Recently, I was listening to an episode of The Read-Aloud Revival Podcast: “Hey Mamas, Reading for Pleasure is Part of the Job!” Sarah, the host, was being gently validating and encouraging – as usual – giving permissions and tips for making reading for pleasure a part of everyday life even with very young children. She shared her own experience of having three babies one year old and under and struggling to make time for her own reading in that season, and how her personal reading life has changed and evolved over the years. And it occurred to me that, while I’ve examined my reading life in other stages of motherhood – like the bleary-eyed days of a preschooler and a kindergartener – I haven’t squinted at my book time recently.

Reading through motherhood is a series of mini-shifts. Mini-shifts in schedule, mini-shifts in expectation.

• Both of my kids read fluently now. This seems like a big shift, but to arrive at this moment there were many small shifts and incremental progress. I still read aloud, but we have moments now of all sitting quietly with our respective books. I’ve waited for this for years, people.
• My commute situation has changed a few times over. I used to get in an extra ninety minutes of reading each day on the Metro (my commute was 45 minutes each way and I would whip out my book as soon as I got on the train and sometimes even before). COVID work-from-home life removed the commute from the occasion but added in walks with audiobooks – a slower way for me to read, but it adds up – and now I am looking at another commute shift as I start to transition back to the office, but with a drive commute instead of Metro as I’ve moved outside the Beltway.
• We’ve recently moved bedtime back by about an hour. It was a long-overdue shift that I’d been wanting to do for awhile, and 100% the right decision for the kids’ ages, but it does mean an hour less of reading time in the evenings.
• Reading attention ebbs and flows with political and current events outside my cozy home bubble. Orange wannabe dictator; global pandemic – big reading slump. New floppy-haired nutjob in the governor’s mansion ruining my beautiful state – mini reading slump. I fall into a doomscrolling spiral. And then I reset, breathe, hide my phone in the kitchen and get back to my books.

So this is what reading looks like, in my current season of life with two elementary school-aged anklebiters:

• It looks like half an hour of reading over my morning coffee, setting myself up for the day before I dive headfirst into dishing up breakfast, compiling school lunch and snacks, laying out clothes, inspecting bed-making, and digging for juice boxes in the back of the fridge.
• It looks like Beezus and Ramona read aloud at the bus stop, at least on the mornings we remember to grab the book on our way out the door amidst the flurry of grabbing sneakers and masks and asking Alexa what the temperature is outside.
• It looks like an audiobook (currently, The 4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie) several days a week, while walking around my neighborhood – sometimes as soon as the bus barrels off, sometimes mid-afternoon between conference calls – and on the way to the grocery store or library.
• It looks like bringing my book to the swim school – and indoor soccer, in the winter – on Sunday afternoons and squeezing in as many pages as I can while Peanut and Nugget are in the pool.
• It looks like cozy weekend afternoons on the couch, stretched out after a run and deep in my current book while the kids read or color or do whatever brings them joy. Reading in front of them has become more natural.
• It looks like The Hobbit or Harry Potter or a picture book in Nugget’s room for half an hour until he drifts off.
• It looks like collapsing on the couch at 9:00, after Nugget finally drops off to sleep and the rest of the house is quiet, finally opening the book for the hour I’ve promised myself.
• It looks like a page or two from A Poem for Every Spring Day before I drop off.

There’s definitely less time for reading at the moment than there was when I was commuting on Metro every day, or when the kids were going to bed stupid early and I had long evening stretches to curl up with my book while Steve met up with his friends on whatever the video game du jour happened to be. But if I’ve figured anything out in nine years of parenting, it’s that this is also just a season, and things will change again almost before I’ve had a chance to get used to this routine.

What does your reading look like in this season of life?