When Dad Goes to War

I was very moved by this essay that Alison Buckholtz wrote for Salon. For those of you without the time to go read the article, I'll summarize it.

Alison's husband is in the Navy, and left on a 7 month deployment. For that time period she is left alone to care for their 4-year old son, and 2-year old daughter. What she writes about must be a very common problem for any military family, how to explain to the kids why mommy or daddy had to go away.

It's particularly hard when you don't feel comfortable relying on cliches about having to fight bad guys. For most people in this country, that's not what this war is about. I wish I could say what it is about, but the only answer I really have is that it's about 5 years too long and counting.

Alison wanted to find a way to let her children know "that allowed kids to acknowledge their anger or sadness at Dad's absence, even wallow in their bad mood if necessary -- all while transmitting the assurance of a better day."

Being a writer, she looked for books to communicate this. She couldn't find one. The chidren's books all had problems, the wrong political message, or xenophobia, etc.

So she wrote her own. And it worked.

When we think of books, we think of large scale publications, but that's not all they are. You have to know your audience, and hope to reach them. In her case it was two small children, upset by their father's absence. She reached them, there can be no greater success for an author.

I want to encourage increased literacy in this country, it's very important to me. It troubles me that so many people who feel this way are so concerned with encouraging people to read the 'right' books. The right books are the ones that reach us. For some that may be harlequin romances, for others it's Descartes. That's ok. Not everyone needs to read the hard stuff, but the more you read, the better for you.

And when the message you want to convey is as personal as Alison's, the audience can be as small as it needs to be.