Tribute to the person/people who encouraged me to read and write

I’ve enjoyed reading for as long as I can remember. My mom couldn’t keep me stocked up in books. I could read a book in a matter of hours, I’d sometimes read several a day. And I was reading adult fiction by the time I was in the third grade, probably sooner, just because I could and they took me longer to read. I discovered Stephen King by middle school, and I fell in love with the classics in high school.

Reading has always been something that came naturally to me. My mom never had to force me to read, I would often beg her to buy me books and then devour them within an hour of getting them, begging for even more. My local library would often hesitate checking books out to me, deeming them above my reading level... But then my mom would come to my rescue and explain that I was reading far above most kids my age.

Coming from the family I do, this is rare. My sister has a learning disability and dropped out of high school at 16 when she purposely got pregnant with my niece. She hated school, she would never read a book for fun. My mom, also a high school drop out, couldn’t spell simple words. She often came to me as her dictionary to spell words for her. She isn’t illiterate, but she certainly can’t read very well. Nor does she do it for fun.

I can’t describe where my love of books came from, it just came from within, but my mom fed into it and encouraged my addiction. It was something my mom took pride in, so every last extra dollar we had went into my books.

One of my earliest memories includes writing a book with my mom. Well, she was drawing the photos and I was narrating the story. I would tell her what to draw, what to write (as I was too young to write myself, not even in kindergarten). There was a page where I had her draw a cat sitting on a table, staring at the refrigerator pondering ketchup. When we were done, my mom took the sheets of papers and stapled them together on the side so we could flip through it like a real book.

I was creating stories long before I could even write my name.

I wrote stories in school, and I always loved character development, maybe even a bit too much actually. I would go on and on about the characters, telling every irrelevant detail that I made up in my head to give the person a life. I loved that part of story telling.

I was the first person in my family to graduate high school, much less go to college. Neither my sister nor my mom can spell even basic words. I don’t think either of them has read a book outside of required reading in school. These are things they would tell you themselves even, not just my observations. Yet, they have done everything that they could to encourage me, and they still do it every single day.







(There wasn't much editing to this. I started it with great intentions to work hard on this piece to make it different, but now I have a craving to do some more work on my novel and stuff. I thought this showed a bit of who I am, so I wanted to share it at least. It made me happy, that's what counts, right? :)