thing is that my boys and I are reading together. That first night after the lights went out, we got ready for bed earlier than usual — as my husband and I explained that this is (sort of) what people did before the advent of electricity; woke at dawn and retired at sunset. Rather than what we usually do before bed — which is entreating the boys to read from their own books while we buzz round them cleaning up, paying bills, or (me) watching House Hunters on HGTV — I suggested we all read together, from the same book. Surprisingly, the boys readily agreed. Surprisingly, because I have suggested this before, in (yet another) attempt to make reading more enticing to them, especially to my older boy, who is not a natural reader.

A quick flashlight scan of my older boy’s bookshelf revealed a book I’d forgotten I’d bought him: The Trumpet of the Swan, by E.B. White. That, along with Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little were in a boxed set I had picked up when I still thought I could mold my son into a mini-me (yeah, I know). In another pleasant, and probably storm-induced surprise, they agreed on Trumpet. Maybe they were in an ice cream stupor (we had a half an ice-cream birthday cake to finish up, so generous pieces were consumed by all of us after dinner), but they seemed more than willing.

We all climbed into my bed, me and the boys at the head, my husband stretched out at the foot. And I started in on Trumpet.

And then, when I was part-way through chapter one, an amazing thing happened. My older boy, the boy who’d rather do anything other than read a book, stopped me.

“Mom?” (I was sure he was going to ask to do something else, maybe to play Angry Birds on the iPod that still had a charge). “Can I read the next chapter?”

“And then I’ll read the third!” piped up my younger son.

As the Trumpeter Swan would say, “Ko-ho!” (it’s an inside thing. Read the book.)

We are on chapter 16 now, and that’s even with a couple of days spent at my mom’s where, they could also avail themselves of not one, but four different TVs.

Will Louis the Swan be able to repay his preening, vain but loving father’s debt? Will he win the love of Serena? Return to the Red Rock Lakes? And what of the boy, Sam Beaver, who first found the swans’ family in the Ontario wilderness? This world is so far from that of, say, SpongeBob, or even of the kids’ school or the downed wires and cold radiators and blank clock faces of their currently familiar world.

I knew they would love this. I didn’t know quite how much I would love it.

(All of which is not to say that I wouldn’t love to read it by the glow of an electric lamp, in a bed with five fewer blankets stacked on top, of course.)

Hope any of you in Sandy’s path are safe and sound and warm and dry. As my younger son wrote in his notebook (when I was also having a spasm of wanting them to do something productive in the absence of school, and so compelled them to write essays about the storm), “What an adventure!”